Searching for matching(?) Subwoofer solution

Mijostyn, just totally dead wrong yet again:

Come on clio you can be more honest than that! Cable risers are for people who want to show off their silly $10,000 speaker wires. Anything they do to the sound is purely psychological.

Chris Brady, of Teres Audio, was over one night. At one point while a song was playing I walked across the room removing the Cable Elevators one by one until the speaker cables were laying on the floor. Then while the same track was still playing, put them all back.

Soon as the track was over Chris said he heard the sound stage collapse and come back as the Elevators were removed and replaced.

This being some time before mijostyn came along I didn't know to tell Chris it was all in his head.

Because I know so well how speaker cables, interconnects and power cords benefit from being up off the floor I was really skeptical when Duke told me not only that it doesn't matter with subs, but to save your money on cables because ordinary wire works just fine too. Sure enough, right again.

Up until some time nearly a year ago I had never heard of using more than one or two subs. All my personal experience was based on one sub, plus maybe once or twice hearing two somewhere. Based on all that it seemed getting really good smooth articulate bass, by which I mean bass every bit as good as the midrange and treble, was for whatever reason impossible.

I still think this is the case. My current understanding is the reason this is impossible is, briefly, what Duke stated above. Its a natural physical consequence of the physical character of house-sized rooms. 

The DBA idea seemed at first unlikely to work. But a lot of the threads I came across were like this one, where if you could somehow wade through the BS and sniping there were mentioned real research articles and work by guys like Geddes, which anyone interested can scroll up and see yes indeed once again he's mentioned. The question is will you dear reader take time out of your busy day opining and parroting and go and look it up and read it and actually try and understand what its all about.

Which I did. Which whatever it is, it sure ain't religion. 

Duke at one point when I said I was going to do this he thanked me for having faith. My reply was I had read enough and understood enough to know for certain and without doubt its going to work. This really is no different than someone teaches you math. You can then determine how many oranges each of 6 people can get if you have 24 oranges. Its not faith and it sure ain't religion. Its physics.

And psycho-acoustics. Humans do not perceive sounds anything like the meters so many wanna-be audiophiles put so much faith in. Which yes that is exactly the correct use of the term. Or maybe like Stevie Wonder said its superstition- when you believe in things you don't understand.

We don't perceive volume equally flat, go look up Fletcher-Munson curve. We don't perceive location equally with frequency either. We are really good at localizing midrange and treble. We can hear even just a millisecond snippet. At low bass frequencies we can't even hear them AT ALL until and unless its a full wavelength. At 20 Hz that means 1/20th of a second. 

The full range of sounds we are trying to create is so different in physics and perception it simply cannot be faithfully recreated with just the one approach. No two speakers can do it. No two speakers with any sub however good can do it. Two good speakers with four or more subs? No problem!

I've been using mine for a good six months now. One of the most amazing things I am still getting used to is the way really low powerful bass can present so many different ways. Sometimes its the low acoustic of the recording venue. In that case its so diffuse as to be completely unlocalizable. It is enveloping. It is what people mean when they talk about good bass expanding the sound stage to completely envelope you. Other times it is so precisely localized within the sound stage its every bit as palpably solidly there as the singer or drum or whatever. 

Never, ever, does it sound like the bass is coming from any of the five subs in my room. Often times early on I would walk right up to one and not believe it was even working until I put my finger on the driver.

There's a lot going on here that is very new and very different. Its a lot to get your head around. People interested will be well served to avoid the silly comments from people who haven't tried it and therefore haven't a clue, and instead read those who have and those who did the very impressive pioneering research that made this most revolutionary discovery in audio in many years.

The need to match subs all stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how bass works in a room and what you need to do to get good bass. Almost everyone is held back by the old school thinking where the sub needs to be as "fast" or at least sound the same as the mains. Timing and matching and power and anything along those lines is unfounded and misleading. From the way we perceive low frequencies to the physics of low frequencies in a room all the evidence indicates the one sub solution can only fail. No matter how much money you throw at it, how big/powerful the sub, how great the EQ, it just never really works. It can't. The physics is all wrong.

What does work however is instead of trying to find the magic sub you drop that whole failed paradigm and go to what actually does work, using four or more subs in a Swarm or Distributed Bass Array type system.

With one sub, no matter where you put it or how good it is or how great the equalization it simply cannot overcome the physical reality of nodes where the response is cancelled to almost nothing or reinforced to way too loud. Equalizing can make it better at one location, but only at the cost of making it worse everywhere else.

With multiple subs however now each sub is creating the same problems with modes, but because they are in different locations each one will have peaks and troughs at different frequencies. With four spaced around the room these will all together average out into a very flat and even response. Much more flat and even than you can get with any one single sub, no matter how big and powerful and expensive and equalized.

Also because there are four they don't need to be nearly as big and powerful. Four 10" subs with 200 watts is plenty.

Both the ones I built and the ones Tim (noble100) uses are about $3k yet produce truly state of the art bass- deep, fast, articulate, and powerful. This approach works so well it works with any and all speakers, making the question of "matching" irrelvant. Only thing to "match" is the level. Search out the many threads. DBA. Totally the way to go.