Has anyone had any success hiding their subwoofers in a custom enclosure?

[RJ Thoms]

I'm building a home theater. I will be using two Rythmik F18 subs. I want to conceal them in cabinetry. I was thinking about building a custom cabinet that would allow the sub to sit on the floor of our home. The cabinet would be large enough to leave several inches of airspace around the sub enclosure. The sub would fire into the room.

I'm guessing it would require us to open the door on movie night. A speaker grill will not look good for the look that we are trying to achieve. We are using KEF 3160 built ins for the fron LCR and that was tough to get past the wife. I'm guessing that it won't be adequate to leave a big air gap in the toe kick.

Imagine removing your dishwasher.... sliding in a subwoofer and putting a door over it.

Has anyone successfully accomplished this?

 

[john61ct]

Not hiding, but my plan is to fix the DIY enclosure baffle dimensions to slide inside the 13"² (33.5cm²) interior dimensions of IKEA Kallax shelving "cubbies" when not in use.

Or maybe they can stay there sometimes, at least for films and background listening

but likely at least some will need to be brought out into the room for critical music listening.

TBD

...

There are lots of HowTo's make Kallax look like fancy built-ins

or ofc you can pay carpenter to bespoke build your rear wall expressly designed for purpose.

I am so happy WA is not a factor in my case

 

[Gregss]

Hello,

There are at lease several plans on the internet using a coffee table as a custom sub. Should work well, but limited on placement.

 

[levimax]

Any chance of infinate baffle sub in the ceiling or walls? Unobtrusive and higher performance. https://ibsubwoofers.proboards.com/thread/2387/bang-buck?

 

[keithm55]

I have done this though it really would depend on how flexible you are with the definition of "successful" (well at least I had a sub that measures and sounds better than no sub). My subs (sealed cabinet front firing SVS versions) sit behind a door frame where the center of the door frame is speaker cloth. The svs subs use the optional soundpath sub isolation system feet. The enclosure in the cabinet is large enough to keep the inside of the door frame outside the outside dimensions of the sub.

For a cabinet you are not standing in front of (this is not a kitchen cabinet) you do not need a toe kick, but I did have a 2" high furniture cabinet base. The cabinet is 3/4" furniture grade plywood including the back and construction is screwed. The floor of the sub "cubby" has a piece of granite (kitchen scrap from the sink cutout) on which the subs sit. Between the bottom of the granite and the cabinet floor (above the actual floor by 2 ") is a sheet of thin silicon.

The obvious big issue of course is if you need to have "good" looking cabinet to get past the spouse and interior decorator you get very little flexibility in sub placement. At sound levels higher than I can tolerate, I did a before the cabinet test with the subs at the same locations and the in cabinet subs basically sounded and measured the same. That said they were clearly not at the best location (based on what I got after doing a sub crawl).

 

[keithm55]

I did my cabinet with two subs. In retrospect two sub optimal positioned subs were a lot harder to get to an acceptable measurement than one was. (I am not a REW expert so that may just be my lack of skill). If I was to do it again, I would stick to one larger sub as I probably can get it in a better acoustic and "eye pleasing" position than two subs.

 

[PaulD]

Not exactly "hiding", but in the pic below there is an SVS somethingorother sub in the custom cabinet underneath the Quad ESL63 panel. It works better than having the subs anywhere else I tried.

 

[GS430man]

Our subs will be inside custom cabinetry in the front and back of the room.

Definitely do-able with minimal compromise, but it requires science and engineering.