Adding subwoofer to Full-Ragne Speakers question

Well, thanks guy...

Theo says it's not goinig to help at all.

Bomarc basically says it might be marginally helpful but probably not that significant

I don't know how speakers work internally, but basically what I thought was that producing bass is a lot of work for the speakers, and if the subwoofer take some of the hard work away, then there would be more capacity left with the mains to work on other area(namly midrange), thus produce more accurate and rich midrange sound.

I guesss it does not quiet work that way??

No, it does not work really work that way.

I'm no EE, but I'm gotten different answers to this. There are a number of different factors at work.
1. The bass waveform places a significant demand on your amplifier. If you use a powered sub and cut off the low bass with some kind of crossover, then the main amp does not have the same demands placed on it and has more current reserve available.
2. Reproducing low bass can also place a significant demand on the main woofer. If it does not have to go as low, there is a good likelihood that there will be less distortion in the bandwidth it is producing.
3. Most (but not all) full range speakers cannot produce the bass in the lowest octave at the same volume. In other words, they roll-off the lowest frequency. Or another way to look at is "how low can they go". A good subwoofer can usually provide useful, undistorted output down to 20 hz; few "full range" speakers go that low.

I'm sure there are others with more technical know-how, but that's my understanding.

i added a pair of 2wq subs to my 3a sigs and it really cleaned up the mid/upper bass. mids and highs also improved. the setup utilizes a 6db/octave highpass filter which is sampled then boosted by the sub. whether the improvement is due to less strain on the 3a's woofer or increased amplifier headroom, i'm not sure. probably both. but the systems performance did improve noticably.

aloha keith