How Do I Set Up My Blu-ray Player When Using a Soundbar?
Q I recently purchased a Bose SoundTouch 130 soundbar and have a Samsung BDP7500 Blu-ray player connected to it. Here’s my question: There’s a setting in the Samsung player’s menu for speaker size and distance. Since I’m using a soundbar that gets calibrated using a headset in five positions, is it necessary to also adjust the Blu-ray player’s speaker size/distance settings, or should I just leave those alone? I called Bose tech support, and they had no answer for me. —Peter Palagonia/Las Vegas, NV
A Bose tech support may not have an answer, but I do. No, you do not need to touch the speaker size and distance settings in your Blu-ray player’s speaker setup menu. That adjustment is meant for situations where the Samsung BDP7500 Blu-ray player’s 7.1-channel analog audio output is connected to an AV receiver with a 7.1-channel analog audio input. By setting the size and distance for each speaker in your system when using an analog connection, you’d be enabling the Samsung player to handle low-pass filtering (the cutoff frequency at which bass information is routed to a subwoofer, e.g., 80 Hz) and delay (to compensate for differences in distance from the listening position between the main and center/surround channel speakers) instead of an external audio system.
In this case, your Bose soundbar provides only HDMI and optical/coaxial inputs for multichannel audio, so you have no option but to let it handle speaker setup. For that reason, you should leave the speaker size/distance settings in your Samsung player untouched and let the soundbar handle those tasks via its automated setup routine.