Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused

I fully agree with @mijostyn.

I used to work for a church doing sound that had the biggest electronic organ in the world. There were 4x 30 inch subs in separate cabinets on both the left and right sides of the main sanctuary the cabinets were not facing the same direction. The organ sounded wonderful and could keep up with the biggest real organs in the world. The speakers for the organ were not set up like a concert but looked like someone had randomly designed them, definitely more of an art than science.

My room is wonderful because it's fairly large and is not square or rectangle and doesn't have any flat parallel walls it has a 10 foot ceiling. Just last night I moved my expensive Lyngdorf 60-2 processor to my Dolby Atmos mixing system simply for it's acoustic room fixing system "Room Perfect", until now I didn't have to use any acoustic processing it simply didn't help even with powdered subs built into my main speakers and 6k watt separate subs next to the speakers. I nearly bought very expensive speakers but realized I only need very good high and mid frequencies and the low frequencies if done right will make everything smooth out. Low frequency is an art, ears are the most part of tuning the system, play a 60hz or 80hz tone and roll the phasing where it's most pleasing musically. Don't forget any latency if you have any digital devices you have latency no way around it.

My Atmos system speakers distances are not spec, newer thinking in acoustics is tending toward non symmetrical speaker placement I fully agree. Ultimately a mixing room needs above all to be standard but this room is personal and I want to experiment, a lot. In the future even 2 channel speakers will be object based and won't need to be symmetrically based. 

Also, about diminishing returns when it comes to low frequency. The best system I ever heard was at Harmon headquarters in LA when I was doing playback for a music video and the location person who was an employee of Harmon showed me there big concert system inside the room we were doing the music video in, it took a few minuets to set up but wow I didn’t expect huge speakers could sound so good. There was so much physical movement of low frequency sound that it stunned me. It wasn’t amplitude volume it felt like thunder that even at low amplitude you can feel how huge it was. Bigger is better, this Harmon (JBL etc. ) was a demo to show big concert companies how good sound can be if you want to pay for it and it was amazing. Of course all powered speakers.

@donavabdear , how do you roll phasing with subs? 

@phusis

Very few audiophiles have been "exposed" to the sound of horn-loaded subs (or their variants), not least for the reasons you outline as a MFR, which is a shame, because they deliver a very smooth, enveloping and effortless bass reproduction when carefully implemented - certainly audiophile qualities in bass reproduction to aspire to. Their ability to produce truly prodigious SPL’s is part of their perceived prowess here (and so not only about loudness per se), because significant headroom equates into cleaner/less distorted and more relaxed bass.

I too am running bass horns - front loaded folded bass horns loaded in the corners of the room, with four 18" drivers on each side. My friend designed and built these with me as his shop assistant and employer. There really is something to the effortlessness of that bass. My non audiophile friends have commented on the bass and that alone. They weren’t impressed with the horn mid and high frequency reproduction, and I think for good reason. Even the best direct radiator bass has a sound of grippy force and power, like something is working hard. One reviewer called it "Iron fisted" bass. I know what that is and it’s impressive in it’s own right. Horn loaded bass doesn’t require nearly as much power to produce plenty of volume and it comes across somehow as sublime. At a quite loud 30Hz those drivers are barely moving.

I heard a lot of good stuff at the Pacific Audiofest this year but I didn’t hear any great bass. Some of it was fairly good though.

At the present moment I’m in the process of moving in to a new place and it will be a while before I can get the bass horns back in action. for now I’m listening with 2 10" conventional subwoofers. They’re way better than not having them and it’s enjoyable - but nowhere near the same. Obviously it would be closer if I had 8 of them in the room stacked in the corners instead of just 2 and they were all 18" instead of 10", so yeah, not a fair comparison. But I think the point is cone excursion matters. The bass horns only had 160 watts total power distributed between the 8 drivers. More than enough - most of that was used to push them a bit lower than they want to go because of limited back chamber volume.