It’s funny. I had a good sit down with Alon Wolf where I argued that using subwoofers to augment the lowest octaves of bass has advantages over trying to achieve 20Hz and lower bass within one cabinet, not the least of which was room integration and speaker positioning issues. At that time, about 10 years ago now, he was adamant that subwoofers won’t work because they fail on producing an accurate impulse response and he proceeded to sketch me graphs on a napkin to show me why this was so. But now that Magico sells their own subwoofer either Magico has solved that equation or have conceded that the advantages of well-implemented subwoofers outweighs a perfect impulse response. My guess is that Magico customers were asking for subs and Alon is just adding a product to fill this demand, but I’d love to hear his rationalization when he so vehemently argued they couldn’t be implemented accurately. So it goes.
Your experience of moving to two subs
Hi all, I have a 2.1 system with the sub sounding best in the center between the loudspeakers. My speakers have substantial, deep, and detailed bass for their size and with the SS amp I’ve chosen. Thus, the sub’s optimal crossover setting is only at about 28hz. I have plenty of bass amplitude going on -- don’t need "more" bass.
I’m wondering about soundstage effects of having two subs on the outsides of my speakers, though. Having my sub in the center does result in some apparent compression of the low frequencies towards the low-center area. The L and R channels from my preamp are combined at my sub. I know some people may disagree and think that the source of frequencies below 60hz can’t be located by human hearing, but my experience tells me differently.
Does anyone have an opinion on the benefits of 2 subs vs only 1 when there’s no need for more bass oompf?
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@soix I can feel it in my balls that loudspeaker woofer distortion is minimized by passing low frequencies to a subwoofer. That's how I know it's true. Would you like to see the napkin that I've deposited the evidence on? |
@audiokinesis is 100% correct. Take note |
The Rythmik Audio website's FAQ section that I've been re-reading since I bought my F12G sub seems excellent to me. One fine example: ( @soix ) "Cone excursion goes up 4x for every octave lower in frequency. So 40hz needs 4x more excursion than at 80hz. And large cone excursion increases distortion and in particular "intermodulation distortion" (higher frequency (small excursion) signal is modulated by low frequency (large excursion)). The correct way to address this is put a high pass filter (HPF) on front speakers in order to reduce the cone excursion. This issue is particularly bad for ported front speakers as you may notice with full range signal, woofer in ported speakers have far more excursion than that in sealed front speakers. With the cone excursion reduced, the distortion from the front speakers is also reduced and the sound becomes more dynamic and coherent." |
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