Will I benefit from a subwoofer with 20Hz speakers?


My source is a minidsp shd studio with Dirac going into Denafrips Gaia DDC to Denafrips T+ DAC to McIntosh 601 Monoblocks to Cabasse Pacific 3 speakers. The speaker's published frequency response is 41-20,000Hz. I presume this is achieved in an anechoic chamber. In my room however, it goes down to 20Hz, at least according to the Dirac measurements. In fact, I needed to flatten the curve and  reduce by 5-20 DBs between 20-100Hz due to the room effect.

So, considering I already go down to 20Hz, is there anything else 1 or 2 subwoofers will do for my system?  Would it create a more consistent low frequency field? I see many people adding up to 6 subs, so I wonder what I'm missing. 

Thank you for your insight! 

dmilev73

I really would like to take your words for it and tune my 44hz and 39 hz (+-3db) bookshelfs down to 20hz (flat like you have shown or -3db is fine). This really sounds a bit too good to be true to be honest.

 

@lanx0003 - I don’t know what you’ll be able to achieve because it is so very room/speaker/placement specific, I make no guarantees that you can take this recipe, follow it 100% and get usable 20Hz. Really all depends where you are starting from. The initial measurements from this OP and my experience in my room which I wrote about showed we both had usable output at 20 Hz. We got lucky. But the thing is that rooms and speakers are random.

I will say this however, almost every time an audiophile adds bass traps and some room treatment to a speaker they are amazed at how much bigger their speakers sound. That is something I can almost guarantee will happen. At the end of that you will be much happier. Now, will it be so great you don’t want a sub? I do not know, but I know 100% that if you do all this and then get a sub you will enjoy the sub a lot more and have a much easier time integrating it with your main speakers.

What I know is a really bad idea is to look at a speaker spec sheet and think "Oh, OK I know what’s going on in my room" because I promise you, you do not.

Overall what I want you to do is measure first and then decide where to go. This I am also extremely confident in being a great approach.

There are the rare cases when bass slopes downwards from 80 Hz or so and there's no significant room modes.  In these cases, bass traps should wait for a sub.