I'll take the feedback into consideration! The primary goal of the subwoofer won't be to turn my room into a drilling machine, but rather to have a more accurate and even more 'feelable' bass. Rather want it to make the lower ends more rich and deep. The salesperson told me SVS is also amazing, but that those are more going for monstrosity (aka making your room a rumbleground) and could overpower the sound image to the detriment of the quality.
As I said earlier, since my speakers are literally in the HiFi store where they do the testing anyways, I'll ask them to test my speakers with a range of subwoofers, and then I'll be able to make an informed decision based on what works for me or what I'm looking for.
I get that straight-up numbers and test will show what is 'the best' on paper, but then again one of the biggest and most reputated audio engineers of my country once told me the best audio recordings and masters he ever heard were from a collegue he worked with that personally listened to the end result after tweaking a few things, rather than going by the pure math on paper that supposedly would tell to do tweak/not tweak some stuff differently (he basically combined the best of both). I'll follow my gut, or ears preferrably
In a nutshell, our ears cannot be fully trusted because the environment changes how the sub sounds to our ears. The room walls (and other objects) are reflecting the frequencies
like water ripples, while charts are generated in a way that factors away these room effects, so that you can compare the data between various subs.
My own experience when I started looking into measurements was that as a beginner, there's a disconnect when trying to link what we see on charts to what we hear. Took me some time to gain this understanding. One of the aids that helped was this video (made by
@wwenze ). The tones are limited to the lower end and
spaced out so that we can compare with just ears alone. In constrast, the typical 20 - 20kHz sweep is so fast because the microphone can pick it up (and it reduces the influence of the room) but it's generally useless for human ears (as a comparison tool).
Main things to look out for when running the sweep:
1. As tones get lower in frequency, are they getting consistently softer, relatively consistent in volume, or there are abrupt tones much louder or softer than the rest?
*If consistently softer in volume: the frequencies are rolling off. Could be a slow or steep descent.
*If consistently similar (or even louder) in volume: the frequencies are level or even increasing in amplitude.
Generally the mark of a better sub, either in specs and/or better room-optimized. Note: human ears find it harder to pick up lower frequencies and need stronger amplitude at lower frequencies. Read up on loudness contours if you want to know more.
*If there're abrupt changes in volume between tones: Either the sub is tuned to emphasize certain frequency regions, or the room gain (as bass frequencies get bounced around in the room) is making certain frequencies too strong. Could be a problem with the sub itself, or the sub is not equalized/optimized for the room.
2. At your listening position, can your ears still pick up the lower tones, like 30Hz, or 20Hz? This tells you how strong a sub is at reproducing the lower tones relative to each other, in the same room.
3. Size of your room versus the showroom, placement and sound treatment. If the sizes are vastly different, room gain will be different. On the other hand, sound treatment can absorb / diffuse the frequencies so that even if they're rooms of similar size, the sub can sound ok in one room but very boomy in another.
It can also mean that a powerful, yet cheaper, sub can be overpowering in a smaller room (aka muddy/boomy/etc) while a less capable, but more expensive, sub actually performs 'better'. And people then may make the mistake of thinking that it's 'more musical'.
So audio engineers are not imbued with auditory magical powers. They just understand the above factors and know how to apply the objective information given in the charts to their given situations.
Of course, the sales people can also use these to their advantage and present the higher margin product as the 'more suitable' product.
The above video allows you to compare the same sub in the showroom and in your own room. Ideally they will have a good return policy for you to do so. The next step is typically to perform eq with the sub in your own room to reduce the room modes. But there're also users who can't be bothered with the hassle, which is perfectly fine.
You're still listening to the salesperson.
