frequency range for instrument vs speaker

06-23-12: Tonywinsc
If you think you can just buy a subwoofer, drop it into your living room and add an octave to the range of your music, then you are deluding yourselves.

Why do I bother qualifying my statements with phrases like "properly blended" in my posts if you bulldoze over them like I never said anything at all. It's not like placement of a 350-lb. pair of full-range speakers with spikes is a piece of cake either.

OF COURSE you have to take special care in placement, phase adjustment, crossover adjustment, and level adjustment. Who on this forum wouldn't know that? I've seamlessly incorporated seven subwoofers into various systems in the past 7 years. I had a pair of subs in my living room and after living with them a few months, took about 4 hours to reposition them and re-adjust their settings. It was well worth it. I can now play large scale orchestral works (Berlioz, anyone?) on this system with engaging and credible reproduction.

Blending subs is a pain in the ass that can take anywhere from 2-4 hours to several days. But if it saves you $5K or more compared to the equivalent passive full range speaker, it's easily worth it.

As for the wavelength argument, my small towers are in an open architecture living room. There's almost no limit to how long a soundwave can form in my house interior--across the LR, up the stairs and down the hall, or across the living room, down the stairs, and out to the 18x22 media room.

Here's another thought: regardless of the size of the venue, if you have a subwoofer putting out a 25 Hz frequency, even if you're sitting well within the fully formed wavelength, the frequency is hitting your eardrums (and flapping your pantsleg) 25 times per second, and your brain will perceive it as such.

By your argument we couldn't hear bass below 180 Hz (about F below middle C) from a car stereo where the maximum interior dimension is around six feet.. Psst... we can.

Johnnyb, you explained it well. It takes a lot of effort and work to get it balanced across the broad spectrum. What I was trying to say is that the long wavelengths are multiple times the length of a typical listening position. So the SPL at 12ft (typical listening position) of a 20Hz frequency is going to be much lower that at 56.5 ft-, ie. the full wavelength. So to make the 20Hz frequency the same loudness at 12ft as shorter wavelengths will take a lot of power and then the loudness of the 20Hz frequency will be much higher as you move out to the 56ft range. Like you said, you have to work very hard to balance all of that out and get it to work. You are taking great pains to get the reflections and the sources to all come together at the listening position. I still doubt you can achieve a balanced 20-20k in a small room.

06-23-12: Tonywinsc
Johnnyb, you explained it well. It takes a lot of effort and work to get it balanced across the broad spectrum. ... Like you said, you have to work very hard to balance all of that out and get it to work. You are taking great pains to get the reflections and the sources to all come together at the listening position. I still doubt you can achieve a balanced 20-20k in a small room.

Sorry; I have a nasty virus right now that's got me grumpy. You've been gracious and make good points. An advantage of the stand mount/subwoofer approach is that if you have to put your system in a smaller room you can dial back the subwoofer(s). Even a JL Gotham G213 can be turned down to reasonable levels in a small room, but you can't do that with a pair of Wilson Alexandrias (or other passive large full-range speakers) which will inevitably overload a small room.

You are right. Full spectrum audio is achievable but takes a lot of patience and money. More than I have of either one. I certainly don't want to discourage the enthusiasts that are working to achieve that, but it is also good to share our failures and successes so others learn something from it. I'm pretty happy where I am with my system today. I think my large size and volume listening room combined with the wood floors made a tremendous improvement in the sound of the lower registers. I had the Thiel CS3.6 pair when I moved into this house and they just didn't seem to be enough for this large room. When I got the CS6 pair the sound filled in nicely. I'm not trying to play at loud volumes, just that the larger speakers seem to fill the range better in a larger room. The converse is true too- smaller speakers work better in a smaller room.
Everyone has a different path to take in this hobby. Many are happy to have the mid-range magic of Quads, which I also used to enjoy immensely at a friend's house years ago with female vocals, and others want the full range to go with their broad stage orchestral music and others the hard kick and punch of rock and roll.