There's a lot more bass in a 6.5" driver than most of you think


One topic of discussion I often see new audiophiles touch on is whether to get larger speakers for more bass.

I usually suggest they tune the room first, then re-evaluate. This is based on listening and measurement in several apartments I’ve lived in. Bigger speakers can be nothing but trouble if the room is not ready.


In particular, I often claim that the right room treatment can make smaller speakers behave much larger. So, to back up my claims I’d like to submit to you my recent blog post here:

https://speakermakersjourney.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-snr-1-room-response-and-roon.html


Look at the bass response from those little drivers! :)


I admit for a lot of listeners these speakers won’t seem as punchy as you might like, but for an apartment dweller who does 50/50 music and theater they are ideal for me. If you’d like punchy, talk to Fritz who aligns his drivers with more oomf in the bass.


erik_squires
I have the Soliloquy 6.3i pair. 6.5 woofer, 6.5 mid, and a 1” silk dome tweeter. I am not sure, but everywhere I look them up it says they are rated down to 25HZ. They are ported in the rear so I keep them 2-3 feet off the rear wall. They sound amazing!
I’ll let you know what my the smaller advents sound like when I get them. Ebay score with 9.5 inch acoustic suspension woofer designed by the great Henry kloss....I hear they were renown for some marvelous bass. Stereophile did a throw back to the smaller advents and were blown away by the bass response of this relatively small speaker, although it measures a bit larger than today’s typical bookshelves being that its 20 inches high etc. It can supposedly get into the 30’s with relative ease....
Of course folks what we’re talking about here is what happens to a speaker in a room, or what Troels Gravesen calls "room gain." That is, the difference in a speaker’s response between the anechoic measurement, which is usually the -3 dB spec cited, and the completely room acoustic dependent response, which is what I measure in the blog post.

You can’t violate the laws of physics, and we aren’t. A speaker in a room sounds entirely different than it does in a measuring lab, and that’s where so many of our troubles come into play as we look for deeper, bigger bass.

The more of us see and know about it, the more audiophiles will get good buying advice, and more of them will be happier.

That’s the goal.
Assuming low distortion, a small driver can either go low or go loud.  Most small woofer systems have relatively high distortion as they go low and cannot achieve high SPLs.  In average sized rooms and for most listeners it's a reasonable compromise.
Post removed