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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: The best bass (below 100 Hz) you have heard posted by beppe61 on November 30, 2014 at 04:31:10:
...the room.Rooms impose significant peak-and-dip patterns on the woofer's output. These peak-and-dip patterns are a lot more drastic than the relatively minor differences between one good speaker system and another. While it's possible to change the patterns by moving speakers or listening position, it's not possible to eliminate them by placement alone.
It's possible to equalize away the peak-and-dip patterns in a small area, but then the response will actually be worse at other locations within the room.
One effective solution is to use multiple small subwoofers distributed asymmetrically around the room. Each will produce a different peak-and-dip pattern at any given listening position in the room, and the sum of these multiple dissimilar peak-and-dip patterns is far smoother than any one of them alone. So we have significantly smoother bass response not only in the sweet spot, but throughout the room. Credit to Earl Geddes for the idea, which I use with his permission.
Note that smooth bass = "fast" bass, because it is peaks in the response that make the bass sound "slow". I have customers reporting measured in-room response of +/- 3 dB across the bass region down to 20 Hz without EQ, so the technique works.
One other factor that should be taken into account is the general bass-boosting trend from boundary reinforcement. The effective angle into which the woofer radiates goes down as we go down in frequency because the distance to room boundaries starts to become a small enough fraction of a wavelength that the reflections add in-phase, until we get all the way down to the pressure zone. There is an argument for voicing the woofer system so that its native frequency response is approximately the inverse of this boundary-induced room gain. Sealed boxes generally come closer to this "room gain complementary" behavior than vented boxes do, but a vented box specifically designed for this comes even closer still.
Some people are skeptical of this approach, intuitively sensing that multiple subs = multiple arrival times = blurring of impact. This is not the case because the arrivals still occur within a much smaller fraction of a wavelength than our ears can resolve at low frequencies. The ear has poor time (and therefore phase) resolution at long wavelengths, but still has very good ability to tell when one sound is louder than another, so that's why this approach concentrates on the frequency response.
Aside from upper harmonic content, impact is largely a function of response smoothness (peaks sound like bloat) and woofer motor strength. When the response is smooth and the woofer(s) are strong, so is the impact. And often the combined motor strength of several small woofers is greater than the motor strength of a single uberwoofer.
I make no claims of "best", just that I think the above are valid answers to under-appreciated real-world effects which have a big impact on sound quality and ought to be addressed.
Imo, ime, ymmv, etc.
Duke
Me being a dealer makes you leery?? It gets worse... I'm a manufacturer too.
Edits: 11/30/14 11/30/14
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Follow Ups
- Below 100 Hz, the elephant in the room is... - Duke 18:03:15 11/30/14 (2)
- Agree the room is the elephant - Dave_K 15:17:52 12/01/14 (0)
- RE: Below 100 Hz, the elephant in the room is... - beppe61 14:04:35 12/01/14 (0)
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