Air, sub, HC, SAM

[sergii85]

Very close to my own situation, I have experience with most of the setup possibilities.

You can't use the high level (i.e. speaker level) connection on the REL, with the Expert, if you want to use SAM. With SAM, you have to use the low-level connection on the REL driven by the (mono) pre-out on the Expert. This enables you to use SAM because SAM will be on the speaker-level, only, not on the pre-out. IMO, this is absolutely the way to go. SAM with your mains will enable you to set the low pass filter lower (either on the REL or in the configurator) and increase the bass level to get the best reinforcement of the lowest frequencies.

So how do you get the HT bass then? Two options.

1. You can set your HT receiver to have no subwoofer and send all the LFE bass to the front mains, which should be set as large. When this reaches the Expert, the extreme bass will be filtered away from the speakers (SAM cone excursion protection is really good for this) but not your sub. This works surprisingly well but I strongly recommend using SAM for this setup just for the woofer protection.

2. Better but this needs use of a second low-level input on the REL. RELs normally have multiple inputs which can be used in parallel. Connect your HT receiver sub out directly to this input (leaving the Expert connected to the other) and reconfigure your HT receiver to have a subwoofer and to not route LFE bass to the front mains. Optionally, you may also wish to configure it to route normal bass away from the front mains and to the subwoofer, but probably not. Set the levels to balance the Expert perfectly first, then use the subwoofer level in the HT receiver to balance that. This is the setup I use myself and is my opinion the best. The bass for both 2-channel and HT is uncompromised due to the dedicated LFE routing and SAM.

For reproduction of music I would definitely go digitally into the Expert and not via the HT receiver.

For TV audio I would recommend going via the HT receiver because of the multi-channel possibilities. Toslink optical is good, but you'll be limited to basic surround decoding. Via HDMI, higher-bitrate options become possible. Clearly then pre-out to Expert for the front 2 channels.

Thank you very much for your answer. I thought about this option, but everybody says that high level input is better that's why I decided to try it that way.
But if you say that it works well with SAM and low level will try it.
One more question. Is there any possibility to make Devialet to turn on with the volume level 0 db and Line input when I turn my receiver on??