Subwoofers make all big speakers obsolete?

[Chromatischism]

At what crossover frequency and slope do you think this becomes problematic?

Above 80 Hz with standard AVR crossovers.

 

[Chromatischism]

On this table, there is only the pipe organ & Sub Bass which drop below 20Hz, and only keyboard/synth that drops to 20Hz, so any full range speaker that goes down to 30Hz should be just fine...

Perhaps you could point out to me what on this chart really requires a true sub-woofer (ie: an Infra/sub sonic focused speaker), as opposed to merely requiring a woofer, whether integrated into a speaker, or external.

"Goes down to 30 Hz" is very different than a subwoofer system that is FLAT to 20 Hz and below. Most "full-range" speakers are -6 or -10 dB there. Very, very, very few speakers are capable of flat playback that low and the ones that are, basically have subwoofers built in to their boxes. But then you're so restricted with placement that you will never get the most of of them.

 

[computer-audiophile]

I have the impression that there are many low bass fetishists at ASR.

 

[EJ3]

Yes the M905 seems to be a full range speaker (hence its output overlaps the range covered by mass market so-called "subwoofers")

In the "old days" the terms Woofer, Quacker, and Tweeter implied the three drivers needed to cover the audible range for a full range speaker... (yep midrange = quacker )

And a proper full range 3 - way speaker would typically have the woofer kicking in somewhere between 200 and 300Hz... with plenty of examples out there of 4 way speakers with both a bass and lower bass driver... in the current mass market paradigm I assume that would imply that it has a built in subwoofer ?!

The current usage of the term "subwoofer" for speakers that don't even get close to reaching 20Hz let alone going below that, gets up my nose.... (in case it wasn't obvious!!)

I like the "Quacker" a term I have not heard in my 66 & 1/2 years describing a mid-range.

 

[EJ3]

The good thing about ASR, by the way, is that you get selected music tips from connoisseurs that you can listen to right away. Of course I already knew the recording of Kevin Mahogany.

The piece is a classic. Decades ago I often used to go to jazz clubs in the Heidelberg area (Germany) where the headquarters of the US Army in Europe was. Very good musicians often came from there for sessions. Today I have less opportunity to do this and I also prefer to listen to classical or contemoporary classical music.

I lived at 622 St. Anne St. in the New Orleans French Quarter in the late 1970's & early 1980's.
I would like to pass on this site that is a great reference for me (containing things from before, during and after my time there).

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/satch1324/new-orleans-zs/

 

[Jon AA]

I have the impression that there are many low bass fetishists at ASR.

I think that's a bit of projection. When the most comprehensive research we have in this area found that for the vast majority of listeners, bass extension is a large part of how they perceive sound quality (thus its influence on the preference score), I tend to think those for whom it does not are in the minority.

 

[computer-audiophile]

I think that's a bit of projection. When the most comprehensive research we have in this area found that for the vast majority of listeners, bass extension is a large part of how they perceive sound quality (thus its influence on the preference score), I tend to think those for whom it does not are in the minority.

My contribution was not meant to be entirely serious. I just wanted to revive the discussion.
In fact, I also see the issue in a very differentiated way. The main thing is to know what you are doing.

 

[NIN]

>Subwoofers make all big speakers obsolete?​

Yes.

Not if you want to reproduce bass-lower mid (80-500 hz) with high SPL and with low distortion.

 

[Magnus]

worst case you put the subwoofers below the speakers. boom! full range speakers again. crossovers aren't hard.

I still haven't seen a good case for full range speakers other than i'm too lazy or not competent enough to integrate subs.

Here's my reason. The bass is purposely set slightly higher than average (active crossovers, but no room correction, just side wall treatments because of dipole ribbons). 26Hz is good enough for music to me. The wooden floor brings loads of tactile feedback as well. What's amazing in that room is how flat the bass (nearly +/- 2dB to 90Hz) is with no correction, particularly given how people say the main speaker is not an optimal location for bass. Power is 2x300W@4ohms per speaker (active bi-amped). Above 90Hz, the overall uncorrected response is about +/- 4.5dB, which is not bad for a speaker only rated +/- 3dB to begin with.

