Do you use a Subwoofer when listening to stereo?

@ Emergingsoul 

Hello It's a matter of preference I think it depends on the speakers your powering and the type of music your listening to also. I am using a set of large speakers that don't need a sub there set to full range and 2 channel is the way to go for me some others may not agree but it's what you prefer. I like to know that I can have concert level sound with just 2  good full range speakers and leave the bells and whistles off. Have a great day!

Atmasphere, I am going to disagree on this one. My experience is different but I think I might go about it differently than most. Up at the crossover point I am just listening and I do not want to hear it. The subwoofers should just disappear(remember I use a crossover point of 125 Hz). It has to sound like I am listening to one speaker. As I evaluate lower down I go from listening to feeling. Do I feel that kick drum the way I do at the club. Are those low synthesizer notes shaking me the way they should. Does the room move under low organ pedal. Hearing is one thing feeling is another. Part of the thrill of live music are the visceral sensations you get.
These sensations are missing or greatly attenuated in most home systems. I started playing around with subwoofers in 1978 for this very reason. I wanted to feel as if I were at a live performance. Again, I can now move a subwoofer 15 feet just by delaying it 15 msec. I can change crossover points and slopes on the fly at one Hz increments 2nd to 10th order. You can hear these changes immediately. It is easy to demonstrate that with everything aligned perfectly those visceral sensations come through in spades any movement away causes instant deterioration in those sensations up to completely obliterating them.
Dukes instructions represent a reasonable way to set up his system without expensive test equipment. You can purchase his system for a very reasonable price commensurate with what most of us have to spend on a system. Brilliant. Using modern resources you can however go beyond this. You just have to be willing to put in the time and money.  

drlisz, the type of music has nothing to do with this unless you only listen to string quartets. A good system will play anything equally well. If it can't it is not a good system.

I don’t get multiple subs.

waves of low frequencies are very large so the spread all over quite well.  A nice 12 inch drive does not seem to need any help in a room that’s say 15x20.  Smaller subs I guess might be spotty and maybe more than one might make sense.

Further, does it really matter where the sub is positionEd?  If I blindfolded someone and said find the sub, could you find it?

Hello emergingsoul.
Here are some answers to your statements and questions from your last post on this thread:

emergingsoul:" I don’t get multiple subs.
waves of low frequencies are very large so the spread all over quite well. A nice 12 inch drive does not seem to need any help in a room that’s say 15x20. Smaller subs I guess might be spotty and maybe more than one might make sense."

noble100: Low frequency sound waves are not actually very large but they are very long. A deep bass 20 Hz sound wave is about 56’ long.
     It’s also not true that the 12" woofer drivers in your pair of B&W floorstanding tower speakers don’t need any help in your 15’x20’ room. You are correct, however, that the bass sound waves launched by the woofers in your speakers do radiate outward in all directions. Once your pair of tower speakers launch their bass sound waves into the room in an omnidirectional pattern, however, the physical dynamics involved do become a bit more complex.
     Once these long bass sound waves are launched into your room, they proceed in an outward direction until they encounter a room boundary (floor, ceiling or wall) and are reflected in a different direction. These reflected bass sound waves then proceed in a redirected path until they encounter another room boundary, run out of energy and decay or collide with another bass sound wave.
     Whenever these reflected bass sound waves collide into each other, they create what is called a ’room bass mode’ at the specific room point of the sound waves collision. When these bass room modes are detected by our ears, they are processed by our brains and a perception is created of hearing one of three possibilities, depending on the angle and direction of the collision, at this specific room location: a ’bass peak’ that’s perceived as a bass overemphasis, a ’bass dip’ that’s perceived as a bass attenuation or a ’bass null’ that’s perceived as an absence of bass.
     At this point, it’s necessary to introduce another factor into my explanation of your room and system bass dynamics realities, the use of fixed position bass sources. Since you probably position your main speakers in your room and in relation to your designated listening position like most of us do, to optimize the midrange, treble and stereo imaging performance, this creates an impediment to optimizing bass performance at the LP. This is because there are only 2 bass sources (your pair of B&W floorstanding tower speakers) launching bass sound waves into your room and they’re permanently affixed in their floorstanding tower speaker cabinets.
     This means these 2 bass sources are unable to be independently positioned in your room, and in relation to your listening position, to optimize bass performance at your LP. The main issue with having fixed position bass sources in your room, such as your pair of floorstanding tower speakers, is that you’re unable to ensure there are no room bass modes existing at your designated listening position. This means you could have a significant bass room mode at your LP, which you would perceive as a significant bass peak, dip or null, and the only remedy is to independently position and configure 1 or more bass sources/subs in your room.
     It’s also important to understand the well understood psychoacoustic principles that come into effect when multiple bass sources/subs are utilized in a room. For example, the 3-4 sub distributed bass array (DBA) concept that provides near state of the art bass performance to virtually any domestic sized room and seamlessly integrates with any pair and type of main speakers, creates the perception of being in a larger space even in small rooms and is the basic concept behind the award winning Audio Kinesis Swarm 4-sub DBA complete kit system linked to here:

https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/audiokinesis-swarm-subwoofer-system/

     This 3-4 sub DBA concept, whether a custom system or an AK complete kit system, is based on a well understood, but somewhat counter intuitive, psychoacoustic principle that relies on increasing, rather than decreasing, the number of bass modes existing in the room. Adding bass sources/subs to a room increases the number of bass sound waves launched into the room, which in turn and reliably increases the number of bass sound wave collisions in the room which results in an increase in the number of bass modes present in the room.
     Fortunately, this is where our brains and psychoacoustics take over, make sense of it all and ’do the magic that they do’. Psycho-acousticians (yes, that’s what they’re actually referred to as.) have discovered that when our brains are confronted with a sound environment containing an excess of bass room modes, they process and make sense of this chaos by summing and averaging these numerous bass modes by frequency. As a result, our brains create a perception of the bass in the room as being powerful, smooth, fast, detailed, tonally accurate, dynamic and seamlessly integrated with the main speakers.
     I realize this all sounds too good to be true but I can attest to the fact that my AK Debra 4-sub complete kit DBA definitely provides these spectacular results in my combo 2-ch music and 5.4 surround sound home theater system and 23’16’ room for the past 5+ years.
     Attempting to spread the word on the DBA’s incredible effectiveness has, admittedly, been somewhat frustrating since I understand all my words may convince noone but, even a brief audition of a properly positioned and configured DBA, would likely convince virtually anyone.
     If you feel curious and adventuress, emergingsoul, I suggest you could begin to experiment, and experience the benefits of the DBA concept, by creating a basic 3-sub DBA in your room. You could consider and utilize your existing pair of main speakers as 2 fixed position subs, obtain a good quality new or used sub as sub #3 and optimally position it in your room using the ’sub crawl method’. You can google the term for details.

emergingsoul: " Further, does it really matter where the sub is positioned? If I blindfolded someone and said find the sub, could you find it?"

noble100: Most humans cannot localize (determine specifically where a sound is coming from) sound tones that have frequencies below about 80 Hz. So, as long as the sub’s low frequency crossover filter control is set at about 80 Hz or lower, the sub should be able to be positioned anywhere in your room.

I hope this thesis helped you,
Tim