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dolifant : I have been told that large speakers (large woofers?) in a small room blunts the bass response. Something about the sound wavelength being too big for the room.
That is, he said that if you have speakers too large for the room the bass response is less than smaller speakers in the same room.
Makes no sense to me, but I thought I'd put this up for comments.
You're right -- it makes no sense because it's wrong! If it were true, you couldn't get bass from headphones because the distance from the transducer to your eardrum is lots shorter than the frequencies involved! For that matter, so are the cabinet dimensions of nearly all speakers (I think the wave lenghth of the lowest audible bass notes is over 20 feet).
In a small room, the
resonant frequencies of your room (that can reinforce the bass and make it "boomy"
are higher, generally in the region where you don't want so much bass reinforcement, so proper positioning to correct this (and maybe even worse, the nulls that can cause huge dropoffs in the upper bass) can be more of a challenge, especially if your speakers or sub are large. Not due to their acoustical characteristics, mind you...it's just harder to figure out where to put that big freakin' box where it will sound best in a small room, but so you won't trip over it or arouse the wrath of your significant other.
However, the dimensions of your room need not be equal to or greater than the wavelength of the lowest frequency you wish to reproduce even though it seems logical on its face that it should.
Large speakers are overkill for a small room, however -- besides being physically intrusive, you just don't need to move that much air in a small room to get the loudness you want. That's why I would not put an 18" sub in my 10' x 13' den, for instance!
For an intro to the basics of room/speaker interactions, I suggest a look at
Siegfried Linkwitz's page on room acoustics.</font>