are subwoofers anti-audiophile?

Nandric writes:
>The designer Joachim Gerhard (Virgo,Caldera,Medea) keep away from 'enything' below 40Hz in the mentioned loudspeakers. But for those that parsist on organ music he produced some subs...

It's about trade-offs.

At the same efficiency, a speaker which extends to 20Hz instead of 40Hz must be 8X as big.

At the same size, a speaker which extends to 20Hz instead of 40Hz must be 9dB less efficient. Assuming a 100W amp provided enough head-room with the 40Hz speaker, you'd need 800W in a perfect world without thermal compression.

Given the dearth of musical content at 40Hz, it doesn't make much sense to go for the extension unless you're using an electronically assisted alignment such as a Linkwitz Transform (the Ultimate Monitor BOMB would be one commercial example). With such a configuration you can have good sensitivity from a small enclosure where there's musical power, and just pay the price in the last octave where peaks are 10-20dB down from the rest of the spectrum meaning you can apply substantial equalization before running out of headroom.

Hey John,

My problem is that depending on mood and music I tend to vacillate between favoring weight or abhorring bloat, heheh.

Dean

Drew,

There are now class D amps. Let's say 2 or 3 subs times 1kw per sub amp. You never run out of headroom.

Marty

Kij,
Bosendorfer Imperial Grand goes an octave lower than the standard '88'.
I have an early CD by Telarc, CD-80040 which shows the instrument off to best advantage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bösendorfer

Low pedal tone on a pipe organ goes to about 16hz.

But, you are correct in that unless you are a pipe organ fan the very low extensions don't do much or any good. Indeed, I had a preamp which featured a 'rumble' filter and my old NAD had a 20hz lowcut on the backpanel for the same reason.

Magfan - thank you for the link. I didn't realize that ocatve down requires 97 keys.