Your sub experience: Easy or hard?

I don't think there's a standard answer. It depends on

1. The size of your room.

2. Room treatments.

3. The size (lower frequency extent) of you main speakers.

4. Your requirements, whether it be gentle underpinning or thumping bass.

In my case my room is treated and my main speakers go down to about 70Hz 

I prefer gentle underpinning, and with the main speakers disconnected I adjust so I can barely hear mail vocals. Dead easy

In my experience it depends on the sub and speakers. I have an svs sb16 ultra. It was easier with my klipsch than it was with my tekton's. The tekton's go lower so I had a flatspot in the low midrange so it took a bit of work to fix it.

I have a cheaper sub (Gallo Acoustics TR3) which I enjoyed setting up with my Spendor D7.2s. Before that I just didn’t have the low end in the room, with the sub it filled out the sound how I like it. Took a few days of moving it around, getting up repeatedly to change settings etc, but I am now very happy with it and feel it is as well integrated as it could be. From this experience I wondered what a better sub could do and auditioned a REL S/510 at a dealer with my same speakers, I spent a whole 2 hours trying to get it to integrate and couldn’t, it was always too present. This was even having the gain close to its lowest setting, it just sounded so boomy. It was very frustrating as I thought a better sub would enhance my system but perhaps it was too much sub despite RELs website recommending it. I also wondered if the dealer had set it up wrong given I could barely turn up the gain without it booming through the room. So I’ve had a mixed experience, however in my current system I love my subs integration and wouldn’t be without it.

I don’t have much experience with subwoofers so my contribution may be worthless. Easy or hard? I suppose the question is closely correlated to expectations? To me, proper integration means the sub blends rather seamlessly with the main speakers and nothing sticks out like a sore thumb. I don’t know, but for a seamless integration the impact of the sub is usually small so as nothing sticks out like a sore thumb. A small but appreciable difference. In my case, I would say easy but as mentioned above, the impact of the sub in my system is not very significant or earth shattering.

I’m still trying to figure out if a superior sub will bring a more significant difference to the system, and whether the integration of the sub will be equally easy or require more effort. I will soon find that out..

I use two Velodyne HGS-15s in the front corners with an SMS-1 acoustic bass manager that makes integrating them pretty easy.  The surprise for me was a third HGS-15 in a back corner that takes LFE from a Bryston SP3.  It's not used for music, but often adds an interesting effect for HT.

db