What are your opinions on subwoofers?
Hard to integrate well. Glorious when done right.
What did you learn and how did you learn it?
That’s a really good question. I started off with an M&K satellite/subwoofer system. Bought into the hype, used a passive 2nd order crossover (yeah, enormous toroids) and a couple of different RTAs to attempt to get the two to play well. Honestly they never did. The best I was able to do was use a little room math to damp the peaks.
The rest of my answer is a little long, but the short version: I integrate subs as if I’m building a speaker.
Here’s the long answer:
The V1B subwoofer eventually fell apart and I parted it out on Ebay, sold the S-1Bs.
Years later I was in San Francisco and got into upgrading speakers, and that led, very rapidly to learning speaker analysis and making my own. Now mind you, I have some professional background in analog and I was lucky enough to audit classes at Georgia Tech when I was too young for the math. Point is, I didn’t just jump into speaker design from zero.
One thing that changed a lot in my favor was the availability of cheap test and simulation tools. DATS, OminiMic and XSim made everything I wanted to do a lot easier, but none of them were useful without having a background already. The other thing that was new was miniDSP having a number of affordable and very high feature active crossovers.
Even with this background I made a couple of choices that really made everything a lot easier:
- Stick to 2-way designs
- Measure the bass response in place.
- Use OmniMic instead of REW, just because for my needs OmniMic held my hand a lot more.
Had I not done that, I would have made plenty of mistakes in analyzing the mid-bass response, or gotten overwhelmed with the quasi-anechoic requirements of a 3-way (this is short-hand, please don’t jump on this sentence).
Anyway, after this I returned to wanting a sub. Based on reviews including those at:
data-bass.com
I went with a Hsu. They were out of the model I wanted, but for a couple of hundred I could get the next larger unit. What arrived was the size of a small refrigerator, and me in a small apartment!! Hahahaha.
Anyway, I tried a number of ways to integrate the sub, bought a pair of GIK Acoustic soffit traps, and the miniDSP HD balanced. What finally worked for me was this:
Treat the sub exactly as if I was adding a 3rd driver to my speakers.
Which meant measuring the acoustic distance, putting in the response of the satellites and subwoofer into XSim, phase/time matching them and then using OmniMic to simulate EQ’s.
Pant flapping glorious.
