I recently purchased a sub to augment the bottom end of my Spatial M3 open baffle speakers. Due to domestic constraints, one sub is all I will have in the living room.
The sub is front firing, and placed about 18” from the rear of the Spatial. If you follow me here, I was concerned about the back wave (open baffle) cancelling out the sub’s forward wave. I made all my adjustments- xover freq, volume, Q, listening mode (Eq).
Things sounded very good- then I flipped the phase to 180 degrees.
This caused things to snap further into focus- I imagine the back wave of the OB speaker was interacting with the sub at some frequency, causing cancellation perhaps?
I mention this because it may very well be that some sub/ speaker interactions will not be affected by the switching of phase- sealed box speakers maybe, front ported, etc., on and on. Maybe rear ports with subs behind the speaker are affected differently.
This could explain why some people hear no difference when flipping phase- I have a separate home theater system, and for the life of me I never heard a difference when doing so. In this 2.1 channel system, it is readily apparent to me.
As I write, I also realize that the 2.1 system uses a sealed sub- the HT subs were ported. Maybe porting changes things too. Just more to consider...
The sub is front firing, and placed about 18” from the rear of the Spatial. If you follow me here, I was concerned about the back wave (open baffle) cancelling out the sub’s forward wave. I made all my adjustments- xover freq, volume, Q, listening mode (Eq).
Things sounded very good- then I flipped the phase to 180 degrees.
This caused things to snap further into focus- I imagine the back wave of the OB speaker was interacting with the sub at some frequency, causing cancellation perhaps?
I mention this because it may very well be that some sub/ speaker interactions will not be affected by the switching of phase- sealed box speakers maybe, front ported, etc., on and on. Maybe rear ports with subs behind the speaker are affected differently.
This could explain why some people hear no difference when flipping phase- I have a separate home theater system, and for the life of me I never heard a difference when doing so. In this 2.1 channel system, it is readily apparent to me.
As I write, I also realize that the 2.1 system uses a sealed sub- the HT subs were ported. Maybe porting changes things too. Just more to consider...