Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused

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.

@mijostyn wrote:

@phusis , The problem most of us face with subwoofers with normally sized rooms in a residential setting is SIZE. Horn loaded subwoofers would have to be huge to work correctly. Same thing goes for the enclosures required to house a 21" subwoofer. It is much easier and more cosmetically acceptable for most people, myself included, to use multiple smaller drivers is sealed enclosures.

The issue usually is not whether large subs can physically fit into and function properly in residential spaces, but whether one chooses and wills their inclusion. You mention what’s "cosmetically acceptable" to most, and that’s absolutely correct; most don’t want such behemoths in their listening room, let alone shared living ditto. Speaking for myself though with a dedicated space I don’t care about convenience (setting them up) or what’s aesthetically pleasing or not, but just plain and simple functionality - unapologetically. Btw., 1/4 wave horn sub iterations have their size pretty much laid out dictated by the parameters sought, and properly designed as such work wonderfully.

It’s about what works, what is required and the benchmark one sets out to work from. To me what’s no larger than ~20cf. per cab is acceptable and physically doable, and ultimately it pays off with regard to headroom and ease of reproduction.

With modern drivers you can get a 12" driver into a 1.5 cubic foot sealed enclosure and with enough power and digital signal processing you can get it to do just about anything within the limits of your amplifier to work perfectly. I use 8 of them which equals 4 15" drivers or two 18" drivers.

Many ways to skin your cat, sure. Multiple 12"-fitted sealed subs like in your case can be a very effective solution, but I think we can agree on that 4 such subs and the weight class they represent would be more than what many audiophiles dare to embark on. It goes to show that if sufficient pressurization, extension and some measure of headroom is the goal there’s no way around physics and (at least an proximation to) ample displacement.

Where I differ is the want for more efficiency and less excursion (for a given SPL), and that requires even more size, so much so - even with way larger cabs - that it comes at the cost of ultimate extension, unless one sets out to work with ginormous horn subs. What’s the summed volume of your 4 sub cabs, ~15cf.? My two TH subs come in at 40cf. (tuned to just below 25Hz), and yet your solution has the lower knee - at the cost of efficiency, the need for more power and added excursion, of course.

Just as an example what high eff. means power-wise: the blue signal LED’s on my MC² Audio amps (1 for TH subs and 1 for EV bass bin) only flash up when reaching 10W, and even at ref. volume watching movies they remain off. I have to seriously crank it for the LED’s to come to life, and there’s +600W disposable to the subs alone..

In a 16 foot wide room I have no trouble getting flat down to 18Hz where they are rolled of steeply by a digital high pass filter at 84 dB/oct so as not to waste power and piss of the turntable. They are actually boosted 6 dB or so at 20 Hz to simulate the visceral sensation you get at a live concert at more reasonable levels. They are also in perfect phase and time with the main speakers. This is critical if you cross over at 100 Hz like I do and don’t want to know you are listening to subwoofers.

Implementation is key - never doubted you have that well covered, as is obviously the case. I cross just below 85Hz to the subs, and the whole speaker setup incl. subs is treated like a 3-way system, and not just with the subs added on as a secondary implementation/thought without high-passing the mains and other. The subs are high-passed @20Hz - theoretically to protect the drivers, but practically to lower distortion and keep them from working in a frequency range where the design wouldn’t do any good anyway - and filter steepness throughout is 36dB/octave.

@asctim --

Thanks for your post.

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.

That’s a seriously capable bass horn setup - kudos. What’s the tune?

Even the best direct radiator bass has a sound of grippy force and power, like something is working hard.

Exactly, I find this to be the case in the sub range in particular, where cone movement can be prodigious. I do run dual 15" high eff. direct radiating mid-woofers per channel covering ~85 to 600Hz, which feels like they’re converted to rockets being rid of most everything below their high-pass point; the cones here move zilch even at close to war volume. However, horn-loading the bass/lower mids in this area with a horn big enough can make wonders.

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.

+1

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.

Hope you’ll be up and running with your 18" octet-loaded bass horns in the foreseeable future. I must be a challenge living with less once used to such an all-out horn bass setup!

But I think the point is cone excursion matters.

+1