It doesn't take an engineering degree Larry but a little time spent learning a little about each of the areas involved sure does help.
Like, sound travels in waves. The lower the frequency the longer the wave length. This one simple fact seems to cause a lot of problems though because it means sound in a room behaves quite a bit different than most people think. What I mean is most people think it all behaves the same. In fact it behaves very differently depending on frequency. Not only does it behave differently, but we even hear it differently!
Its real easy to get confused by people who don't know what's going on, get their facts wrong, and talk about things like toe in and timing which do matter from midrange on up but do not matter at all at low bass frequencies.
If you want to understand there's great articles already mentioned above by Geddes and O'Toole, and of course everything posted by audiokinesis on here is pure gold. Everything else you should take with a big grain of salt. What is not flat out false is maybe even more dangerous for misleading with a grain of truth. There's also a book I can't recommend enough The Complete Guide to High-End Audio by Robert Harley.
As an example of a little knowledge.... plga has a room 14x28x9 which just that one thing is enough to know he's gonna have problems with a sub. Why? Because 28 is exactly twice 14 and almost exactly three times 9. This means nodes are gonna stack up at 40Hz and 80Hz. Why? Because at 40Hz the wave is 28 feet, at 80 Hz 14, and at 125Hz 9ft, and 125 is almost exactly three times 40. You could literally take a piece of graph paper and map out the nodes and see them.
No wonder plga has had so many problems. He's trying to solve a problem of physics the wrong way, with a sub. The key word being "a".
Now look at noble100. His room at 16x23x8 is almost as bad yet he is really happy with great sota bass! Partly this is because the larger dimensions (16, 23) aren't multiples so troublesome bass nodes are further apart. Mostly though this is because Tim has wisely chosen to solve his bass problem with an actual, bona fide proven to work solution- a distributed bass array.
A little knowledge does indeed go a very long way.
Like, sound travels in waves. The lower the frequency the longer the wave length. This one simple fact seems to cause a lot of problems though because it means sound in a room behaves quite a bit different than most people think. What I mean is most people think it all behaves the same. In fact it behaves very differently depending on frequency. Not only does it behave differently, but we even hear it differently!
Its real easy to get confused by people who don't know what's going on, get their facts wrong, and talk about things like toe in and timing which do matter from midrange on up but do not matter at all at low bass frequencies.
If you want to understand there's great articles already mentioned above by Geddes and O'Toole, and of course everything posted by audiokinesis on here is pure gold. Everything else you should take with a big grain of salt. What is not flat out false is maybe even more dangerous for misleading with a grain of truth. There's also a book I can't recommend enough The Complete Guide to High-End Audio by Robert Harley.
As an example of a little knowledge.... plga has a room 14x28x9 which just that one thing is enough to know he's gonna have problems with a sub. Why? Because 28 is exactly twice 14 and almost exactly three times 9. This means nodes are gonna stack up at 40Hz and 80Hz. Why? Because at 40Hz the wave is 28 feet, at 80 Hz 14, and at 125Hz 9ft, and 125 is almost exactly three times 40. You could literally take a piece of graph paper and map out the nodes and see them.
No wonder plga has had so many problems. He's trying to solve a problem of physics the wrong way, with a sub. The key word being "a".
Now look at noble100. His room at 16x23x8 is almost as bad yet he is really happy with great sota bass! Partly this is because the larger dimensions (16, 23) aren't multiples so troublesome bass nodes are further apart. Mostly though this is because Tim has wisely chosen to solve his bass problem with an actual, bona fide proven to work solution- a distributed bass array.
A little knowledge does indeed go a very long way.