AudioKinesis Swarm or JL Audio F112 Pair?

I have a Swarm and used to have a Fathom (but not a pair).

My main speakers are Magneplanar 1.6qr's which roll off between 30-40Hz in my room. The Fathom gave me all the deep bass I wanted, but I always had a major problem with discontinuity between the planar drivers and the dynamic drivers of the Fathom.

I read about people using the Swarm successfully with Maggies so I talked to Duke LeJune at Audiokinesis and bought a Swarm. His advice on setup was to "scatter" the Swarm speakers around the room. Better still, get them on different levels (e.g. some higher in the room than others).

I found the actual Swarm locations to be fairly non-critical. I did have a strong bass node at one listening position that totally went away with some small repositioning of some of the drivers. More importantly, I've gotten much more coherent music as a result of the change.

I've been running them for about 5 years now and have no plans to change. Very worthwhile, at least for me in my system.

YMMV

I've never used a Swarm, but I have tried to "knock off" the idea with a pair of Rythmik subs and the pair of smaller Velodynes that I used prior to upgrading to the Rythmiks.

The four sub set-up reduced some "bloat" in the octave above 70ish hz (by about 5 db) that I couldn't shake when using the Rythmiks alone. Other than that, there wasn't a lot of difference in response, either by my ear or by my RTA. I then EQ'd both the dual subs and the quad subs with Audyssey and found the sound from the two set-ups was pretty much indistinguishable. Although the RTA readouts weren't identical, they were pretty close. They were also better than the non-EQ'd four sub set-up and, in either case, I preferred the EQ'd set-up

In the end, I settled on dual subs with Audyssey and now use the Velo subs in other applications. Note - this isn't a comment on the Swarm (which I've never heard), merely my experience with dual subs vs quad subs and EQ'd subs vs non-EQ'd subs.