Lots of bass at walls, lack of bass in center of room/listening position


I guess this is relatively common in listening system. Is there any way to smooth this out so I get more bass energy at my listening position? This happens with our without my 2x 18 inch subs. Room is 12 x 16 x 8 ft, speakers 4.5 ft apart on long axis and I am sitting 4.5 feet away. I tried moving back and forward but the entire middle center of the room except near the walls has decreased bass.
Is this a boundary effect or could it be due to bass cancellation effects?
smodtactical
Lots of bass at walls, lack of bass in center of room/listening position
@smodtactical  This is the classic description of a standing wave in the room.

While room treatment will help a little bit, its effect is marginal. You have two solutions both of which will work fine, depending on how you want to handle this.

The first is as others have suggested, move your subs around until you find a location that allows you to hear bass at the listening position. This can be tricky but can be done even with only one sub.

Now if you think you might want to hear the bass properly in any position in the room, then you need to break up the standing waves. The only way to do that (you can't do it with room treatment) is to use multiple subwoofers. You'll need at least 4 to do the job. This type of subwoofer approach is called a 'Distributed Bass Array' and is very effective- with the qualification that none of the subs operate above 80Hz. But its likely that your main speakers go lower than that, so this should be fairly easy. Below 80Hz your ear cannot tell where the bass is coming from- and the harmonics of the bass instruments will make you think that the bass is coming from in front of you.


Two of the subs would be placed in front of you, and the other two placed asymmetrically in the room, with one maybe on one side wall and other other in the rear on the opposite side. You might get better results by putting one of the latter two out of phase with the rest. They can all be fed a mono signal- again, if kept below 80Hz this will work fine. To get bass evenly distributed at all frequencies this is the most elegant approach. There is one subwoofer that is built specifically for this purpose, the Swarm, made by Audiokinesis in Texas.  Good Luck!
Move you listening position closer to a wall boundary.  You may need to be anywhere from inches to 2-3 feet from the wall.
Guys thanks for all the feedback!
I forgot to mention my speakers are Yamaha NS5000 and they are about 1 foot off the wall. As for the separation I know its not ideal but i just don't have much space because I have a door to the left of my left channel and my sub to the right of the right channel.

My right sub is at the front right corner. My left is at the back left corner. Both firing down the long axis. I guess if I had 4 smaller subs I might get a better response than 2 subs. I don't have a ton of space to move my subs around because of other items in the room.

Would changing the firing direction of the subs make a difference since bass waves below 80 as you said are non-directional. I might be able to move one of my subs to a position where it is to the right of the listening position firing at the center of the room. I can't really do a crawl again because of so many other things in my room (it is a bedroom).
And I guess I am kind of stuck with the bass without subs because to fix it there I would have to I am guessing pull my speakers out further which I can't do right now.