I have a separate home theater with room correction and a 15" subwoofer flat to 20Hz. There's not much difference with most music in the bass department. It's hard to beat the dipole ribbons for presence in the room (The deadened theater room with 21-speaker Atmos takes you more to the room where it was recorded instead).

 

[JimmyBuckets]

I don't know much about pianos but, doesn't it create all sorts of resonance? Is there some sort of brake for the wire inside?

 

[Magnus]

I don't know much about pianos but, doesn't it create all sorts of resonance? Is there some sort of brake for the wire inside?

It's a digital Roland piano (keys are weighted like a Grand) workstation with cherry wood veneer. I do some recording in the room with MIDI and a Presonus for Logic Pro (hence the MacBook Pro on the top of it) . It does make a very convincing piano sound. I can play it through the Carvers too. I play piano, guitar and saxophone (my vintage Fender is sitting on the right side. I've had it since high school). I've got an acoustic guitar sitting just off camera to the left as well. My brother has my Alto at the moment.

 

[JimmyBuckets]

lol. Awesome!

 

[EJ3]

I don't know much about pianos but, doesn't it create all sorts of resonance? Is there some sort of brake for the wire inside?

Excellent question, until the answer was, basically: no strings involved. It was a question that I was going to ask but you beat me to it.

 

[Magnus]

I can actually play 100% analog on it with the turntable since it has no room correction. I had purchased a lot of now rare vinyl in the 90s so I was anxious to see if there was anything to the vinyl euphonic distortion mythos.

Vinyl can actually sound pretty good and some albums probably sound better because they can't crank the compression too high or the needle might start jumping, but generally speaking, digital had nothing to worry about.

I ended up recording all my vinyl at 24/96 and running it through Izotope RX software to remove clicks, pops and even analog tape hiss and play those instead. I have the last fully analog Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon record (30th Anniversary Edition) and recorded it on the first play (not a single click or pop on that play and probably the cleanest, most bass impressive record I've ever heard.

There were two pressing plants and I guess one was defective and terrible sounding (it sat shrink wrapped for years). Fortunately, mine was from the good plant as you might have guessed by the above description. I do prefer the bass on that one to my digital copies for whatever reason, though. It's usually the stereo version I play. I've got the new Atmos blu-ray coming next month, however. I can't wait to hear it on my 21 speaker Atmos system (PSB speaker based).

That Izotope RX software is awesome, BTW, as you can sample a bit of noise like tape hiss and it will wipe it from the entire album, even where you cannot hear it without harming the rest of the sound, at least as far as I can hear. I actually tried doing exactly that with Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes album, which has a lot of analog hiss even on the CD and ended up with a quieter result than the CD. It probably is inferior for sibilance and other measurements, but darn that was impressive how quiet that software made it without damaging anything else audibly.

 

[holdingpants01]

There were two pressing plants and I guess one was defective and terrible sounding (it sat shrink wrapped for years). Fortunately, mine was from the good plant as you might have guessed by the above description. I do prefer the bass on that one to my digital copies for whatever reason, though. It's usually the stereo version I play. I've got the new Atmos blu-ray coming next month, however. I can't wait to hear it on my 21 speaker Atmos system (PSB speaker based).

Awesome stuff! I wonder how the pitch was compared to digital copies, it could be slower with a slightly lower pitch. BTW in the izotope software you can hear the stuff which denoiser remove from the original, try the "output noise only" button. When it's used on constant hiss or noise or buzz it works basically perfect and you can hear it only on fade in and out part of the song.

 

[Magnus]

Another interesting thing about Carver's ribbon drivers is that they basically act like partial line arrays and almost completely cancel all floor and ceiling reflections, allowing use with uncarpeted hard wood flooring with no negative sonic impact whatsoever. (i.e. If you put your head above or below the 4 foot tall ribbon zone on the 6 foot tall speakers, almost everything above 250Hz (where the dual 10" down-firing woofers are crossed in the active crossover system) just disappears like magic (you can hear a bit of reflections from elsewhere in the room, but it's a bit like listening to speakers with broken or damaged midrange and tweeters.

