speaker specs & room matching

IMHO, that describes whether the wave will be allowed to "travel", or whether it will be perceived as "pressure". That has nothing to do with the room's deep bass extension possiblities, however. I easily perceive a 15 Hz test tone as "pressure" with my Sennheiser HD-600 headphones, and they are only, what, and inch and a half from my auditory nerves (with the wavelength being over 40 feet long)? The argument that deep bass is somehow invalid or "only a standing wave", when heard reproduced through a stereo, that is not allowed to be a "travelling wave" (because the room is too small), IS AN OLD AND OUTDATED ONE...and is widely disavowed by anyone who has a properly dialed in full range playback system (and properly treated room).

A caveat: don't rely too heavily on Harley as an expert. Seriously consider "The Master Handbook of Acoustics" by F. Alton Everest. In short, the lowest freq. that your room will successfully accomodate is found by the equation: freq = 565/L where L is the longest dimension of your room. If your room is 10 ft long, then the lowest freq would be 56.5 Hz. This is called the first axial mode of the room. Hope this helps.

You're welcome.

Thanks again Carl. Sorry it took me so long to respond. An excellent idea and one I had not previously considered.

You might peruse The Complete Guide to Highend Audio. All I know is, it's not as easy as you say to get smooth and accurate bass, deep or not, that has a fast room modal decay time (try a good test CD, and it'll be obvious). I prefer using a high quality subwoofer or two, in an "augmented" configuration, where you can adjust low pass crossover frequency, level, and especially continuously variable phase. This type of system is always going to be better in the bass than a standard "fullrange" system. Besides, all the world class $50,000 plus systems have some provision for this anyway, because they know you can't have ultimate performance without it. Integration isn't a problem, you just have to spend a little time with it.

Thanks you Carl_eber for your prompt reply. Can you be more specific. I believe we can smooth out much of the bass irregularities with room treatment, but it is more difficult to remove overloaded bass. We all want as much deep clean bass as possible but too much may be worse than too little. Besides, good basss extension usually doesn't come cheap. A general guide would go a long way to maximize our audio budgets. Thanks Again Siem

It's a complex issue (because you must take bass response smoothness into account), but basically it's small speakers for a small room, and large speakers for a large room. A small room will allow the most bass extension and dynamic contrasts from a small monitor speaker, and a large room must have larger speakers to energize it's volume.