2. speakers
  3. 173285-168789

HELP - Subwoofer placement

Hello everyone.

I have recently decided to experiment with a subwoofer for my system (mainly audio, little HT) and dug out my old Definitive Technology SUB1000 from my now retired HT system. My room has a quite inconvenient L-shape with ver few options for speaker placement. I have used my kid’s drawing program to describe it as best as I could below where my two ELAC Navis ARB-51 active bookshelf speakers are the red squares (too far apart but little I can do about it, also for wife-acceptance reasons). The sub is currently in the purple square and I sit in the black L on my corner sofa. Grey squares are other potential placement options. The big brown rectangle is a massive brick fireplace. I forgot to draw a large cabinet sitting directly left of the sub in the guest dining area of my room (ie no man’s land).

Considering the improved SQ despite (i) potentially poor current placement/tuning and (ii) decidedly poor sub quality (much more of a big HT boomer), I have now just bought a used REL T7 (1st gen) which I will be getting next week.

Questions I have are:

1. If using one sub only, where would you put it?

2. If using two subs, would you use the two grey positions or right grey and purple? I read that opposing “corners” can be helpful to get rid of nodes

3. Do you see a lot of value in adding a second decent sub (thinking REL T5 to sit in the right, closed off area with the T7 to power through the more open space on the left)? IMO keeping the DefTech sub will only negatively affect the SQ of the T7.

My art

Many thanks already for your views. Jokes about my drawing abilities of course welcome! 🤣

laimac

Showing 2 responses by erik_squires

erik_squires
16,591 posts
 

I am a little puzzled by your opinion on second sub. Yes, it probably would require room correction by eg MiniDSP (between pre and subs), but presumably having two subs in “opposing” corners should help in smoothing out the general room response.

 

You don’t have opposing corners, really, you have complex modes that include all of the open space.

 

Or are you just concerned that room shape + mains + 2 subs would be too complex? It seems these days a bit of REW + Dirac shouldn’t be too hard to manage, but I am inexperienced.

I think if you do 1 sub right you’ll be exhausted and happy. Take a look here though if you want to see what’s involved in optimizing multiple subs:

https://www.minidsp.com/applications/subwoofer-tuning/tuning-multiple-subs

 

While I really like the app note I tune my subs to peak between 20Hz-30Hz and descend about 1.25 to 1.5 db/Octave until the crossover point. I find this much more musical than flat. JL Audio and Dirac seem to agree with me.

Last bit of advice:  1 sub, well integrated, is glorious.  Most people get 1 sub and cant' do it well so go looking for more ways to fix their problems. I assure you, if you get 1 sub working well, EQ your two mains to match each other, you'll be in a really good place.

 

Best,

 

Erik

erik_squires
16,591 posts
 

Hey there,

Wold you consider wall or ceiling mounting in front of the fireplace?

Next to the couch IS the best place for the sub.  I don't think adding a second sub is going to be worth the effort to get right.  I DO think that you are going to need EQ or room correction to get any of this right.  You need EQ to balance the main speakers and high pass filter them.  This will reduce the problems you are going to have with one being very close to a wall and the other not.

To integrate that single sub you'll need a good DSP based EQ to clip strong room modes and blend them in with the mains.  Otherwise you'll probably be caught between muddy/boomy bass and no bass.  How exactly you do this depends on the rest of your system.  Roon can help you, as can devices from miniDSP, or you can get a receiver with it built in.

If you were up for room treatment, I'd suggest it on the right and behind the couch, and big bass traps on the two corners on the left.  I assume due to other circumstances none of this is an option. :)

More to discover