When you play the system as loud as you are comfortable with, something with a decent bass line and a bass drum, can you see the excursions?
There are two 15" woofers per cabinet. You never see them move.
Your sub experience: Easy or hard?
For those of us with subwoofers, I'm curious whether you thought integrating it was easy or difficult. That's it.
Of course, lots of DBA people will chime in. No problem but please ask that everyone stay on topic. If you want to discuss all the pro's and cons of DBA take it to a brand new thread. Thank you.
The focus here is just to ask how many people had easy or difficult times and what you thought was the difference.
Showing 6 responses by atmasphere
Yes: 'Nulls' are caused by standing waves. It was exactly the only spot in the room the listening position could be located. Move three feet in any direction and no problem. I am very lucky in that my GF likes the stereo quite a lot (helps when it sounds good) so its in the living room rather than a mancave. The 15" drivers cross over at 500Hz. They are field coil and quite fast, but so is the midrange driver. |
My main speakers use dual 15" drivers each. They can shake the house pretty well; everywhere except the listening chair 🙄 So I added a pair of subs, thus creating a DBA because the subs are asymmetrically placed. Now I get the same bass impact (and 'buzz'...) at the listening position that the rest of the house gets. |
@mijostyn This is mostly incorrect unless you let the subs run up too high. At lower frequencies the 'time alignment' thing isn't an issue simply due to the length of the waveform. At 80Hz its 14 feet long and that means in most rooms its bounced off the wall behind you before the you can even know what the bass note even is (it takes a few iterations of the note before the ear can identify the frequency). By the time you've identified the note, the bass in the room is entirely 100% reverberant- there's no time thing. So yes: ALL bass in regular size room below probably about 80Hz is an 'echo'. FWIW this is the case whether you have a single sub or a DBA or anywhere in between. I play string bass; have since I was in 6th grade. The 'buzz' in bass strings comes from harmonics of the instrument, not its fundamentals; the former are handled by the main speakers. A DBA has no adverse effect on bass impact (if you have a standing wave at the listening position it can certainly improve it); at any rate regardless of the subs you have if they (or it) allow proper bass at the listening position then the bass will be the same in either event regardless of single or multiple subs. |
@kevn The DBA setup is more accurate. The single sub suffers a bit around the edges of the room where it gets too much reinforcement. Forward or downfiring has no effect (in practice) simply because in most rooms the bass is entirely reverberant by the time you hear it due to the wavelengths involved (at 80Hz the wavelength is 14 feet). |
I have two systems employing subs, one with DBA and one without. The one with the DBA set up the fastest. I didn't have to mess with the sub locations and setting the amplifier controls was a breeze. The other uses a single sub and I had to move it around quite a lot to find a spot that it could be heard at the listening position that was not also in the way. Where I wanted it and where it needed to be were quite different. In both cases the subs are set to be operational below 50 Hz so no integration problems at all. |