Subwoofers and Phase Question For You Sub Experts

I just wanted to add a bit of information to readers about concerns with a somewhat related topic: aligning arrival times of midrange /treble soundwaves with bass soundwaves at our ears. Briefly stated: don't even bother to be concerned with it.  
    Midrange/treble complete cycle soundwaves are very directional and short compared to bass complete cycle soundwaves that are omnidirectional and very long.

Exactly. Two completely different animals. This may be one of the hardest parts of the whole thing to understand. Though granted, the whole DBA approach relies on a number of hard to understand concepts. No one of them really so much hard as different. At least I feel it must be something like that. Else why so many have explained so clearly and yet so few seem to get it?

This one though I give top honors because if there's one thing we all know for sure its that timing matters a lot. With full range speakers everything must be done just right or you will get poor if any imaging, and it will be obvious where the sound is coming from. With subs, and especially with a swarm, you can plop them down just about anywhere and never know. The first few weeks with mine I lost count how many times I walked right up to one and finally wound up putting my hand on it just to be sure it was working.

But then this should be obvious, if for no other reason than a lot of us run these things pointed at the wall. Hello! At. The. Wall.

How much more different you can get than that, I just don't know.

bdp24, slipping in right at the wire taking the prize for top post of 2019:

"in other words we don't really know how all these things work so just do a bit of each and see what happens."

Now remember, this was posted after a number of posts from Duke, noble100, millercarbon, and others, in which they provided plenty of evidence that we DO know how all these things work.

Poor reading comprehension skills, slow learner, or just plain ol' duh?

Don't reply. Just read, and bask in its beauty.

noble100:

 The truth is that the 4-sub Distributed Bass Array (DBA) Concept actually works like a proverbial charm! There are no ifs ands or buts, no maybes, no under the right conditions, no excuses, no fear and loathing, no terms, no conditions, no stipulations, no hidden clauses, no fine print, no oils and no qualifiers whatsoever.  
      It's the cat's pajamas, the bee's knees, good as gold, tits, right as rain and too legit to quit. I believe it's the gold standard of sub systems that all others should be judged against.  
    Based on the 4-sub DBA's near state of the art bass quality, I actually continue to be amazed that it isn't more widely known, accepted and utilized, especially by fellow Audiogon members who are typically keenly aware and accepting of high quality audio related concepts, technology and methods they can utilize to increase the performance of their systems.  

Ain't it the truth.

I struggled for so many years looking at so many different things all of them ultimately running into the same fundamentally immutable physics problem. Well the thing is it really is a fundamentally immutable physics problem. So whattre you gonna do? Give up! And I did. Gave up all hope.

For years.

And yes of course I know all about all the wonderful different subs, including the magical REL, and EQ, and bass traps, and all that jazz.

What part of fundamentally immutable physics do these people not get?

I had come to view the situation as so hopeless that when first reading about this, right about a year ago now, I assumed it had to be just one more dead end. But you never know. So I read. And read. And read some more. Dang. This just might work. So I read a ton more. Read Toole, et al, read every post by Audiokinesis, read all the reviews, read the threads. 

All the physics, all the psycho-acoustics, the measurements, every single bit, it all made sense. Solid, compelling, logical sense.

So I decided to go for it. DIY. Might as well. And Duke is all thanking me for the leap of faith.

The what??!? So of course I had to tell Duke faith had nothing to do with it. No sane sensible man of science could look at this and come to any other conclusion than its gonna work. Just as surely as no other solution can possibly work, this solution cannot possibly fail to work. The laws of physics would have to be re-written. Something that is not happening any time soon.

That said, still it is hard to fathom just how well it does work. Last night listening to the 20th Anniversary 45 of Jennifer Warnes Famous Blue Raincoat it was absolutely freaking amazing the way the drums are no longer this thud thud thud that moves a bit left or right but actual 3D drums with skin and case and body and its not a dull thud but a clean impact that reverberates across the skin so that you feel and hear every up and down movement of the skin, and its not one sound or even one event its the wave moving out across the skin from where it was hit and then reverberating up and down and this is something you can see with your ears, its right there in the room which is completely mind blowing because as much as you know there are 5 subs plus the two speakers there is no sense of that, none whatsoever, its all just one seamless presentation, the drum and the skin and the room, the all-enveloping room that has erased the room you were in so completely its not the performers being there in your room its you being in theirs. And that's just the one whack. I could go on like this paragraph after paragraph on literally every track of every recording on the shelf.

The DBA approach is so superior to everything else that this one thing has transformed my system from where the bass was easily the worst weakest lamest thing about it to one where its the strongest most astounding aspect- and we're talking not because anything else is lacking but because the bass is just that crazy good. And not just because of any one thing like impact or extension or articulation or any of that but all of it together. We're talking play an absolutely average ordinary record and watch your guest move forward to the edge of the chair lean in fascinated and exclaim, "The bass!" 

And yet, as surprising as all that is its nothing compared to how stunned I am to stop and think this isn't some brand new thing just discovered last week. It wasn't even new when I first heard about it a year ago. Its like 20, 30 years, something like that, depending on how you want to count. From the PhD thesis or the commercial use or whatever. Not here to split hairs. We have people for that. All they do. Forest for the trees. 
 
Forest for the trees!

Everyone should be doing this. Or at the very least, everyone who has not tried it should maybe hold off until they do. Or if not that then at least take into consideration one or two of the dozens of compelling lines of evidence and reasoning behind this before spouting the usual irrelevant nonsense.

But no. Forest for the trees. Boggles the mind.

Sorry. Remind me again, about your experience setting up and using your distributed bass array?

I’m curious to know what your mains are and whether or not you run them full range.

