Pairing Planar Speakers With A Subwoofer (Eminent Technology)

I don't know much about the Eminent speakers but they have always intrigued me. I currently have two sets of ESLs. Quad ESL 57s and Music Reference ESLs. I shied away from subwoofers because I thought they made things a bit too complex and I never could get used to the idea of bass being driven by plate amps. So I listened to my ESL 57s with my OTLs and enjoyed what bass they could muster, which quite frankly was more than I expected. Then Roger Modjeski introduced me to his Airspring woofer system that he uses with his ESLs, which by design only go down to 100 Hz, so they require something to provide the bottom end. He fixed up a Class A/B solid state amp with a low pass filter for me and I made two of the woofer boxes myself. Once I put that in my system there was no going back.

Today I use a Beveridge RM-3 as the crossover with 100 Hz boards, my OTLs on top driving the ESL 57s or the MR ESLs, and a Luxman M-02 driving not 2 but 4 woofer boxes spread asymmetrically around the room. This has done more to improve the sound in my room more than anything else I have ever tried. So for me biamping was the ticket and I imagine you can attain the same effect with good subwoofers. In fact I'd recommend checking out the Audiokinesis Swarm which is a nice little system that would play well with the LF8s.

What happened to the DD-18 on your list? 

If you still have it I'd slave it from a 10" or 12" DD Plus for a sort of modular 1812. I had one brief experience a few years ago setting up a pair of DD-10 Plus with a receiver equipped with Audyssey (I don't recall which level or the setup details). In that room the Velodyne Manual Room Optimization procedure did a noticeably better job of the basic integration than Audyssey not to mention the two custom movie presets.

I'm sure there have been Audyssey upgrades since then. I found it to be so useful with the rest of the system in this particular room I wouldn't dare dismiss its capabilities.    

  

m-db...my DD-18 is for home theater only.

I want an identical stereo pair of subs for music only.

I tried my two 12" Plus using separate left and right signals and located near the speakers which seemed OK but left many room nodes. Summing the signal at the same speaker location increased solidity or possibly just loaded the room better but the nodes were still present.

Finally positioning the subs in two irregular locations using a summed signal really locked the room and eliminated all but a few extreme corner nodes.Then again every room is different when it comes to the low end.

The Plus can be simultaneously connected to both a stereo and HT systems. 

 Good luck with it.

I have dual Rythmik F12G with Magnepan 3.7i's. I think subs, in general are hard to integrate. Make sure you level match each side.