does a subwoofer kill stereo sound?


I was wondering whether adding a subwoofer to a pure stereo system would cause any harm to the soundstage and other features of the system. What are your experiences? Should one buy a subwoofer to complement a great bookshelf pair (that may be lacking some bass) or necessarily one would have to buy a new par of speakers with deeper bass?
tvfreak

Showing 1 response by 6550c

I can never get why people buy very expensive top shelf amps and then let the bass be done by amps built into the subwoofer cabinet. Is that really the best way to do things? Or do most people have a really good amp to run the subs too? How about using a seperate amp and preamp to run a subwoofer system?

As a side note, I have caught a dealer demoing SET amps but had a powered subwoofer playing hidden behind some other speakers. I am getting very good at detecting bass that should not really be there. I can tell if a subwoofer is in the system and it usually annoys me too much. imo, a sub is not really needed if you have great full range speakers AND the room to support low HZ. but they may be fun to play with and that is okay at time too.