Mains are Talon Khorus X. Not that it matters. Which I seriously doubt that it does matter, given the range of speakers and situations its been reported to work beautifully with. I mean Tim has electrostats. So case closed.

Oh and yeah, full range. If you understand the way you seem to think you do then you would know the whole idea is more low bass source locations. So it would be counterproductive to that goal to eliminate the two mains from helping with that. Indeed, as it turns out, every time I do something that improves the response of the mains (like speaker cables) the improvement is seamless including well into the low bass. This should not be news since its exactly what Duke and everyone else is saying.

Well, dang, let me clarify that. Everyone else means everyone else who has a clue. Which you can only have by actually building, or buying, and then setting up and listening. Everyone else emphatically excludes the yammering nabobs posting so much about which they know so little.

Also, you make no reference to sub quality, only quantity. Are you saying that 4 cheapish subs can produce tight, articulate and extended bass, or is there a requisite standard or level of quality and if so, can you suggest a make/model that you see as the entry point for a successful distributed sub system.

Of course sub quality matters. Duh. Should go without saying. Except, on the other hand: audiophiles! Nothing can ever go without saying. Only group of people in the world to know everything and nothing, simultaneously.

While working on mine Duke was very careful not to recommend or comment on anything too specific. The minute I told him what I had ordered however he immediately said mine will kick butt on his. He knew it was the same Dayton amps, same size drivers, very similar speaker boxes, only Morel drivers with more powerful magnet and voice coil. So yeah quality matters. Duh.

But that being said, based on everything I have seen I would have to say that no single sub no matter how awesome or powerful or how perfectly EQ-able will ever touch my 5. Just no way. Duke had a customer with mega sub budget actually compare and decide the same. Most incredible of all was one guy with four speakers, just ordinary biggish bookshelf type speakers, ask how to use them best. My answer was put two facing the corners with a pillow over the tweeters, in other words use them like subs. Much to my surprise the guy actually did this, and then reported back how surprised he was at the bass extending deeper, smoother, and more cleanly than ever before. Which did not surprise me at all. Because quantity beats quality. Which is not to say quality does not matter at all. Only that in this particular case quantity matters so much more that more often than not four of anything will beat one of anything, at least around anywhere near the same total cost. Which for reference Duke’s customer thought the $3k Swarm was better than anything he heard up to ten times the price.

EQ is a lame idea, DSP or otherwise. But no more lame than taking advice from a bunch of guys with absolutely zero idea what they’re talking about. Which is every single post so far!

The problem you’re having rooze, and the mistake you’re making, is the same one I made and everyone makes and that’s following the conventional wisdom, because the conventional wisdom is WRONG! The conventional wisdom is based on the idea that because sound is waves and bass is waves then bass must be the same as midrange and treble. When its not.

Both in terms of how it is heard by human beings, as well as in how it works in a room in practice, low bass is a completely different animal. My subs for example all face the wall mere inches away. Try that with your precious Dunlaveys and see how it works. Which is not a knock on your speakers - NO speakers will work like this. EXCEPT SUBS. Because low bass is so very different. That’s the key idea. My distributed bass array integrates and images so seamlessly with the entire stage its freaking uncanny. It does not shrink, my room expands. It does not narrow, it envelopes. It does all this regardless of where I put them. How can this be? Its a completely different animal.

Incidentally, I am saying nothing hasn’t been said by everyone else who has actually done it. People with unfounded opinions based on imagination will say all kinds of things. People who know all say the same thing. Go read the threads. Tim, noble_100, had his a lot longer than me, expresses it a bit differently but we’re saying the same things. Sometimes when learning new complex ideas helps to hear presented different ways. Go read it all. If you want to learn.

I can appreciate where you’re coming from because I was once like these others, parroting the same nonsense, not even knowing its nonsense. I had a really good sub, Talon Roc, which I spent hours trying in vain to find that one perfect spot. Spent years searching high and low for an answer to the problem of really good bass response. The Swarm or distributed bass array solution seemed like just another likely idea at first. By now though I have learned they all sound likely at first. Even the posts above sound likely at first. They just turn out to be wrong. Which I assumed would be the case with DBA too.

Except, turns out its not wrong. It works in practice, and the science is compelling. Experiments show human beings cannot even hear a low bass note shorter than one full cycle. Think about that one for a minute. There goes your timing theory. Low bass isn’t even stereo. The subwoofer systems developer starting from first principles looked at a lot of music, found it was all summed low bass. Of course he didn’t test them all, but only a statistically conclusive sample range. Whatever. We can argue, or we can see. Hooked up running four off one mono signal sounds just the same as running two hooked up to the same amp but wired for stereo.

Again, the bass in my DBA is every bit as 3D in the sound stage as anything else. The subs actually disappear even better than the stereo pair. The stereo pair treated with Synergistic Research HFT Speaker Kit, that disappear extremely well. The five subs plopped down almost at random disappear and integrate supremely well. Because: the conventional wisdom is wrong. The DBA concept is correct.

Right now you have only two, and all the stuff you are trying so hard thinking its helping is unwittingly only making things worse. But hey, don’t take my word for it. Move your subs away from the stereo pair. Put them very near the wall, pointing along the wall or towards the wall or any direction but at you. Now this is important: place them asymmetrically, different distances from you, the other speakers, and most importantly the corners. Now go listen. See how much better it is?

The more, the better. With four or five you can literally plop them down anywhere around the room like this and have superb smooth articulate deep bass. Which unlike the others above I know, because I did it, and I heard it. I am not just blowing smoke out my, well you know.

And now hopefully this answer will make a little more sense:

1/ How does running a swarm setup, with 4 subs, affect phase/time integration with the mains? Does it create twice or half the issue or remove it altogether?

It removes it altogether.