On Rel subs: Which are most musical?

All subwoofer's are the spawn of the devil. Beautiful when subjugated, but nightmares otherwise.

A smaller sub with higher f3 (-3 dB point) will tend to be easier to integrate with the room so many listeners think they are faster somehow, or more musical.  Well, no, they just get along with the room better with less effort. They don't try as hard to ring the room modes in the depths.

If you want to get a larger sub that can do 20 Hz with low distortion and high output WELL, you'll need to consider bass traps as part of your solution, and have some sort of great EQ and a way to properly measure the main and sub woofer responses.

I guess my main message is: Subwoofers are not anything like your main speakers.  They almost never are just drop, plug and play. The bigger, the more difficult, but more rewarding.

Best,


Erik

Anyone put forward firing sub right between main speakers? I asked about forward firing because I wouldn't want it to fire downwards, I would want it to play music not massage the floor.

Bass from any sub (on the floor) will "massage the floor" regardless of the speaker orientation as bass notes crawl along and are reinforced by any nearby flat surface. An acoustic unavoidable reality. I have both front and floor firing subs (2 RELs in the main listening rig, one front and the other floor firing, and a large Mackie in my recording studio area that has both a front passive radiator and a down firing driver) and they sound very "musical" when placed and driven properly.

Are you saying that in this aspect there is no difference betwen front firing and downfiring subs? Sure, what you say about reinforcement is true, but in full range speakers bass woofers don't normally fire downwards.

just be careful with the xo. even when you set the xo at 30hz, the rel T series are -6db at 55-60hz

so ime, matching mains that are -3db at 40 or even 50hz will not integrate with rel t series.