"Musical" subwoofers? Advice please on comparing JL subs

In good humor coming back at you Erik, do you need someone to instruct you on how to set the tone controls on your Luxman?  Which I wish I could have purchased with the deal you secured.

Northman, here is my $.02:

Four E110’s, intelligently positioned, will have about twice the inherent in-room smoothness (and correspondingly better tonality) compared with two F110v2’s.  I can explain why if you’d like. Tonality in the bass region is a function of the in-room frequency response. And "smooth bass" is "fast bass", because it is the room-induced peaks which decay more slowly and sound boomy and degrade clarity and tonality in the bass region.

Another advantage of having four subwoofers instead of two is that the (improved) frequency response holds up well throughout the room. When the frequency response is similar throughout the room, any EQing you do will be beneficial throughout the room as well, instead of improving the response in the "sweet spot" but making it worse elsewhere. So if you have multiple listeners, nobody gets cheated with a good distributed multi-sub system.

Even three subwoofers intelligently distributed is imo a worthwhile improvement over two. Or to get the best balance between bass quality and number of "footprints" occupied by speakers in your room, maybe use four subs with two of them doing double-duty as speaker stands, though that might not be practical if the heavy-cone JL Audio subs would vibrate your main speakers.

In general I have a great deal of respect for Erik’s opinions. Note that his objection to a distributed multiple subwoofer system is based not on the technique lacking in merit, but rather on his negative feelings towards people who have advocated it. I appreciate the fact that he makes that distinction clear in his blog post.

Duke

The $3500 you are planning to spend on one sub alone will buy you four subs that will together far outperform anything you can get from any one sub at any price. Sorry the other boob got here first. Really. Because you want to do this right you need to learn a little acoustics if you want to understand, and the stuff above is simply out of date bad physics and bad audio. 

Do a search for distributed bass array, DBA or Swarm subwoofer system. There's three main reasons why multiple subs works far better than one: physics, acoustics, and psycho-acoustics. 

The physics is that low bass waves are 40, 50, 60 feet. Much longer than any room in a house. Because of this it really does not matter what sub is used, the waves are all going to hit a wall and double back long before even one wave is complete. Smaller rooms are actually worse than bigger ones. But even a really big room is small relative to these long wave lengths. Because of this no matter where you put a sub the wave always winds up reflecting back and either canceling or reinforcing itself. This is all pure physics, nothing you can do about it, impossible to solve with any DSP, EQ, or sub technology. 

The acoustics part is that because of this you are going to hear lumpy crappy bass from one sub. People will tell you to equalize it. Don't. The only way to EQ bass smooth at the place where you listen is to have it be even worse everywhere else.  

One thing makes for bad muddy bass is the bass energy in the room excites all the walls into vibrating and this takes time to dissipate and die down. The whole time this is happening its muddying the bass. EQ only makes this worse by turning up the bass. That is why people recommending EQ are always also recommending tube traps. First they have you spend money to make the bass worse, then they want you to spend even more money to fix the problem they created. Beautiful. But the website is very pretty. So it must be right. Right? 

The psycho-acoustics part is we aren't able to localize really low bass. Below about 80 Hz its all about volume not location. We get all our location cues from midrange and treble. Very low bass we cannot even hear at all at less than one full cycle.  

Understand all three of these and you can see why multiple subs is the answer. Multiple subs means multiple locations means lots of small lumps and dips that all together add up to smooth even deep and powerful bass. Not needing EQ means not adding more energy than is needed means not exciting the room means the bass will be clean and clear and articulate- without tube traps. 

You can still do that stuff if you want but with four subs it will be fine-tuning, and extremely fine tuning at that. All the EQ I need is on my Dayton sub amps. Total cost for a Swarm or any four subs will be around or under your $3500. Of course you can get four of those and it will be even better.

Skip the blather. Do a search. Study the system. Notice a lot of people simply cannot get their minds around the ideas. Notice how extremely happy and impressed are those who do, and who actually have one. https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367 Read Duke, Tim, and me. Skip the other one. Hopelessly lost. Does have a lot of pretty pictures though, I'll give him that.

Unless you listen in an anechoic chamber, one of any quality won’t cut it.
Room nodes.
Might as well stick to headphones
Get as many as you have room and funds for, up to 4. Mismatch OK.
You been schooled.

You know it is blasphemy to say, but I have a couple of SVS subs, one next to each speaker, and I have once before written that for some reason I have not had the problems others have making them sound right to my ears.

Not blasphemy to me, but not the path I’d recommend everyone try first.


The problems that you run into getting very deep bass is that too much is up to chance and circumstance. Open floor plans, good speaker/listener position, and otherwise naturally good acoustics contribute.

I will say though that I’ve heard many subs be configured so they are inoffensive, without being fantastic. I fell into this trap myself for a while I was satisfied with what I had and thought it was the best I could do without brand shuffling.


Which one are you? I don’t know. You could have gotten super lucky, you might have settled. Lets be grateful for these lucky situations when they happen.