Subwoofer: should we even use them at all?

My mains in my main rig are rated -3db 55Hz, while my office monitors to 44Hz. In either case, I can listen to a lot of music and be mostly satisfied without a sub for acoustic, vocals, jazz, blues, etc., even some rock. But there are times I do not want to be MOSTLY satisfied. And for those times, and when I wish to crank it, I employ a pair of 12" powered subs in my main rig.

The deep, visceral, gut-wrenching, grunt of those subs can fill in the missing parts, transporting me to musical Nirvana and change my MOSTLY satisfied experience to COMPLETELY satisfied. I'll never live without a sub (and preferrably at least two) regardless of how wonderful my mains are.

Rockadanny,

Totally agree!!!

Elegal,

Ideal placement of a subwoofer is most often far from ideal placement of mid/tweeters. If you put a sub in the same cabinet as the other drivers, you'll end up with (pardon the pun) suboptimal placement of one or the other.

I love the pun! And thank you for a great answer. Perhaps they could design systems with a separate sub with suggestions on placement?

Elegal,

Those do exist. Duke at Audiokinesis makes a really interesting speaker system with your choice of two different subwoofer arrays, one sealed the other ported. There are four subs with four channels of amplification in either array. I think it's worth visiting his web site to check out.

There are also traditional 2.1 systems out there, tho not as many as there once were.