You wrote: "Any home audio system that does not employ multiple subwoofers and suitable EQ based on in-situ measurements is a low-fidelity system. Period. Doesn't matter if the speakers are some cheap full-range deal or TAD Model Ones."

That sentence is a big pile of bullshit. That's the text that you wrote, that's what I'm replying to. "does not employ multiple subwoofers and suitable EQ " vastly overestimates the importance of the 25-40Hz region which is actually fairly moderate in overall importance, in the grand scheme of things.

That is what I wrote, and I stand by it. You do not, however, seem to possess sufficient analytic rigor to properly distinguish "fidelity" from "enjoyment." People can enjoy whatever, and often do enjoy rather low-fidelity music reproduction.

Also, you're just plain wrong when you write that I "overestimate the importance of 25-40Hz," because the only thing I've written about that range is this, in reply #78:

"I do, incidentally, share your opinion about the importance of flat-line bass in the first mode region. ['First mode region' was defined earlier in that post as 'below about 40-50Hz in a 'small room.'] The reason is simply that just-noticeable differences in sub-bass are much larger than they are an octave or two up. So honestly I do wonder if lots of EQ down low is just to make the person feel better about having a nice graph. If that nice graph is attained by applying lots of boost, it may actually be deleterious because it could rob the bass subsystem of significant power headroom."

Multisubs do not help (except by increasing power headroom due to the extra volume displacement) in the first mode region.

The benefit they provide is smoothing the response in the modal region, roughly 50-200Hz give or take depending on the volume of the room. Also, they reduce MSV, which is important for people who care about the sound at multiple seats.

I'm really glad you're so in love with your multisub arrangement. To suggest that it's "required" for high-fidelity sound in a room however is a bunch of BULLSHIT.

You may be deluded into believing whatever you want about bass, your ineffective room mutilation products, whatever.

But the data show what they show.

Have the two of you forgotten that there is more to hi-fi than just bass reproduction?  I think sometimes audiophiles get so lost examining the texture of tree bark they forget how to look at the forest.

No, but the issue under discussion was an area where any decent headphones genuinely beat the crap out of any stereo pair of speakers: timbral fidelity in the modal region. Good headphones and a small room audio system with well-optimized multisubs do about the same in that area, though.

Commercial subs OTOH that are any good will cost you a minimum of about $1000/ea. The big RELs and JL Audios are triple that amount. And you need what, 3? 4?

Actually, excellent (not just "good") commercial subs can be had very cheaply. Note that in the "modest multisub" system, I attained those results with one small DIY sub, and two small commercial subs. Total cost of well under $1500 for the three. A commercial equivalent to my DIY sub, in that uses a similar Peerless XXLS driver in a slightly larger box, is the SVS PB12-NSD. I think it costs around $800. The big Genelec subs use the same 12" Peerless XLS driver I used, which is an older variant of the driver in the SVS sub.

RELs are universally overpriced and poor performers cost notwithstanding. Their most expensive Gibraltar is abjectly inferior in terms of performance to that SVS sub above, or the sealed variant thereof, though the RELs cabinet does look more expensive.

And the Jellos, while excellent as pure bass pumps, aren't really suitable for a multisub system unless one uses it as the single "ULF" sub for the first mode region, with multisubs for the modal region. The reason is that while their BL-over-stroke is as linear as anything, JL incomprehensibly left shorting rings out of their design. Long coil + no shorting rings means limited top-end extension, and lower upper bass fidelity because inductance varies quite a bit over the woofer's stroke.

I personally prefer and use the 3" and 4" voicecoil Aurasound drivers. While they're expensive (underhung motors* have a lot of steel in them, and neo is also quite pricey) they also have sufficiently long stroke, exceptional BL(x) linearity because they're underhung, copper sleeves on the motors for very low inductance and basically no Le(x) variation, and smooth response out to well beyond the subwoofer region. That low inductance and linear frequency response makes subs-mains integration easier. One can do a great multisub system with MUCH less expensive drivers, though. I don't want anyone to think a bunch of $500-$900 drivers is needed. I designed a system for a friend of mine that sounds great and used under $250 in drivers TOTAL (one Peerless SLS-12, two Peerless SLS-10's). It gets plenty loud enough to, say, blast In Rainbows or Shostakovich 7 at noise-ordinance levels, too.

*"Underhung" means that the coil is shorter than the gap. Most drivers are "overhung," which means the coil is longer than the gap. The W7's motor design, like the "XBL^2" dual-gap design and TC Sounds' "LMT" variable-density voicecoil, are clever and generally effective approaches to get the BL linearity of underhung drivers at substantially lower cost for a given stroke.

