How To- Perfect Subwoofer Integration

I tried. The KEF LS50s sounded the best to my ears above anything under $6,700 US and I have been listening to speakers since last April.

 

I agree-But, when I intergrated two subs into my audio system many years ago I realized that the dramatic and harmonic sound I was missing was in the foundation that the two subs gave me.
I never looked back after that day in app. 1998 and have had musical joy and frustration and learning since. An amazing journey. Two GOOD subs RULE! A proper room doesnt hurt either...Take care, John M.

 

were they specific in saying 1/6 for under 3oohz or so? I understand 1/6 would be ok for the mid range and up.

 

I completely agree with all your major points as far as the NEED for measurements to properly integrate a sub into a 2-channel system. However, there are much better ways to achieve this at a modest cost. With ANY sub you can use one of these http://www.ebay.com/itm/Velodyne-SM...327201?hash=item4d3d9f3aa1:g:zJEAAOSwaA5WiZ15
It gives you all the basic requirements you outline and adds a bunch of other very useful tools, like a 8-band, fully adjustable parametric eq. This way you can correct for room modes and really get the sub to disappear.
Alternatively you can buy something like a Velodyne DD sub (or other brands that have built in equalizers and spectrum analyzers).
Its just a better way to do what you are talking about.

 

I run two REL Britannia B3's with a pair of Duevel Bella Luna Diamantes and they integrated seamlessly. So much so they disappeared. Rooms can present a problem but speaker placement (not sub) goes along way in resolving most issues as chair placement. Furniture also places a significant role eg. leather sofas and chairs act like drum skins and can cause wild standing waves.

I will highly recommend Get Better Sound by Jim Smith which deals exclusively with proper room setup. Following his guidelines worked very well for me.

 

I think this is just flat out wrong!

I've thought a lot about this through the years. When you set up a 2-ch system you MUST position the mains to optimize imaging, when you do this the mains are (almost always) not positioned to optimize base response. You have all kinds of room modes that affect the low end. The best way to attack this is to have the ability to freely position the low end drivers AND adjust their response. Thus, a sub with room eq separate from the mains is superior in any real world situation. You get the best of both worlds, optimized imaging and flat base response.

And this tuning a sub by "ear" thing is a bunch of huey. I did that at first, then when I got a DD sub it was like holy ****, this is way better. I bet that all the tuning by ear proponents have never experienced a properly integrated (ie. measured) subwoofer.

 

You can't correct for standing wave peaks and nulls with equalization. No matter how much or how little energy at those standing wave frequencies you pump into the room (unless the amount is zero), you're still going to have peaks and nulls at those frequencies at certain specific points in the room based on the room dimensions and boundaries. You need to deal with those kinds of issues with absorption, speaker and listening position location, changing room dimensions or whatever. Similarly you can't deal with uneven reverb times with eq. These days with decent freeware real time analyzers and decent calibrated mics for around a hundred bucks, measurements are cheap enough. Treating issues, especially for sub 80 Hz problems tends to be not so cheap. But definitely positioning speakers and listening positions away from low mode standing wave peaks and toughs helps both mains and subs disappear.

 

Chervokas nailed it.
For issues around 80hz in my room, Part, but only part, of the fix was a full bottom to top left to right rear wall bass trap 2.5 ft thick. It's still not fixed, but it did make a hell of a difference, particularly in low end decay.

 

so what you are saying is without a sub your system sounds awful...?

couldn't disagree more, in a polite way, its all subjective... part of it is my less is more approach, i hate tons of stuff everywhere, seems like overkill...

its just 2 channel audio, sometimes we tend to make this seem like rocket science...

 

I've been using an 8033C for several years now and in my case it made a very noticeable improvement, eliminating the "boom-i-ness" and smoothing out the overall bass response. Setup is about as easy as it can get.

 

Yes, you are absolutely correct, I have treated the room and also use a small amount of digital eq below 250hz because the treatments still left a couple of nulls I couldn't iron out.

At the listening chair ONLY, there are no apparent room nodes but if you move away from that spot then bass issues start to become noticeable to a varying degree. As it is a dedicated music room, this is not a problem because all I want is 'perfection' at the single chair and that's what I've got!

 

I don't know who you are responding too. I missed the post where someone said that you have to have a sub or your system will sound awful.

I will say that I would rather have a system with no sub over a system with a poorly integrated sub. Fortunately, we can all take advantage of having a sub that can be integrated smoothly using measurements.

Room treatments and acoustic measurements of the room should be higher on audiophiles priorities than picking any other piece of equipment because the room makes a bigger difference than any piece of equipment. That includes implementing a sub.

