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.

erik_squires

One Rythmik F12G in between Maggie MMGs.  I recently added a small Miller & Kreisel K-9 in the corner opposite the Rythmik just to flesh out the sound throughout the room (it has one side open to the kitchen/dining room).   Only adjustment was to the phase control - it now melds very nicely with the entire system and is literally two feet from my listening position.  I get no localization from it. 

So..............neither sub was hard to integrate. 

Since I use a sub for "bass fill" to obtain full range sound in a good room, not difficult. I suppose if one is a home theater fan and going for dramatic effects it would be much more difficult. I have a two channel system, so I can pretty much set it and forget it. 

 

I tried subwoofers with Magnepan 0.7's with no luck. I wired them up with a pair of DW-M bass panels which filled in the lower frequencies with much better integration. I connected the 0.7's to the 4 Ohm outputs on may Hammond 1642 SE Transformers and the two 4 Ohm elements in each DW-M in series and in phase with the 8 to 16 Ohm transformer outputs. 

In my weight training room I built a 45 SET which uses Goldwood GT 1118 pizo tweeters mounted in Parts Express 294-2924 horns and DS1B PRO-X6BM speakers with first order crossover 0.3 mH chokes. This kind of speaker system does well with a subwoofer. 

I think it depends. I got a sub because my room has poor bass response. Lots of experimenting, and lots of long listening sessions. My goal was to have it integrate with my main speakers and call no attention to itself. If Vandersteen Quatros were on a half price sale I would’ve gone that route. I have Vandersteen 2Ce sig. II’s. I added a V. SUB3, and a M5-HPB crossover. Once I embraced that a lot of the setup is personal preference, it was just a matter of extended listening, and fiddling with the settings. I’m happy with it. But, it may be a while before I want to listen to anymore solo upright bass recordings.