Setting up a swarm


I'm addressing M.C. mainly but anyone else is welcome to add their two cents.  Mc I read your experience with setting up your swarm system and you say all 4 subs face the wall .By that do you mean driver face the wall? How far? And would you know if using powered subs work. Thanks for any help
Audiomaze
audiomaze
Yes the drivers face the wall. About 2" away. Not that it is all that big a deal. Bass waves are so long direction hardly matters. What does matter though is they look better that way! Honestly, that is the reason!  

Powered subs are no different. Sound doesn't care if the amp is on the floor or on a plate inside the sub. Only difference is how you hook it up and make adjustments. Four of mine are passive, powered off Dayton SA-1000 amps. The fifth is a powered Talon Roc. 

And yeah I respond to PM's. All the time. Heh.
As long as we're swarming: My main system now has two powered subs. Was wondering if the four woofers, built into my main L/R, count as part of the "swarm"? They only go down into the 40hz range but do contribute.
Played my Joni Mitchell "Cotton Avenue" test last night and got my lamp rattled so "There be bass here"!
They do. To whatever extent they put out bass they are serving as separated bass source locations. The whole idea is to have moe low frequency location sources.

This applies to all speakers. There was a guy last year asking what is the best way to use his four speakers? Stack them with teeters close together?

I said take one pair, disconnect the tweeter or put a pillow over it, and put them down on the floor facing the wall. They need to be facing the wall because without a proper sub crossover they will put out high frequencies that can be localized, and we don't want that. We just want the bass.

Well much to my surprise he tried it, and was real impressed. The best bass he ever heard from those speakers, including running them all together. So this totally works. Even without a sub. It's that good.
Audiomaze,  I recently added a Swarm to my dedicated listening room.  As usual, I found that using REW as a guide got me to optimal results faster than using the sub crawl technique or published formulae for multi-sub placement.  My mains go pretty low.  They are down 3 dB at 27 Hz but have decent output down to about 23 Hz.  So, in a sense, I have six subs, two of which are in fixed positions.  

All that said,  my final configuration was as follows:

I ended up with one of the 4 Swarms subs in each room quadrant.  Right front, right rear, left front, and left rear.  I had one sub in the left front corner angled away from the corner, firing down the left side wall at an angle.  Another sub was placed in the right rear corner, firing directly into that corner.  A third sub was placed along the right side wall about 1/3 of the distance from the front wall to the back wall, and this was firing towards the rear wall.  This sub was elevated about 30" off the floor.  Sub 4 was placed immediately behind the listening position, firing into the left rear corner from a distance of about 6 ft.  All four subs were out of phase with the mains.

As a rule, the direction of fire of those subs in a corner made a  big difference.  For those subs located away from a corner, the direction of fire made a small difference.   

My room had been very carefully laid out and treated before installation of the Swarm system.   It took a great deal of care for me to install the Swarm in such a way as to substantially improve frequency response at the listening position, but I finally got it, and boy, do I like the end product!  No doubt this was one of my best investments of time and money ever.

Thanks M.C. -good advice! I have crossover set to lowest but sensed duplicate output coloring sound. Will aim subs to wall.
REW = Room Equalization Wizard.  Free software.  Very sophisticated measurement program.  Highly recommended.