My experience adding subwoofers to 2 channel

Hello Tim,
In 2000, I bought a pair of MBL101D Radialstrahier speakers. I enjoy listening to my music very loud around 85dB to 90dB, so you can imagine in a room 18’X12’X9’ without acoustic treatment, everything sound bad especially the bass. So I got ASC Mr Art Noxon from Seattle to design the acoustic for the room.

The floor is concrete overlay with 3” wide 0.75” thick 48” Long teakwood of various length

Hello Tim, 
Is there a way I can send you a video clip of the room? 

Tim, sorry I did not get back earlier. I can not believe people are so far off on the subject of time and phase. Time and phase are intimately related. wire two of your subs backwards and see what you get. That is 180 degrees out of phase. You get exactly the same effect when the distance between speakers is different. The wave length of a 100 Hz tone is about 10 feet. If you put one sub 5 feet closer to you than another you get exactly the same effect as if you wired one speaker backwards. Music is not one tone so you get every frequency altered by a different phase angle. Then you have a range of frequencies to deal with at the cross over which depending on slope may be as high as 250 Hz. It is also not only about what you hear but about what you feel. In phase you feel the thud of that bass drum strike. Out of phase and you feel nothing. You can easily demonstrate this to yourself by reversing wires. A system that is aligned in phase and time is a wonderful thing to hear and feel. It is much more realistic. If I blind folded you, drove you around and brought you into the room you would think you were in a jazz bar. I'm afraid millercarbon is spouting off with excuses to support his infatuation with SWARM systems, all of which are entirely unsupported assumptions which in reality are entirely wrong. Humans are marvelous creatures. When they don't know what is going on they make stuff up. They mythologize. Zeus, great explanation for lightening don't you think?

Oh, and Tim. I am not saying that in certain situations a DBA system may not be the easiest way to reasonable bass performance. It may work reasonable well for many people. What I am saying is that in the end it will not produce the most accurate and realistic results but do to do so usually requires advanced digital speaker control that at this time costs at least $6K. If however you have a tape measure, some savvy and some luck, you might be able to get there without the computer. An important part of this hobby is being able to screw around with your system to see if you can get it to sound better and in doing so you learn. So, start screwing around! 

mijostyn writes:

I’m afraid millercarbon is spouting off with excuses to support his infatuation with SWARM systems, all of which are entirely unsupported assumptions which in reality are entirely wrong.

This is what psychologists call projection. Whatever you are doing you project onto someone else. Instead of actually listening to what they are saying.

Which if you did mijostyn, what you will read if you can be bothered is pretty much everything I have written is based on my actual experience. There is posted among the many threads my actual experience of actually reversing phase, adjusting phase, and trying different locations.

What actually happens- actually not in your imaginary theory world but a real live room- is when you reverse the phase the drum does not disappear. You still hear it. In fact it sounds almost exactly the same. Not quite. You can’t ever change anything and yet have everything be the same. But you said, "Out of phase and you feel nothing." That could hardly be further from the truth.

Now at this point I have to be clear. I’m talking about the lowest bass component only. Of course if you reverse phase on the main speakers the drum is going to go from being focused and located to the opposite, coming from everywhere. At very low frequencies though, and with four subs- which is what we are talking about- its a completely different story. The kick drum does not disappear to "nothing". Talk about unsupported assumptions!

So much for your projecting your own faults onto me. What about your projecting your own misunderstandings onto the Swarm?

You say everything about the SWARM is entirely unsupported assumptions. In fact the distributed bass array concept is based on extensive real world measurement and experimentation. In sharp contrast to your fantasy of it being all "unsupported assumptions" it is in fact only there because of the measurements. In other words it was not a case of a theory in search of evidence. It was the exact opposite of that. It was a case of testing and measurement and then eventually figuring out how to explain why we get those measurements. And only then what to do about it.

Its Audiogon. Someone is always getting something worse than backwards, then posting authoritatively about it. So nothing new here. But just because others do it doesn’t mean you have to follow them over the cliff.