Boomy bass in home theater room


I have a Martin Logan/Adcom home theater system in a 14' square room (concrete floor (no basement) with typical wood stud/drywall construction). I'm using a single, Infinity 12", 300 watt (RMS) subwoofer. The room is treated with 24, 2'x2' (3" thick) acoustic foam in various wall locations. The bass is boomy, especially in the mid-bass region. I can't change the room. When you get done laughing, care to offer some realistic suggesstions?
ivory1

Showing 1 response by drew_eckhardt

Dipole bass helps tremendously - perception seems to be driven by more than just steady state response. Unfortunately, most of the Martin Logans cross to monopole bass drivers by the time they reach 200-300Hz. You can do that down through the second octave using a speaker like the Linkwitz Orion or Audio Artistry Dvorak/Beethoven. You could also build dipole bass units for your martin-logans.

You'll need a box sub-woofer to reach home theater output levels in the last octave; parametric EQ (the Behringer Feedback Destroyer pro is cheap and fine in that frequency range) helps some there.

If you stick with the box bass, you'll need to use a steep cross-over slope to the sub or equalize everything - with an 80Hz 2nd order high-pass behavior my box main speaker bass hadn't rolled off enough for me to get more than 1dB of difference on big 40-80Hz bass peaks just equalizing the sub.