Subwoofer setup

I finally got myself a powered sub and was able to retire my Optimus passive subwoofer.  The sub sounds great, and the bass from blu rays sometimes can be overwhelming.  Heck, even Seinfeld is bassing.  I’ve had it almost a week, and I kind of just threw it into place and haven’t adjusted on it much.  Sometimes the bass can be “tiring”.  My wife was watching Supernatural on the CW Thursday night and there was this constant bass line through out the whole show.  I couldn’t even figure out, though what exactly the sound was supposed to be…meaning why it was there.  One scene one of the guys was talking to this girl outdoors at night and it was like my whole room was shaking…but there was nothing going on in the scene that should have been producing that type of sound!  But I digress a little.

What I’m wondering is how do you guys adjust the output of your sub?  My thought was to put some kind of “reference” disc in…something that I’m familiar with, and turn the gain on the sub all the way down.  Then turn the movie up to a loud level…a level that is really loud but the maxium that I could actually see myself listening at and then turn the sub’s gain up until it reaches the point that I feel it matches the “loudness” of the mains.  I feel like the problem right now is my receiver and mains are at a normal listening level but my sub is set above that.

I tried this method tonight and it worked pretty well.  I think I still need to tweak it.  My different set ups causes me a little bit of a problem.  I put in Star Wars Episode I and played the pod racing scene.  I turned the gain up on the sub till I felt it matched the mains.  I went from about 5/8 on the dial before tweaking, now down to 1/4.  This was still powerful bass, and I felt like loud was loud and normal was normal.  This was using SPDIF from the PC to the receiver and using AC3 Filter for the audio with the Envy 24 sound card.  But then I got to thinking and there lies my problem.  I decided to try the same scene using PowerDVD and the analog outputs using the Realtek onboard sound.  With the volume levels the same as before, the bass output was not nearly as good and was actually rather weak.  I don’t use PowerDVD and the analog outs (and Realtek onboard) to watch regular DVDs; I only use that for blu ray.  So I put in my Transformers HD DVD as I thought that had some powerful bass.  BUT, I played several scenes with some explosions and stuff and it really wasn’t that powerful.  None of what I heard sounded as good as the pod racing scene and any of the blu rays that I’ve watched since getting the sub (Tropic Thunder, Iron Man, Kung Fu Panda, Wall-E).  So then I was thinking that the 1/4 gain that the sub was on now was not enough for the analog out.  So I put Iron Man in to see what it sounded like, and it was as good as it was the other day when I was trying it out with the sub (at the 5/8 level).  Even at 1/4 it was plenty loud.  Sooooo…does Transformers just not have that powerful bass?  I seem to remember people talking about the bass in Transformers being pretty good, but it was nowhere near what Iron Man or even Tropic Thunder was.  On a side note, is the audio on Transformers blu ray better than Transformers HD DVD?  The blu rays I’ve listened to seem to sound better than the HD DVDs that I have.