Which component to upgrade to improve bass control?

@tvad:

"You might call Peter and ask him about using Symposium platforms between your speakers and target stands"

As I mentioned, Peter stipulates there should be no spike or other footer under speaker stands when using Symposium shelves under monitors. I finally got around to removing the Herbie's Gliders from under my stands this afternoon and put the shelves back under the Silverlines. Better!  I can actually follow bass-lines, now and there's an overall improvement in the sense of ease or flow of music. 

This may be enough to get me through until we move from this house and I'm able to have a dedicated, Swarm-equipped, audio room. We'll see. 

Given your options are so limited, you might need to go the DSP or equalizer route. I know the latter is a blasphemous thing on Agon, but given few options might be the ticket to helping with the limits of your situation. Usually, moving a speaker closer to a wall is a no go, but it does reinforce bass potentially. Given you cannot optimize your room etc, you can’t have the perfect situation anyway. It might be worth trying something unusual to see if you can gain something you can live with in the interim.

I assume your speakers are well cross-braced, between each pair of opposite panels. i.e, side to side, top to bottom, etc. Assuming a well-designed speaker, then that is the most important factor I have found for clean bass. I have learned this by building and testing.

On to your situation: Bass likes current. Current likes thicker wire. Thicker wire means less resistance. Less resistance means greater damping factor (control).

You said your speaker cables are 20 feet long. Resistance increases proportionately to length. So you have reduced your damping factor some.

I suggest you employ cables that are equivalent to 10 gauge AWG or better.

Since treble likes thinner wires, cables made up of many thin wires work well. I suggest using Kimber 8TC or even 12TC. A friend uses them on his Magnepan 20.7s and they do very well. Their net gauge is even better than 10 gauge.

BTW, I am about to build some speaker cables of my design, see if I can improve on what I did before. One will have 16 pairs of 22 gauge wire - plain solid core copper. This adds up to 10 gauge equivalent. I have hopes on the result.

Brandon

Mo’ bigga speaka wya!
20’ runs? Bi-wire if you can. Otherwise double run w/stacked nanners. Made a big diff years ago w/the low impedance highly reactive subs I had at the time. 
My $0.02. Tony

You don't say why subs and room treatment are out. I have a friend who was in a similar position to you in a square room (the worst) with all hard surfaces and his expensive kit sounded horrible, I don't know how else to describe it, certainly brought no pleasure to anybody who heard it. I asked him what he intended doing. A local outlet had convinced him to buy a new and very expensive cartridge. I explained that he would not be able to hear what this cartridge could do in his poor room because the fine detail and better overall performance would be obscured. 

To keep this short: I brought in some big rolls of rock wool and placed them where I considered they would help the most. The change was huge and the mood of he and his wife picked up noticeably. The temporary stuff was removed and he later installed some smart looking absorbers and traps. If you simply can't have any panels which need not be permanently fixed then consider a multi-sub approach.

My same friend now with a new outlook listened carefully when I explained what he could achieve with a DBA. I built 3 simple sealed boxes with an 8" driver in each. I posted something about this recently on another thread. The boxes were made tall with a small footprint, not much bigger than the 8" speaker. One sub was used to support a nice pot plant, another to support a reading lamp and the third as a coffee table. They fitted very easily into the room and were hardly noticed.

You may wonder what a 'little' 8" driver can do. Well there are 3 of them and they serve to randomise the nodes, filling in the nulls and taming down the peaks. The performance of the whole system including midrange and tops improves beyond what seems logical. I very strongly recommend you consider this.

Other posters have wisely suggested a DBA and I agree but there remains the issue of overly long decay without the correct type of absorption.  This leads me to the popular idea that DSP can fix this. It can't fix it. It can't fix it because it can't reduce the long decay of some or all frequencies. How can it? It can reduce the peaks, sure, but only the amplitude not the length of reverb. With partial nulls it can't boost those frequencies by for example 15dB, the amp can't provide that amount of clean power and the speaker's voice coil would melt. Anybody doubt that statement then just calculate for yourself: you need to double the amps output to gain 3dB. If you started with a 50W amp and double it 5 times you will need ... 1600W !$%#

What about a total null which means zero information (music)? Any power driven to the null frequency will just cancel with the same power. The multi-sub system provides many more peaks and nulls but they are now less less severe with more informative bass as a result.

I know that after this post you will still receive advice to use EQ or DSP  These are and always will be a band-aid. They may help when the room is properly treated where only small boost or reduction is required. Resist the urge :-)