Is This Sub Powerful Enough For This Room?


I will be receiving my Velodyne DD-18 sub next week. I see a lot of people here using 2 subs. The Sub will be for home theater only. The sub has the room-correcting software and all that latest stuff.

I will be running a pair of Infinity Kappa 9 speakers full range for the rears. I will be using a pair of Infinity Kappa 7 speakers laid horizontally for the center channel.

My front speakers will be a set of Infinity IRS Beta.

Powering the front speakers will be two pair of Pass Labs X-600 monoblocs. Powering the rears and center channels will be Carver Silver 9t monoblocs for each speaker.

My processor is a Sunfire Theater Grand II.

The room is 70 ft long and 22 ft wide with a 20 foot ceiling. The speakers will be positioned on the long wall.

The front speakers have a total of eight 12" woofers and the rears have two 12" woofers each.

I have run a home theater setup in the past with the Kappa 9's as the front speakers and the Kappa 7 as the rears and no sub in this same room with good results. However in the past, I'd always feared the for the health of my woofers with the onlslaught of bass that some movies have and I don't want to submit my Betas to that kind of stress.

I'm wondering if the DD-18 has the testicular fortitude to provide enough bass for a room this size.

Click on this link to MyRoom
see my room. Click "slideshow" to view the photos.

thanks......mitch
128x128mitch4t
Why do you have the speakers so close to the wall? I would think they need to be several feet out to really open up.
Narrod.....These photos are so that you can see the room in order for you to comment on the subwoofer siutation.

The speakers that you see in the photos will be used as the rear speakers for my HT setup. My new speakers will arrive this week and I'll be sure to move them out from the walls the correct distances. The racks and components will not be placed as you see them in the photos....a 9' x 12' roll-up screen will be there instead. All components will be placed on low profile amp stands....the top of all components will be no more than 15" off the floor. The the turntable will be several feet to the right of the right front speaker.
Hey Mitch, if any sub has the 'nads for a room like that it would be the DD18, but as you fear you may find that operating with just one nutsack isn't enough and two huevos grandes will work better in that gi-normous room.

Set up the DD18 when you get it and see if it's got enough sperm count for your HT system. If not, it may be time to go with the double hairy beanbag approach.

"The first rule of government spending; why build one when you can build two at twice the price?"
- S.R. Hadden
Your huge room has roughly 10 times the volume of a medium-sized room. If you need something that plays bass louder than the DD18, consider the Servodrive Contrabass (http://www.servodrive.com/contrabass.html) or bass horns like the Labhorn or Bruce Edgar's Titan.
Well, I think you're going to need something pretty big to load that room properly. My first recommendation would be the Wilson Watchdog...maybe two.

Good luck,

Wendell
You defiantly need two for the room volume you have. Bass output fall off 3db for every 6 feet of space away from the speakers.

Secondly you need even bigger front speakers realistically.

Thirdly you need room correction and or acoustic tunning a room this big and as apparently as empty will suffer from slap echo, and have all sorts of nulls and peaks.

Fouthly you should have someone measure your room and help you set up your system correctly, no matter how much you
ve spent on equipment the room is the dediciding factor.

I am a tweenty year industry veteran. What state do you live in? If you are close I will come and see you.
Bigger front speakers are out of the question. I think I have big enough already...the Betas are a 4-chassis system and will take up twice as much real estate in my room as what you see in the current photos.

For two channel listening, the Kappa 9's were not overwhelmed by the size of this room. They more than held their own in that regard. The Betas came available locally and I could not pass them up and now the Kappa 9's will be moved to the rear.

I will be sitting across the room approx 15 feet from the front speakers(they will be five or six feet out from the wall.) The sub can be positioned along the same wall as the front speakers just outside of the right front speaker aprox 3 feet out from the wall.

I live in Los Angeles.
This link is a photo of the Betas of another Audiogon member. The planar columns will be spaced 12 feet apart in my room and the bass columns will be approx two feet behind and approx 1 foot to the side of the planar columns.

So you see, bigger front speakers are out of the question.
You need more than 8 12" speakers for bass?!?!? My goodness. I believe your front speakers can sustain a club easily. To add bass to this may be a humongous task in itself.

But good luck. I have never experienced the bass of a setup in a home environment in my life, so i cant even begin to imagine what is required!

D
Eccbo....my front speakers will have prodigious bass, but I only want that for 2-channel. I don't want to grimace when they have to face the bass onslaught of the cannons in "Master and Commander" or "Gladiator". I'd rather have a speaker that's designed to withstand that kind of bass assault to handle it.

Over time, I believe if I subjected my main speakers to that kind of sustained bass over a period of time, they probably would't last very long. The sub has to do the heavy lifting in my system. The speakers are at least 16 years old.

Here is a better photo of them BetaPhoto
My exclamation was not meant in a bad way mind you, its just that where I live, that many twelves can work for an out door setup/small show no probs. So to see this in a home for me is mind boggling. Also the bass I get from the two (one each) 8" drivers in my ST4s have rocked a room wich can be considered medium sized (maybe 17' x 30' with a high ceiling and opens into the kitchen and dining area hence no real partition), without really breaking a sweat. So I can only imagine what these monsters will do!
Eccbo...imagine no more.

I recieved the Betas yesterday and hooked them up, the bass is way beyond what I could have imagined.

It is otherworldly, period.