Your sub experience: Easy or hard?

I have tested quite a few brands of subs in my 10K cubic foot room.  Some are simply terrible in terms of muddy concocted sound.   The worst one (for my space) was the Paradym monster 15 inch sub with way too much power; although I can say that it is a very sturdy well built piece of gear.   Nothing would tune it to the room, about all it did was rattle the windows; it was not musical at all.  The next worst speakers I used were a group of SVS speakers, again pure mud and phasing them was nearly impossible.  A few others were tested with limited success and then I brought in Bryston/Axiom subs and how refreshing!   Absolutely harmonious easy listening natural bass which blends perfectly with the main speakers.  I currently have 4 subs; the room is filled with fabulous full sound, no muddy issues at all and they are a snap to phase with the fully variable phasing controls.  I set them up initially and rarely touch anything.  I found the most perfect musical bass yet.   I did not concentrate on size, that is all large or all small.  I bought the size which fit the specific area for location in the room.  Two are set up at the 90 and 270 degree positions and another is at the rear 180.   The 270 degree spot is one where I ended up stacking a single 12 sub on top of a dual 12 inch driver sub; the stack is around 6 feet tall and fills the corner perfectly.   Up front are a pair of Bryston Model T signature triple 8 inch woofer main speakers and no sub is needed in the front.   I cross the subs at 150 hz so that I get all of the really nice upper range bass with the very low mids, that was key to the set up.  I have the front mains crossed at around 80 hz so that they handle down to the mid bass and don't do the heavy lifting.   My larger subs will handle very low range bass beautifully.

I am really pleased with the set up; the speakers were all built to order for me in real wood veneers with pleasing satin natural finishes. 

Very interesting discussion.

Not difficult but it is a process and the more of a perfectionist you are the more knowledge and tools you will need.

Depends greatly on the subwoofer (RELs are by far the easiest because of their passive radiator) and the speakers (speakers with lower output are harder to integrate unless you plan to high pass, which I will not do.

Two subs are more difficult, especially if you don't know the proper method, but the results are better.  

I would not integrate a subwoofer without a using some form of measurement tool- e.g. a microphone, RTA software and full bandwidth pink noise tracks.

I’ve run a single sub + 2 desktop main speakers for ~15 years. Until ~5 years ago the mains were powered; then I switched over to a series of passives.

For me, the hard part of subs wasn’t placement--I only had one placement option, and luckily all the subs I’ve tried sounded good in that spot. Specifically, in my nearfield setup (home office), the sub’s effect sound flattest/best in the listening seat equidistant from the speakers. So I lucked out there.

But for me, the hard part was getting a high-pass filtered signal to the mains. Some subs have built-in crossovers that can do this. Sometimes those crossovers are high quality and sound good; other times they’re trash and sound bad (I’ve had both). I solved that issue for once and for all by picking up a transparent, high-quality external electronic crossover ((Marchand XM-66 in which the high- and low-pass filter slopes 24 dB/octave).

The other hard part is matching the sub’s output level to that of speakers. I found two things that help:

• I get better results by far when using sealed/acoustic suspension speakers. They sound better here, and have the benefit of having a real drop-off out output at the resonant frequency. I count on that when setting the crossover
• And it helps to cross over to the sub at the lowest frequency (that is comfortably above the -3 dB drop-off point of the mains).

Would all this apply to a far larger, high-end system in a living room? Yes, but also no, because there the physical placement of the sub (or subs) would consume much time & effort.

@atmasphere - hi atmasphere, I was wondering, which of your two set-ups, with the DBA and the single sub, do you feel sounds better? And, of subs in general, do you believe forward-firing subs produce more accurate lows than downward-firing ones? thanks much!

in friendship - kevin