Very good point. My experience is also that I could get away will lesser levels of support, but then the higher level of support does not hurt. Support from subs to other groups and from other groups to subs does most of the job. There is marginal benefit in engaging other support, but that's just me. On some other forums some professional calibrator challenged the whole setup as not optimal, starting with subs firing too early. He could probably do a better job in 2.5 days he would require, but including transport that would likely be more than my AV10 costs.I think we need to be careful to extrapolate your room, speakers, configuration to making a statement that if you use max or near max filters, you will have poor results (either objective or subjective). There seems to be just as many that have great results and are happy at or near the max. With so many variables regarding speaker capabilities, locations of speakers, rooms, and personal preference it all seems quite difficult to make definitive statements one way or the other.
Thanks for taking the time to try different things with your system, measure, and report your findings.
One thing that might be interesting, with any of your configurations is to see the affect of spl on ART performance. If/when you do your next set of measurements, maybe take post measurements at 3 different SPL’s. It would be interesting if the results stay the same or if, as some speakers get closer to their limits, results get worse at higher spl’s. It would make sense, that the louder you listen, the more conservative you need to be on setting the lower limits of frequency support.
I find the whole topic of evaluating my REW charts a bit frustrating as they are different, but at the end of the day I do have issue hearing any difference between the most. I do hear difference between some of them, and keep them even if they might not be the best measuring ones.
I also agree that people should consider SPL. Some speakers can't really support 50hz at 100dB while they potentially could at 80 or 90hz. We have different presets and thus ability to address different use scenarios.