Bass rant

The problem is subwoofers are a total design compromise need to be small for waf and cost, thus need large excurtion and massive power this greatly reduces transent responce and bass details. Needs boundery reinforcment to generate bass, again bass qualitys effected since best spot for subwoofer to generate low freqincy might not be the best sounding spot or best integration. Andmany loudspeakers today are using such weak motor transducers no wonder bass is droning booming dull delayed etc. With bass go big, large drivers, low excursions, hi-eff. Thus massive. If you cheat physics you get a conventional subwoofer and thus subwoofer sound to bass.

I use 18in aura sound in big sub its good. Or 31.5in in our KCS subbass system. Or I use 4-15in per horn 8 total for hi-eff mid bass or 4-18in in dual giant bass horns. Nothing I heard is close to the bass quality provided by the massive 31.5in fostex or multiple bass horns. No free lunch. To me many audio complants are from folks expecting too much from wee little kit. They do all they can system wise but when it comes down to it in loudspeakers size maters. And shopping for loudspeakers based on low end responce is missing the point. You want a good sounding loudspeaker deep subsonic bass has effect on over all performance but its not that large compared to other aspects of loudspeaker design. And very costly to do right. Many times my monster bass systems reviel subway noise truck or bus motors as well as pressure produced by venue and instruments. When using such for TV viewing they seem to never filter true subsonics on TV, CNC always sounds like a UPS truck pulling into my driveway. Even my dogs bark thinking such. But on pipe organ, live music,pop rock etc the impact and pressure will raise the hairs on your body. I feel some of the excitment of hearing live music is the pressure of venue as much as the musical notes.

Liz, I have done somework in theaters. Some older ones replaced nice altec or jbl systems for modern. The bass horns where removed now you have standard sytle pro subwoofers in most. These are run so hard most are in a constant state of damage. So your mostly listening to 1/2 blown woofers in many theaters. A few I know of have time frames for bass driver replacement in the 2 month range. Look for a THX or other claiming higher quality you will find better loudspeaker systems in these. Funny the old bass horns I pulled from theaters have drivers near 20-30-40 years old work fine the new stuff well...you find cooked voice coils or cones shreaded. After months.

I would have to disagree about woofer quality. Just for prosound most cheap out. Using the cheap drivers cost less when replaced, the standard bass cubes are cheaper than horns. Back in the day theaters used some of the better transducers available, today they mostly buy cheap. Still my favorite woofers are all new or modern designs. But not cheap for such. You need to use more power in non horns drivers can take a beating since so pushed and of cheap build. Thus the dammage.