Yes, it took a lot to get to that point and a lot of trial and error and reading with my other setups. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, my setups have gone through a lot of changes. 3 different residences, lots of gear changes from 1-5 subs and with lots of different placements and experiments. It definitely hasn't been a set up once and leave it kind of job.
As far as simplicity goes Audyssey is probably the easiest. A receiver with Audyssey MultEQ XT32 and BassEQ will get you pretty darn good results with 2 subs and is a breeze to run. The Antimode 8033S-II will do a pair of subs and should be reasonably easy to setup and use, while also providing flexibility in terms of other tweaks you want to do. I've never used an 8033 before since I have the dual core, but from looking at it, it should be similar in that you make a few selections and then run the autoEQ.
Dirac is interesting, albeit expensive, and provides a lot of tweaking and features all in one place. I fiddled with their free trial awhile back and thought it was pretty cool, until I saw the price and immediately realized it wasn't for me
The big drawback is price, for a stereo miniDSP with Dirac it'll set you back over $900. While the MSRP for the Antimode dual core is about that much, I bought mine used and paid a heck of a lot less and IMO they seem to provide similar functionality, with a few key differences.
My personal preference is miniDSP with a calibrated mic. It allows you to make tweaks over the entire band and with REW gives you a lot of options. I also prefer mics from CSL instead of buying them directly from miniDSP for 2 reasons 1) they're not coming straight from China and 2) the calibration goes down to 5Hz instead of only down to 20Hz. This option is the least straight forward route, although the quick and dirty version doesn't have to take hours and hours.
The 8033S-II should do two subs although I'm not sure it calibrates them individually. Either way, you calibrate with whatever aftermarket gadget you've got and then run the auto cal (preferably Audyssey MultEQ XT32 with Bass EQ) to not only level match, but also set the delay and provide a touch more EQ. At least IMO YMMV and all that.
Dirac allows for customizable curves, multi-point measurements, not just on the horizontal plane, but also the vertical plane, and will do some other stuff as well. It's a pretty powerful suite of software, but it's expensive as mentioned above and if you're only looking to do the subs and not replace the built in EQ systems of receivers (like Audyssey) then I would say the $1000+ could probably be better spent.
Last place I was in was an apartment. I had a living room system and my office system. Now it's a similar setup except one in the basement and one in the living room. I have a thread in the pros and joes gallery, although I realized I don't have many shots of everything finally set up. Excuse the mess.
Finally Coming Together
