35Hz - 25kHz -- A Partial 'Purist'?

Just a note here....
I found a good balance simply by backing the sub out of the mix a bit.
Big, old amp with level controls and a aged Canton sub...when turned down..added a nice foundation to the system, without taking over.
The less you push to it, the less it clouds things up.
When you have a 12X14 room, you have to get your base somehow...the Tabs certainly dont go low enough on thier own.
Good info in this thread!!! :)

>> ...but I guarantee you'll hear frequencies much lower than your simple formula suggests. <<

No, what you are "hearing" is 1/4 and 1/2 wavelengths reflected back upon themselves giving you peaks and valleys as you move thru the room. I didn't make up the laws of physics, I simply (must) abide by them. It is physically impossible for your room to support a full wavelength of very low frequency - some fraction of it will bounce off the back wall and then reflect back onto itself, causing amplitude doubling at some location and complete cancellation at another.

If you want true low freq. reproduction, ya gotta have a big room or hall - them's the facts.

You're right that there are peaks and valleys in the bass response due to the standing wave pattern in the room, and that this means sub placement is critical relative to the walls and listening position in most rooms.

Within the peaks and valleys you are still hearing true low frequency notes ... just the standing wave pattern makes the relative volume of the sub and the main speakers vary thoughout the room. Hence the placement issue.
This aside you can have very satisfying, if not perfect, low frequency reproduction in a small room, and for me this substantially increases my enjoyment of the music. What you are presenting are facts, but they're not the full facts, and to imply that they are is misleading.
Have you ever heard a good sub setup ?

If you'd like more information about the physics of sound and music check out this website:

http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/Class/sound/soundtoc.html

There seems to be some misunderstanding about low bass in small rooms, so in an effort to clear this up....

Any enclosed (airtight) space gives a 6dB/octave BOOST as you go down in frequency, beginning roughly where the wavelength of the sound wave is equal to the longest room dimension. For a typical room length of 20 ft, this means that the room is actually adding 6 dB/octave starting around the 50-60 Hz range. This means that a sealed loudspeaker, which would normally roll off at 12 dB/octave in free space, will actually roll off at only 6 dB/octave in the room. Deep bass is actually much easier to achieve in small rooms; the trick is to prevent the speaker or sub from overpowering the midbass region, typically around 60 Hz. This again is a real advantage of the monitor/sub combination, since the main speakers start to roll off in this range and the REL can be brought in lower, around 40 Hz in this example, thus giving a flat in-room response. In contrast, a full-range loudspeaker will often exhibit a midbass peak in this same 50-60 Hz region, which is often very difficult to eliminate, even with careful placement.

This is also why it is so important to "match" loudspeaker size to room size so you don't end up with a hump or suckout. Let's say you put a large full-range speaker that is flat to 30 Hz in a room that begins boosting at 60 Hz; you will end up with a 6dB RISE from 60 to 30 Hz and it will sound "thuddy". Same with a monitor that rolls off at 60 Hz in a room that doesn't boost until 30 Hz; anything below 60 Hz will be MIA and the sound will be incredibly "thin". This is especially true of vented monitors which will roll off at 24 dB/octave through this region. Again, the sub/sat combo allows you to tune virtually any combination of sub and sat to the particular room it is placed in, by virtue of the ability to tune the response through this critical region.