@phusis , You could do two floor to ceiling towers in the corners with four 12 subs in each tower and get decent results and here is why I do not do it that way. It is virtually impossible to control resonances and vibration in an enclosure that big. The problem with most subwoofers is they are not just speakers. They are musical instruments. Enclosure design is not so simple. Any vibration or shaking of the enclosure is distortion. Keeping the enclosure from becoming a musical instrument requires a very heavy stiff walled enclosure. The Stiffest enclosure would be a sphere. Spheres are unfortunately hard to make and work with. Next in line is a cylinder. Put a driver in each end of the cylinder and you cancel forces that want to shake the enclosure. A heavy cylinder with 1.5" walls will not resonate. No resonating and no shaking. Perfect. Place four of these units along the front and in the corners and you have an extremely low distortion horizontal line source. If you recall. line sources do not radiate sound off the ends, in my case the sides! The subwoofer line source system has only one early reflection, the ceiling. My listening room is open to the kitchen and then the dining room. The nearest full wall is 75 feet away. I still have some nodal behavior in the room but it is greatly diminished. It sounds like you are in a much larger room.
Getting a horn to do 18 Hz requires an extremely big horn. I know of one fellow who casted bass horns in his house's foundation. The drivers were in the basement. The horns curved outwards and upwards opening up at the bottom of the front wall making a "U" turn. I only saw pictures. This was before DSP. Those drivers had to 15 feet behind the rest on the system. That is a huge delay. I have screwed around with delays just to see what I could detect audibly. 1.5 ms is clearly audible in the midrange.
If your subs crossed over like mine at 120 Hz 1.5ms would also be clearly audible. Much lower and you would be able it pick it out in an A/B comparison. It gets more difficult as you go lower. It becomes not what you hear but what you feel.
Getting a horn to do 18 Hz requires an extremely big horn. I know of one fellow who casted bass horns in his house's foundation. The drivers were in the basement. The horns curved outwards and upwards opening up at the bottom of the front wall making a "U" turn. I only saw pictures. This was before DSP. Those drivers had to 15 feet behind the rest on the system. That is a huge delay. I have screwed around with delays just to see what I could detect audibly. 1.5 ms is clearly audible in the midrange.
If your subs crossed over like mine at 120 Hz 1.5ms would also be clearly audible. Much lower and you would be able it pick it out in an A/B comparison. It gets more difficult as you go lower. It becomes not what you hear but what you feel.