Amp + speakers + room = a "system within a system". Imo they should all work well together. The speakers are "in the middle" in this paradigm, so they need to work well with the amp (usually not too difficult) and also with the room (often quite difficult).
Room-interaction peaks and dips in the bass region are inevitable, and it is the peaks that are the most audible and objectionable. A speaker that puts out less bass energy will have smaller, and therefore less objectionable, peaks. A speaker that puts out no bass energy will no bass peaks, but its tonal balance will suck. So in practice it’s a trade-off, because you want SOME bass energy, just not TOO MUCH. So I typically design speakers with multiple pluggable ports, to allow for some user-adjustability in the bass region. Open baffle (dipole) speakers have inherently smoother in-room bass than box (monopole) speakers, but don't "pressurize" the room at low frequencies so don't deliver that "chest-thump" impact that good box speakers do. Tradeoffs, always tradeoffs.
The problem in the bass region is not that we have TOO MANY room-interaction peaks and dips... it is that we have TOO FEW!! Higher up the spectrum the room-interaction peaks and dips are far more numerous because the room is large relative to the wavelengths involved. We have so many peaks and dips bunched up so close together that they effectively form a "continuum", and we do not hear the individual peaks and dips. The larger the room, the lower in frequency this "continuum" behavior holds up. Small rooms are the worst because their peaks and dips are spread so far apart and that trend extends up higher in frequency.
So in the bass region the peaks and dips are too few and too far apart to be heard as a "continuum", so they stick out like sore thumbs (the peaks in particular). What we need is, MORE peaks and dips, smaller and bunched up closer together, and this way the room would behave more like a big room and we’d have good in-room bass.
One way to do this which imo works fairly well is a distributed multi-sub system. The idea is, spread several (typically four) small subs asymmetrically around the room. Each will produce a different peak-and-dip pattern, and the sum of the four dissimilar peak-and-dip patterns will be fairly smooth, and will approximate the peak-and-dip pattern that we might get in a much larger room. Whether the subs are sealed or ported depends on what works best with that particular room’s acoustics.
Duke
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