One of the best systems I've heard in recent years was a pair of NOLA Micro Grands in a professionally treated room. The NOLAs are all out of ideas by 35Hz. To call that "low-fi" is idiotic.

That to me just says that you haven't heard a well-optimized multisub system. Or, for that matter, a speaker with competent pattern control through the midrange..

DS-21 would you mind posting a picture of your setup? I'm curious about the "WAF"

I don't have a current picture of my system, pa rtly because my damn cabinet maker has yet to finish the cabinets I commissioned back in November. But WAF isn't bad, as the front trio are close to the front wall and all of the electronics are inside a cabinet with smoked glass doors (BDI Cirrus). One sub is in the front corner, one is concealed along the back wall. The "flanking subs" will just visually take the place of the speaker stands I'm currently using. Admittedly, my wife doesn't like the small sub (Aurasound NS10-794-4A driver, 15L closed box) on top of the 6.5' tall bookshelves behind the main seating position.

The only "room treatments" are a wool shag rug over the loft's concrete floor with an heirloom (in my family since the 19th century) oriental carpet on top of it, and an upholstered ottoman. The wall behind the main listening area has some "diffusion" from books placed on tall bookcases.

I tried reading your blog, but TBH rather dislike the huge BlogSpot blogs that load the entire website in a single page requiring endless scrolling. I was able to find one picture.

Any advice on how to make it easier to navigate? Please PM me if you do. I know basically nothing about programming, so just used their defaults.

As for the picture you posted, that's a picture of a stack of equipment taken after we moved into our current loft last August, yes. I think there's another one in that post that shows my current main sub, a gigantic piano-and-cherry pie wedge (31" on each straight side, about 23" tall) that's not long for this world. (It will be replaced by a ~20" cube containing an Aurasound NS18-992-4A.) The speakers you see in that picture are as follows:
-The big trio are Tannoy System 12 DMT II drivers in low-diffraction cabinets I commissioned from Nathan Funk. They were my reference mains for about 5 years.
-The mid-sized trio are stock Tannoy System 8 NFM IIs. They were my long-time nearfield mains.
-The small ones are the best-sounding cheap speakers I've yet heard, KEF Q100s.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out as I had hoped looks-wise. Not gonna hide behind WAF here; I didn't like the way it looked with the room configuration our two balconies forced us into. So neither of the Tannoys were used, and the front three speakers until my damn cabinets are done with veneer and finishing, are KEF Q100s. And my "nearfield" setup at home is just headphones now. The other stuff is in storage.

Quote from: arnaud on March 08, 2013, 12:23:33 AM

Now, you might object there is no way to place the sub such as all targetted resonances are excited but a corner of the room should be just fine to attack the first couple of modes in the length of the room.

A corner-placed sub can "see" all the modes, which is why it's usually recommended to have one sub in the corner. But because the modes are sparse in the modal region (that paucity of modes defines the modal region; the region above it, where modes are sufficiently dense, is the "statistical region") merely exciting the modes will result in serious measurable and audible problems in the modal region. So multiple subwoofers randomize and decorrelate the room modes, producing enough confusion to approximate how the bass would sound in a large room where the modal region is much lower, and the statistical region extends to the sub-bass.

Yes, using Statistical Energy Analysis and Finite Element Analysis literally all day / all year long, I am rather familiar with the concepts of modal and statistical regions .

Now, I was somewhat with you until your latest post... I am sorry to say though, but the idea of "decorrelating and randomizing room modes" with additional sources is totally non-sense. The modal region it is just that: a completely deterministic behavior of the acoustics with discrete modes that have clearly outlined peaks / nodal lines and not very sensitive to small details like a bloke sitting somewhere in the room (a different story in the statistical region where it becomes a moot point to try to deterministically track individual resonances since a simple fart would be sufficient to shift 2 resonances around).

You're not going to randomize squat by putting 10 15' woofers all over the place, you're simply adding more muscle to equalize (actively damp, whatever way you want to see it) the response. The only motivation to add more than one sub is if 1) it cannot attack a particular mode due to placement, 2) it does not have sufficient volume displacement to handle the job correctly (for instance a room requiring severe correction in a frequency range where the sub is already heavily relying on electronic correction to achieve its output, e.g. below the driver/cabinet Fs), 3) you're audio setup is inside the 12 sq. ft storage room and you need to compensate for low order modes all the way to 200Hz where the subwoofer becomes easier to localize with our hearing.

The Shakti sticks are amateur hour. This is how we do.

wtf is that monkey doo?

At first glance I thought those were just really nice kitchen mixing bowls.

It's a cloche for your CDs. Your butler brings you the CD in the cloche when you shout at him to bring you your favorite album.

"Your album sir"

Then you yell at him "don't just stand there Geofrey load it into my Goldmund transport!"