Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

not true

The studies that I have cited (which you reject) demonstrate that scattering subs in the horizontal plane smoothes the bass everywhere in the room.

Geddes advocates locating one subwoofer closer to the ceiling than to the floor. I agree. But even if that isn't practical, multiple low frequency sources is still demonstrably an improvement.

You even admit that horizontally scattered subwoofers will smooth the side-to-side and front-to-rear room modes. That would be an improvement, would it not?

Apparently you are arguing that it would not, because of the remaining floor to ceiling mode - which is now easily addressed by elevating one sub (multiple subs are likely to be much smaller than a single sub), or by applying as single band of parametric equalization, or by an appropriately tuned Helmholtz absorber (since now we'd only have one peak to deal with). In each of these cases, we're better off with the benefits accruing from having scattered multiple low frequency sources.

And even if we did none of these things to address the floor-to-ceiling mode, we'd be down from having a major imbalance in three 1/3-octave-wide critical bands to having it in only one. And I'm sure you're aware that the most extreme in-room peaks and dips are formed by the combining of two or three modes, so we will have taken a major step towards smoothing the in-room frequency response by reducing the modal excitation in two dimensions, even if the third is not directly addressed.

As far as what the goal of a subwoofer system is, mimicing live music in a good recital or concert hall is my goal - NOT mimicing two fullrange stereo speakers. Small room acoustics being what it is, there is very significant room for improvement in the bass region over using two speakers as you well know from your frequent citation of plus or minus 10dB as being typical of stereo in-room bass response.

Duke


This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Herbie's Audio Lab  


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups


You can not post to an archived thread.