Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

RE: Recommended studio-accurate subwoofer?

Thanks for your replies to my quesions.

The woofer getting worked at low frequencies isn't contributing much useful bass, as below the 42 Hz ballpark tuning frequency the woofer will be out-of-phase with the passive radiator and so they will be cancelling one another out. At the same time the woofer's motion is no longer effectively damped by having to compress the air inside the cabinet, so it is susceptible to being driven beyond its linear limits by deep bass at high sound pressure levels if not protected by a high-pass filter. So the excursion-limited power handling of the Amphions will definitely go up when you add a high-pass filter.

I think you'll get about 3 dB more excursion-limited headroom out of your Amphions by highpassing them at 80 Hz instead of 45-50 Hz, because the excursion requirements on the woofers will be even further reduced. It would have been closer to 5 or 6 dB except that woofer cone motion is reduced near the tuning frequency anyway. The reduction in thermal compression will probably be negligible. To keep thermal effects to a minimum, I suggest keeping really loud "impress the client" sessions fairly short, or if that's not possible, maybe finding a pretext to take a short break to talk about something so the Amphion's magnets can cool down a bit.

A distributed multisub system will do a better job in that south-of-80 Hz region than the Amphions. But you do need to roll off the top end of the subs steeply (I use 4th order) so that their locations aren't betrayed by upper bass leaking through.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but smaller rooms benefit more from a distributed multisub setup than larger rooms. This is because smaller rooms start out with worse behavior in the modal region, which is what a distributed multisub system is designed to deal with.

I haven't had firsthand experience with a Marchand in decades, but have always thought very highly of them.

Best wishes,

Duke
Me being a dealer makes you leery?? It gets worse... I'm a manufacturer too.


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Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
  • RE: Recommended studio-accurate subwoofer? - Duke 12:02:18 05/31/16 (1)
    • I Agree - M-dB 05:31:50 06/02/16 (0)

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