Am I done yet? LOL


Things are sounding pretty good at the moment. The Dynaudio Contour 30i speakers are the latest addition and are working better in this room than the Maggie 3.7i speakers were. 

Usually, when I ask the wife to come listen, she'll sit for a song, maybe 2, then make a "that's nice" type a comment and leave. With the Dynaudio speakers, she stayed, and played song after song. She listened for over and hour and said she really really liked these speakers. Great to know the wife was pleased.  laugh

But the audiophile in me feels like there is more to be had. The amp & pre-amp are on my radar as the possible candidates for improvement. Any opinions on where to head next? (There's always a "next" isn't there?)

traudio

OP, if bass is what you're wanting, subwoofers are the best way to achieve this no doubt.  I wouldn't go with a smaller sub.  Typically it's nice to match subwoofers so that their response is the same (even though room nodes will destroy this, it's nice to have baseline)

I have two subs in both my systems and it's a massive improvement over having one.  It evens out the frequency response.

Have you done any EQing/DSP for this system?  Often times bass response issues are because of room nodes which can be corrected by dialing in the peaks in the response.  It really is not difficult to run pink noise through an analyzer program like Room EQ and determine an appropriate EQ curve for your particular response (especially in the region below 200 hz!!)

Do NOT go down an equipment rabbit hole if you just need better bass.  The problem is that the ideal positioning for mids and treble is almost never the ideal position for bass.  If you can crossover less sub frequencies to your Dynaudios, you will also possibly hear an improvement from those as well because the sub frequencies aren't being handled by your amp, or the speaker woofers, or the internal crossovers.  I've noticed that clarity improves on my system when I engage my subs even though technically the DSP adds some distortion, that distortion is more than made up for the fact that the tower cabinets aren't vibrating from sub bass and the components aren't having to handle the toughest material (sub 80 hz)

Best of luck!  My vote is, go grab another SB 5000, and dial in that bass response to your satisfaction by using REQ and a room mic like a umik-1

Just saw that your SB-5000 has DSP built in - so you don't even have to engage DSP in your other hardware in order to accomplish what I was talking about regarding the response.  If you want to stay with one sub, make sure it's in the ideal location but I think 2 or 3 is so much better for an even bass response!

@jrareform Allegely, SVS is coming out with a room corrections addition to the app. I saw a subwoofer software update this morning, so maybe they are getting close? I questioned them at AXPONA this year and was told it's in the works, but they didn't want to promise a date yet.