Your sub experience: Easy or hard?

@rennieboy

I’m going off-topic because a couple of responders have mentioned having to constantly change the subwoofer level and I hope I can help.

My experience with this is that this happens when there are pronounced room modes which you have not dealt with. Peaks which certain music excites. Clip them and you can achieve a better sub balance and you no longer have to ride the subwoofer level.

Use the AM Acoustics room mode simulator to find those modes and move the subwoofer out of the hot zones.

https://amcoustics.com/tools/amroc

After this, EQ or EQ+Bass traps will deal with this nicely.

Of course, some one always replies "you can’t fix room modes with EQ" and you are wrong. You can’t fix nulls with EQ. Peaks however are dealt with easily, though the more you use placement and bass traps the more locations the solution works in.

Measure, clip the peaks and you’ll find that the sub level you normallly listen to is now way too low. Raise that up and boom.

Mine was relatively easy. The sub was lined with foam, but was still a tad forward sounding, so I added a small amount of polyester batting. You should set the crossover point as low as you feel your main speakers can cover. Mine ended up at 80Hz. Then the main thing I did was to turn it down. If you have a subwoofer, there's a powerful desire to hear it woof, but I found that it sounds better and better the more you turn it down. Until you get to the point where it's no longer overpowering your mains and you can't tell if all that wonderful bass is coming from your speakers or the sub.

Good information Eric, but my desire to change the sub's output level is solely related to low level listening, where I enjoy a little more kick - sort of like the loudness controls we used to have on our receivers back in the day.

I have decided to try the Marchand balanced, second-order, passive, high pass filter at 40 Hz, under the premise that any detriment to the signal above 50Hz will be offset by the benefit of not having my main amps/speakers trying to reproduce those lower frequencies.  Marchand claims a S/N ratio "much better than 110 dB", so worth a try. fixed at

For home theater great, too distracting for stereo

I had two JL Audio 110E subs, the JL Audio CR-1 crossover, and a DSpeaker room correction (which I used on the subs).

To answer the question:

1. Easy.

2. Hard.

3. Impossible.

First, it was hard in the sense of trying to find a place to put two more bloody speakers in my room.  And then the hassle of getting AC to the subwoofers.

But the CR-1 crossover is brilliant.  Simple, fairly intuitive, made for folks like me who don't want to make a second career out of integrating subwoofers (I can not BELIEVE how much time some people spend on integrating subwoofers, the endless room measurements, the tweaking...)

So it was actually easy to get an initial good blend of the subs with my main Thiel speakers.   But...being very picky about integration...it was hard to get a completely seamless integration.  If I spent as much time constantly making adjustments like some subwoofers enthusiasts do, I may well have got a more seamless coherent blend (the Dspeaker did help too).

Impossible in the sense that even when the integration sounded very close to seamless, it still changed the tone/timbre of my speakers.  Always.  And I'm super, super picky about that.  The voice or timbre of a speaker is my number one priority, and if that changes, it ain't the speaker I bought.  The subwoofer always altered the tone somewhat, away from what I liked.

It did even out the bass!.   But I actually preferred the punch and coherence of the speakers when the subs were turned off.  The CR-1 crossover makes it super easy to flick a switch between the speakers run full range and then with the subwoofers integrated.

Anyway, sold all the subwoofer stuff and never looked back.