Audio Kinesis Swarm Subwoofer Awarded 2019 Golden Ear Award by Robert E. Greene

Hello davekayc,

     Congratulations, it seems like you happened into discovering a good combination of positions for both of your JBL subs that's providing the very good bass response a dual sub bass system is capable of.  I believe the sub unusually positioned on a shelf over your oven, about 7' above the floor, may be the key to your good fortune.
     The main goal in a dual sub bass setup is to position both subs sequentially in your room at the optimum positions in relation to your listening seat.  The best method I'm aware of for accomplishing this is the crawl method.  If you were starting from scratch, this is the procedure I'd have suggested you follow for optimally positioning each of your JBL subs:

 1. Connect sub#1, place it at your listening seat and play some music with good and repetitive bass. 
2. Beginning at the front right corner of your room, begin slowly walking or crawling around the perimeter of your room, in a counter-clockwise direction, until the bass sounds best to you (smooth, fast, detailed, solid and natural).  Once you find this first exact spot, you move sub#1 to this spot. 
3. Connect sub#2 and place it at your listening seat position, replay the music with both sub#1 and #2 playing and, beginning at sub#1, slowly continue walking or crawling around the perimeter of your room until you discover the next exact spot in your room the bass sounds best to you. Once you find this first exact spot,  move sub#2 to this spot. 

4. Sit at your listening position, replay the music with both sub#1 & #2 playing and verify the bass sounds very good to you.  If it does, your subs are likely optimally positioned and you can continue on to the next procedure phase of optimally setting each sub's Volume, Crossover Frequency and Phase controls.  (Procedure for this phase will be described later.)  If the bass does not sound very good to you at your listening position, you'll need to repeat the procedure starting at step 1.

     The above is the procedure I'd recommend, however, it seems like you just experimented with positioning your subs without following this procedure.  You may have just placed each sub at a convenient or available room position but it's very fortunate that you did, since you apparently discovered an unusual position (7' above the floor on a shelf above your oven) that surprisingly works very well in your room.  The truth is that you would not have discovered this very good but unusual location for 1 of your subs if you strictly followed my suggested crawl method.  You got very lucky because this is a very valuable discovery.
     If you're completely satisfied with the bass response performance of your system from your listening position with your 2 subs in their current positions, I would definitely suggest you leave them right there and buy some lottery tickets immediately.
     If you're not completely satisfied for any reason but you're okay with one sub being located on the shelf above your oven, my suggestion is to just treat the sub on the shelf as an optimally positioned sub#1.  You'd then have the option of further experimenting by treating the sub behind your bar area as sub#2. You could then follow my procedure starting at step#3.  Just place sub#2 at your listening position with both sub#1 & #2 playing and walk slowly around the perimeter of your room and find an exact spot where the overall bass sounds the best to you.  This spot may be behind your bar area or the bass may even sound better, from your listening position, with sub#2 located at a different position in your room.  Only a bit of experimenting and listening from your listening position will let you know for sure.
     I hope this was all clear to you and helped a bit.   


    
     


     
      

I actually did hang out up in those areas . The oven is a built in double wall oven which is more structural than shelf actually . I shifted the sub into the corner and was up and down the ladder a dozen times setting adjustments while switching from misic to 

.. music to movies to the news to radio on and on . Using a powered sub was the big thing . I honestly do not know how i would have achieved this result with out having adjustments . It sounds .. revolutionary. Thanks for your insight . It as it turns out is indeed mathematics as well as discovery. Over the last year tweaking  this system i have been imagining all the angles of reflection in this room (56x36x15) adding the subs almost seemed to erase the need for room treatment . As a matter of fact some of the adjustments on my c46 were then backed off a bit from their original settings for room correction !

Ps. I’m not finished experimenting yet . I have cables still running cross country until i get a few days of listening in (100ft balanced mic cables )

Hello davekayc,

       I'm guessing from your huge room dimensions that you live in a loft.  I've learned that getting the bass right in most home rooms is a key factor in building a high quality, realistic home audio system but it's also usually the hardest part of the audio spectrum to get right.  
     Most people can very quickly tell the difference between music heard in person played live and the same music played back via a recording on a home audio system.  I believe bass that is felt as well as heard, detailed, textured, solid, impactful and with a powerful dynamic range, basically bass that has the qualities of bass played live and heard in person, is required to be replicated on a home audio system in order for the experience to be perceived as realistic and of very high quality.  
     The main reason good bass performance is so difficult to obtain in most domestic rooms is that bass soundwaves behave very differently than midrange and treble soundwaves behave in any given room.  Here are some important facts to understand and keep in mind:


1. Humans generally have an audible hearing range from deep tones to high tones of 20 Hz (deepest tone) to 20,000 Hz (highest tone).

2. The deeper the tone, the longer the corresponding soundwave produced.  The higher the tone, the shorter the corresponding soundwave produced.  For example, the full cycle soundwave length of a very deep 20 Hz tone is 56 feet and the full cycle soundwave length of a very high 20,000 Hz tone is only a fraction of an inch.
     It's also been proven that the entire length of a full cycle soundwave must exist in a room before it is detected by our ears, our brains process this information and the perception is created of a sound tone at a certain frequency being present in the room.

3. Most humans cannot localize bass tones below about 80 Hz, meaning we cannot determine exactly where the sound is originating from.  But we are progressively better at localizing sound tones as their soundwave frequencies rise from about 80 Hz all the way to about 20,000 Hz. 

4.  The radiation pattern of deep bass soundwaves is 360 degrees meaning the soundwaves radiate out from the speaker in all directions.  The radiation pattern of midrange and treble soundwaves are much more directional meaning the soundwaves radiate outward from the speaker more in a straight line, like a beam of light. 

     You're on the right track thinking about all the angles of reflections in your room.  As you can see from the above fact #2, one of the reasons it's difficult to get good bass performance in domestic sized rooms is that the length of some deep bass tone soundwaves may exceed one or more of the dimensions of the room.  This means the long bass soundwaves must reflect off a room barrier (wall, floor or ceiling) before its entire length exists in the room, the ear can then detect it and the brain can process it as a bass tone sound at a certain frequency. 
      In smaller rooms, multiple long bass soundwaves reflecting off room boundaries, that are closer together, often meet or collide which causes bass at these spots in the room to sound exaggerated, attenuated or even absent.   Actually, you're fortunate again because your room is so large it can better accommodate multiple long bass soundwaves, which means fewer reflections off room boundaries that results in better bass response performance overall in your room.
     
Did you buy those lottery tickets yet? 
                   Tim