Bass is clearer and more impactful when I stand vs. when I sit

Sounds like you have a bass null at the listening position.  I have the same situation, i.e., there is more bass in my room pretty much everywhere except in the listening position.  The bass is great at the sides and far back of the room.  The problem is that this is a family room(don't have a dedicated listening room) and I can't really arrange the furniture much differently. 

Null, node; these phenomena are caused by standing waves in the room. A standing wave in this case is where a bass note is so long that it is able to reflect off of the wall behind you and cancel itself.

No matter what anyone says this cannot be cured by room treatment using bass traps or room correction using Digital Signal Processing (DSP). In the case of the latter, the cancellation means that you can put nearly infinite power with the same result until the wall behind you collapses. With the former, to be effective the bass traps need to dynamically move about the room as the bass notes change.


The more elegant solution is to use multiple subwoofers arranged asymmetrically in the room. This breaks up the standing waves and you get evenly distributed bass. The trick is to make sure the subs don't go above about 80Hz so as to not attract attention to themselves. Then the main speakers will convince you that the bass notes are coming from them. Audiokinesis.com makes a sub called the Swarm that is meant specifically for this use; its one of the very few I've seen that is designed to be as close to the wall as you can get it and still be flat (to 20Hz), and they are not crazy money.

@atmasphere Thank you for your advice. I just look at the website about Swarm, they are very interesting! I would try it if I had a bigger listening room and get approval from wife :)

This is normal. Over time I’ve realized that a great way to mitigate this is to have speakers that begin to drop off slowly at a relatively high frequency. You don’t want speakers that are flat to 30hz. You want speakers that begin to drop off at 80 hz or so and output slowly decreases from there. You still want your mains to have good sized woofers for the punch they provide. And you want them to have useful output in the deep bass, but it should be at a significantly lower level. The reason is that if you’re down significantly at 50hz the room problems will be greatly diminished. You won’t have a massive peak that overwhelms the room. Get a sub, or subs, to bring the deep bass levels up to where they should be. If you put your full range mains where they’re best for everything but the deep bass and it turns out the deep bass is terrible, then what?

Hi, the other guy here.

I took the advice I received to move the speakers - PMC MB2SE - closer together about a foot each closer to the center, as close as practical to the media unit, and also further forward about 6”. Towed in towards the seating position.

Problem solved.

Positioning was the key.