Dual subs placement

[jeanseb]

By your experience, would you rather place voth sub in front (L/R) or in the opposite corners of the room, like front left and rear right for instance?

Thanks!

 

[no. 5]

Experience is one thing, but the only way to know which performs better in your room is to set it up and measure it...

 

[zhimbo]

By your experience, would you rather place voth sub in front (L/R) or in the opposite corners of the room, like front left and rear right for instance?

Thanks!

Speaking not from experience but from theory: In an idealized situation, opposite corners is better for flattening the room response. Assuming you have a nice, idealized room.

There was a video that got a lot of play and discussion a little while back that went over this in great detail, actually stating that the best (idealized) setup was to have subs in the middle of each wall (4 subs) or the middle of 2 opposing walls (2 Subs), except you tend to get a lot cancellation in the middle position. Opposite corners was a second-best solution if you wanted/needed to boost output more.

I think it was a THX representative giving a talk, and that's consistent with this page from THX. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

Of course, if you don't have an idealized sealed rectangular room, who knows, but this seems like a logical starting point.

 

[MatthewB.]

zhimbo, there was an article in last years Sound and Vision magazine about four subs that explained exactly what your talking about. the article basically pointed out that the best thing to do, would be to have the subs polar oposite of each other. So one in front and the other in back. To avoid null voids and give better overall bass in a center room position. I had this issue with my great room system when I had one sub. I placed itup front and bass would lack in the back, then when in back, it would lack in the front. I solved it by buying some tower speakers (DT BP7001sc's) with built in subs. I placed those up front and have my SVS in back and now get great overall bass. Placing both subs up front will give you basically a 3db increase in sound, but may still lack bass in the back. So i would place one up front center and one in back center.

 

[AVRat]

There's also this paper: http://www.harman.com/wp/pdf/multsubs.pdf

 

[no. 5]

I think it was a THX representative giving a talk, and that's consistent with this page from THX. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

I think (although I am not certain) the THX recommendation comes from one of Todd Welti's papers on the subject, one of those papers is conveniently available through AVRat's link.

 

[DD66000]

By your experience, would you rather place voth sub in front (L/R) or in the opposite corners of the room, like front left and rear right for instance?

Thanks!

Each room will be different, but when I tried subs in opposite corners the sound was disjointed.
I'd say either have both subs up front or at the mid-points of the side walls.
But the best thing to do is find the hotspots for the bass frequencies, using a spl meter and pink noise, while one sub is at the main seat location.

 

[Gohanto]

I agree with everything that's been said, but it's a very rare room that can give you a perfect response. Once you've found the best configuration for your room, try to run an equalization sweep of the room in a few places to see if you have any hot spots. Hopefully they'll be few and/or minor, but you may want to check out adding an equilizer if your room doesn't cooperate. Manually doing the job can be fun if you're up to it, or using something like the Velodyne SMS-1 on each sub automatically equilizes for the room or SVS has a two channel sub equilizer coming out soon as well.

Obviously easier on the wallet if you do find placement options that work well together though.