williewonka,
By cancelling out room nodes, i.e. peaks within the room, the bass decays faster, not to mention you get a more consistent room interaction. Keep mind mind we are talking subwoofer frequencies, i.e. below 80Hz, where you can't tell where the sound is coming from. A smooth frequency response, without room nodes works best, or at least as an alternative to a lot of room acoustic treatment, perfectly positioned speakers (for bass), etc.
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Smaller Tsu Research subs
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Velodyne and SVS are a good match with Klipsch. I was at one time using Khorns front, KLFC7 centre, Hersey II's as rears with a Velodyne FSR18, a true beast back then. |
williewonka, Based on your budget of around 4 x $599 you could do much better with just two subs at @1200 each. Respectfully, I’m not here to argue a point but to offer up a different way of thinking ’out of the box’ to get good bass. The 4 sub SVS SB1000’s would be a killer set up to augment elate’s Klipsch mains as those ’little’ 12 incher’s are quality mechanical devices for producing bass with a good price to performance ratio too. And the SVS SB1000's with the high level speaker input are actually $499 all day long, not $599. https://www.svsound.com/products/sb-1000 elate, The
SVS SB1000's
would take some time to find the right placements in your room but
with
their small size and high level speaker inputs you would have more options and ease of placements.
Read what Duke was gracious enough to write here on Agon: Tyray asked: "Can a customer use their own passive subwoofers of choice?"
You can totally use your subs of choice, active or passive. Here is the amplifier that I use to drive my passive subs, note that it has a single band of EQ and a switchable 25 Hz "bass boost" circuit, which may come in handy with sealed subs:
https://www.parts-express.com/dayton-audio-sa1000-subwoofer-amplifier-rack-mountable--300-811
Tyray: "Or do I have to use AudioKinesis designed passive speakers for best results?"
I think the subs I designed work well for this application, but they are NOT required for good results. I don’t like to make claims like "best results" because in this hobby there is always something better... I’ll only claim "best I know how to make at my price point given where I think the goal posts are."
Tyray: "As I’m trying to understand if you would need to ’customize’ your swarm peripherals, amps, speaker wire, crossovers and any other hardware to work with the subs a customer may propose."
I don’t really "do" custom Swarm systems wherein I don’t at least supply the passive subs, but it’s not rocket surgery. Briefly...
Spread your subs asymmetrically around the room, perhaps with one (but no more than one) in a corner, and bonus points if you can raise at least one sub up off the floor such that it is closer to the ceiling than to the floor.
(If you prefer, you can also use a symmetrical configuration - see Todd Welti’s "Subwoofers: Optimum Numbers and Locations" on Harman’s website.)
Any subs which are fairly far from the main speakers, you want their top ends to be rolled off fairly steeply no higher than 80 Hz, so they don’t betray their locations by passing audible upper bass/lower midrange.
I usually find that reversing the polarity of the sub farthest from the main speakers tends to improve the in-room smoothness, but in a very large or open-floorplan room the result may be deficient in the bottom octave.
If you don’t have test equipment, when setting the controls on your subwoofer amp(s) by ear, the sequence is: First set the level, then the frequency, then the phase. Cycle back through this sequence several times to fine-tune. Credit to master acoustician Jeff Hedback for teaching me what the proper sequence is.
Duke
As it may help you ’wrap your head around’ something that at first does seem counterintuitive, that 4 smaller subs can sound so good. And of course you could also buy one of Duke’s kits, but I do understand the bug to try to do it yourself. |
An F series Velodyne? That was a time when real audiophiles snubbed subwoofers and a substantial improvement over my ULD.
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