Wilson Audio Haters

shadorne

With small 8" woofers obviously you need a subwoofer.

Not necessarily. The Infinity RS1-B speaker system used 8-inch woofers, and it surely didn't need a subwoofer. To be fair, it did use six of them per side.

I didn’t mean say you can’t use 8 inch woofers - just that they are inadequate to properly do the highest end true full range. I guess I should have added - at realistic volume levels! Of course the limited excursion of 8 inch can be used down to 20Hz but you won’t get much useful SPL out of it....as it needs to move linearly for several inches to have any meaningful output.

Agreed that 8 of 8 inch woofers is probably equivalent 2 x 15 in area but still won't be as good at powe handling or large excursions (won't get as high SPL)

To sub or not to sub, that is the question.
Whether it is nobler on the ear to suffer the rise and fall of room modes or by equalizing, end them.....

The further down the octaves you go the more problems you need to solve. 2-way speakers aren't better, they are simpler. It is usually much easier to get very good sound out of a limited bandwidth speaker than a true full-range and/or speaker plus sub.

Where the trade-offs are ideal is up to the listener, the human being who has to trade off living space, decorations, and even friends and a chance of finding true-love in exchange for unlimited bottom end in their music.

Two advantages subs have is placement, and equalization. You can hunt for the best place to put a subwoofer, but your main speakers are usually limited by where you want to sit. Also, by using an EQ that only sits in the way of the subwoofer you eliminate a lot of contamination in the mains.

I think $200K for a subwoofer is absolutely ridiculous. IMHO what makes a subwoofer great for most consumers is how good it's integration features are. Right now JL leads the pack. However with skill and experience you can use a far less expensive sub with outboard EQ's and get as good of a performance.

I don't think there's any 1 right answer about what any given listener should do. I just wanted to point out, there's challenges either way.

Best,


E

I own 2.5 way speakers which are very simple  to drive and I agree that full range speakers may go lower but are extremely difficult to drive, there is no shortage of LF at my listening room , Sometimes  I miss my sub once watching action movies but for music listening adding a sub to my system is absolutely unnecessary.