Good day to all,
Have a question: in the process of re-shuffling my gear connection.
In the process of feeding the mains out to my sub, I was wondering if I could actually feed one of the aux send of my mixing desk to the sub and then feed my speakers with the mains out?
Would I then be able to send only whatever track I would want to the sub? Avoiding sub Freq clashes between different tracks?
Any advice?
I understand this is a process used for “live/gig” situations.
Thanks for any advice,
STAY SAFE
Well yes. You described it exactly. What s keeping you from hooking it up and try? 
Hahaha!!!
Nothing 
I suppose.
What would I gain in terms of mixing down as the mains out would only drive the sub?
Sorry if this sounds stupid
Assuming your mix is stereo : nothing I’m afraid. I think this is only useful for gigs (and recordings) where you play it on a similar setup. In electro-acoustic and ‘experimental’ music circles this is quite common.
Btw, in your explanation you said main outs would drive speakers, not the sub.
Thank you for the explanations
Actually I am coming out of my mixer mains out to the sub ins then from sub outs to speaker ins in my current config.
In the described config, the mixer mains out would go straight to the speakers ins and aux send 1 to the sub?
Thank you again
Yes but you should ask yourself whether that s useful to you. Will you perform your music like that? Will you record it with a separate sub channel?
Regardless, can be fun to just try it for the experience.
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Yep, going to try this
In the middle of re-shuffling all my gear connection, getting rid of all possible Jack/RCA ins and outs, replacing it with D-Sub. The dynamic gain range has just gone UP big time
I am interested…
You mean I could route a sub out back to the mixing desk?
I do this all the time for conference A/V…
So only music and video get sent to FOH and the sub on a post fader AUX send, and lecturn Mic and presenter Mics just get sent to the FOH…(or every “p” and “b” the presenter says sounds like a kick drum)…
Its far more versitile, but since you are bypassing the crossover in your sub!!! watch the doubling of the low end frequencies, its ok in a live environment, but your studio reference will be lying to your ears as you will get a double up of everything from say 110Hz down to (however low your main reference monirs go) so reference the guts out of it and be careful of phase.
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I mean that if you create a music piece for your 2.1 speaker setup with separate sub channel and you want to record and play it back on your system, or on another 2.1 setup with separate sub channel, you 'll need to record the 3 output channels: L, R, and sub.
While a fun exercise and certainly possible (and as you and others have said, it is a normal use-case for live A/V events etc.), I doubt this will improve anything for you in terms of sound-quality.
In fact, it could actually create NEW issues for you - as Adam9 said you risk creating an artificial “bump” at the crossover frequencies between your sub and speakers.
-> this is what your current/original setup is intended to do: the main out signal gets passed to the sub, which filters out everything above the crossover and passes that on to the speakers that are connected directly with the sub.
this way, both the sub and the attached stereo speakers only have to process relevant (and less) frequency information , thus not working as “hard” and usually resulting in a better sound.
the other upside of this setup is that your sub level is always the same, relative to your “mains out” volume.
in your AUX-send-to-sub scenario, you would have to set that by ear every time, making reliable (let alone recallable!) mixdowns a nightmare.
So, in short:
YAY for live
NAY for studio
(in my opinion)
edit:
one UPside of this would of course be that you can “mute” your subs on the mixer by turning down the corresponding AUX’s master send level!
and also RE: the crossover “bump” thing - if you carefully tune your sub and your speakers (provided they have the facilities to filter out certain frequencies built-in!!) this can be avoided.
I am actually using two separate speaker output pairs on my monitor controller to do the same thing, “A” is my Genelecs and “B” is a sub - that way, I can switch off the sub and hear what the mix would sound like without one…
that being said, I never screw with the relative levels of the two output pairs, so it is always the same and I set the crossover on my sub to be precisely where my (small) Genelecs start dropping off.
that way I have a minimal/in reality nonexistant “bump” at the crossover.
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Ok.
I do understand better now.
Was not seeing the interest for a home studio setup vs live performance.
Appreciate the detailed feedback.
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