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
