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Subwoofer location/facing question

So for the last few months I've read and learned a lot about subwoofer placement and implemented those ideas which made sense to me. I crawled, heaved, groaned and probably pulled some muscles in the process. I have found thru trial and error the sweet spot or very close to it. It sounds very nice but am sure it could be better.
Here is the question that has not been addressed in anything I have read, which was a lot. 
In what direction should a sealed sub be facing? Parallel to the front wall, parallel to the side wall or facing the prime listening position or other? Seeing diagrams most if not all have the sub on plane with the front speakers facing parallel with the side wall. In my case the sub sweet spot is located approximately 1.5 foot in front of the main speaker plane. Can someone enlighten me which direction the sub should be facing and why? Does a single sub in a system have to be on plane with the mains?
Please enlighten me.
Thanks. PS L & R main speakers are 4.5 feet from front wall, 3.5 from side walls, sub is 5.3 ft from front wall and 2.8 ft from side wall. Mains are toed in 15 degrees. Room size 15x23x8
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tablejockey
3,882 posts
 
Your subs location seems unusual.

Have you checked out REL's videos?
https://rel.net/tune-rel-video-series/

If your ears like that position, stick with it.

jl35
3,976 posts
 
REL recommends corner placement, REL dealers often recommend next to main speaker placement...
doitwithlife's avatar
doitwithlife
98 posts
 
I’ve been working this issue for a couple of days now on my system. Just got a pair of Rel .s812 which replaced a single MK.

Rel customer support gave me specifics based on photos and floorplans. I tried their recommendations then did what all the videos and crawl docs etc said to do. I wasn’t really liking what I was hear across varieties of music and it was fatiguing compared to my old setup

Finally got a calibrated mic and software to figure out what was going on. Huge spike like 30+db around 35Hz at all the suggested locations. I'm guessing that the old sub wasn't adding enough energy into the room to really excite my problem modes. 

After stripping my treatments out, pulled out the subs and started again. After resetting speaker position, toe in and take I was still seeing these room modes but much less. Finally starting to understand what those are. Gezz long enough.

Now I went around the room with a sub and found the peaks were less pronounced and suprisingly the bass smoothed out. Found the best spot on one side of the room the went to the other side a repeated.

What I came up with was unlike anything I’ve read. Subs are outside the speakers by at least 6 feet. 1 in a corner other side of a doorway, other mid wall. They face seemly random directions but direction seemed to really impact that peak.

Decay times came out low, average maybe 100ms.

My corner traps did nothing to help these modes. All are back in place and the system is less fatiguing them it was, still tuning. I also sent my data to GIK to get some ideas toward tweaking some other areas of interest



noromance's avatar
noromance
9,763 posts
 
A sub loads the room. It doesn't or is not intended to be firing at you. Corner placement is the more efficient place to do this. 
lancelock
1,093 posts
 
Acquiring 4 subs solved my problems. I bought Gingko Audios version of the swarm system and it doesn’t just pressurize the room but it expands the soundstage incredibly well. Placement is still important.
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