 

True, that is why having a separate sub is such an advantage. It gives you the freedom to position the low freq driver (where most standing wave issues manifest themselves) to reduce these modes while not sacrificing imaging over most of the audible band. Then you equalize to compensate for the dropouts.

As an aside, room treatments have very little effect on sub 80 Hz room modes. The only thing you can really do in this range is change dimensions and speaker positioning.

 

Well, like I said, yeah, it gets expensive to try to treat problems below 80 Hz. You can usually find ways to do some absorption down to maybe to 70 Hz or so with porous absorbers of sufficient thickness which can help smooth things out, and if you have a room finished with gypsum wallboard on studs that'll help you some down into the 60 Hz range, but below that you're really down to using tuned resonators or something.

 

My overly simplified method is I don't want to know its on until I turn it off then if I notice immediately that it's missing it's just right.

 

I know of iTunes Match and Apple Music as subscription services. I though this was a product and not a reference to other products and wondered if there was something working in the background working I didn't know about.

 

I have no idea how this post ended up in this thread even with a wrong quote. Sorry.

 

In recent years, there has been a big movement toward smaller coned speakers even with subs (small cone long throw speaker)

I'm on the ear side of things, because ultimately it's my ears that are doing the listening. I have good ears.
When I was growing up in the 70's, I don't remember powered sub woofers. I do remember a lot of big speakers with 15" cones in them. Big pieces of furniture. Today, wives don't find this so appealing (not mine though! lol)

My feeling is that a lot of the music I like was recorded in the analog era where bassists used cabinets with 15 inch speakers in them. That has a way of moving the air around. It's different than moving air with a smaller diameter short throw cone. To properly reproduce those frequencies in a most realistic way, I want to play back with at least one 15 inch cone in the room.

I do also use a powered sub with a 15 in it along with the 15 inch passive cones in my Forte ll's. What I do is bleed in the sub just barely so that I can just start to feel it. Very subtle. I don't want to "hear" my sub. I want to just feel it ever so slightly. I don't think the location is all that important because I cut it at about 40 hz.

I rarely listen to CD's. I think they don't sound very good on my system. I know I have a better system than most, so it's tough to compare things that most others don't have access to or have never experienced. I take music seriously and listening gets my full attention. I'm not much of a casual listener. I probably listen to music how most would watch TV or a movie.

JM

 

I also tune by ear. This is tricky though because my mains are teeny tiny (PSB Imagine Mini) and don't produce a lot bass below 90 Hz. So, I set my sub cut-off at 100 Hz and the sub essentially becomes the woofer (mono) in this 3-speaker system. Works when I keep the sub between the mains and in the same plane. I had great difficultly setting up my first sub though, which was a ported 8" by Polk that I got cheap and was actually a lot of speaker for the money. It was down-ported though, and my living room arrangement did not allow me to move it far enough away from the rear wall to reduce boominess from the port. I just replaced it (Merry Christmas to me!) with a sealed 12" sub from SVS (the SB-1000). Now that's better! Flat down to 25 Hz, tight as a drum, and not as position sensitive so it's easy to blend with the mains. Happy days.

 

My feeling is that if you can tell where the sub is in the room, then the cut off is too high. It's the blending that needs to sound natural, and that sounds best to my ears to be very tentatively done on the low end.

It doesn't hurt to have another pair of ears listening, someone you trust.

I don't like trying to homogenize records or attempting to make them all sound the same. I enjoy the different way they are mixed. I just can't see wanting to modernize the sound of a 1960's Verve jazz recording. They are mostly very nice just the way they are.

I know a lot of modern records have been recorded digitally and mixed with huge subs in mind, so that is a whole other animal.

 

Agreed. I love jazz and I want that double bass to sound seamless as the sound transitions between the main speakers and the sub. This is tough to achieve especially with a high crossover like I'm using, but it can be done if the sub is positioned between the mains and adjusted slowly and tentatively as you say. I listen to modern electronic music too, but would never adjust the sub using one of those records as a reference. It's too easy to go for extra "slam" that sounds good with electronica or hard rock, yet terrible with jazz and the classics. It's all about finding that perfect balance.

 

Dave Holland's fantastic solo bass album One's All (which also offers nice audiophile detail like the creaking of the instrument), is a good one for listening to the sound of the acoustic bass and natural transitions between mains and sub since he works the whole range of the instrument and it's a really nice, natural sounding recording.

 

Thanks, I will check that out.

 

Yes, the entire spectrum- however it was for the purposes of EQ correction.
I am gong to measure again using finer resolution to see what happens. I am not using EQ to do the integration, strictly crossover, level and continuous phase adjustments. Although it sound so good right now I haven't heard a need to adjust anything.

 

was the issue a peak or a null?