Fortunately, 4 feet is a big zone so sitting and standing is generally fine (I'm 6'2" and so there must be a bit of a range just above the limit as it doesn't cut off unless I stand on a step stool).

Unlike some other planar designs like many electrostatics, the ribbon is pretty narrow in the width department so it still has pin-point imaging and wide dispersion, but that's also why a bit of side wall treatments aren't a bad idea as the reflections there don't get wiped out like the floor and ceiling reflections (actually the right wall is open straight to two other rooms totalling over 40 feet so there really isn't much of a right wall reflection. I treated the left wall with very heavy absorptive draping in front of a window so it looks perfectly normal).

You actually want the front wall reflections for the dipole sound, but they need breathing room (mine are about 4 feet from the front wall). My rear wall area is not a flat wall either, but a long hallway and staircase so the lack of parallel surfaces probably helps with the overall frequency response.

I try to follow the Floyd Toole method of disguising treatments using ordinary looking items.

The home theater room has bookcases along-side the drop down screen which has heavy blackout drapes covering the window behind it. There's more heavy drapes covering 80% of the rear wall (other 20% are racks of blurays and decorative movie poster and movie prop displays and another set of heavy drapes at the left wall doorway. All these drapes also serve to make the room pitch black in broad daylight. Across from the doorway is an outboard fireplace mantle that is bricked from floor to ceiling (All these alternate absorption with dispersion).

The floor is heavily carpeted as well and all seats are heavy thick fiber and absorptive as well. Tapestries near the front of the room on the side walls (Thomas Kincade cottage type scenes) are actually there to absorb the first side reflections and eliminate the last vestiges of room flutter (front wides provide reflections from the recordings instead). You can yell in the room or clap and it just dies, but you don't see the typical obtrusive looking treatments you see in many treated rooms. It looks natural like a family room.

The RT60 times are quite decent, I think.

 

[Adi777]

Above 90Hz, the overall uncorrected response is about +/- 4.5dB, which is not bad for a speaker only rated +/- 3dB to begin with.

Haven't you tried to even out these peaks and valleys?

 

[Magnus]

Haven't you tried to even out these peaks and valleys?

That would defeat the point of running this system without correction and I have no EQ connected to that system to try it. It's just Carver C5 preamp to Audio-X-Stream active Crossover to amps.

Looking at what Toole wrote, trying to "correct" something above Schroeder without knowing the exact data on the speaker in an anechoic environment would be rather a shot in the dark because you cannot differentiate the speaker from the room in a frequency response graph and how much more so with a dipole speaker whose prized ambience is a result of those delayed reflections?

Our brain does not treat/hear room reflections the same as direct sound. The peaks and valleys above Schroeder are a combination of both. EQ would change both and while it might look better on the graph, the reality is the direct sound may be compromised in the process and actually sound worse. Treating the room might help, but it'd be a lot of experimentation and you might lose a lot of the dipole ambience in the process.

This is where listening comes into the picture. If it sounds awesome and true to life with known voices, what's a squiggle on a graph mean? (I tend to use Tori Amos' voice for comparison between systems and speakers since the 1990s as I've listened to her albums more than any other and I've heard her sing live without a band from perhaps 12 feet away).

Now between 90Hz and 200-300Hz, it might be improved somewhat (all of ~4dB maximum over a partial 1/4 octave, which I'm not certain is really psychoacoustically audible), but that also means adding more electronics in-between.

I have thought about trying a Mini-DSP with DIRAC (or perhaps using a notebook to try the software version) to see what it could do with it, but honestly, how much more performance can you squeeze out of a +/- 3dB speaker than 4.5dB in a real room? Is that worth adding another layer of noise and in DIRAC's case for a DSP unit, a layer of ADCs?

I only EQ (Audyssey) in the home theater room even up to Schroeder except where I use an array for dialog lift to prevent too much summing at some frequencies. The speakers are +/- 1.5dB there. Any direct sound is only going to get screwed up by EQ and the room is already pretty dead and thus I don't worry about remaining arbitrary reflections in the graphs as they can only be the room or some mostly inaudible comb filtering where I use some summed arrays until I get full discrete processing for all 21 speakers.

 

[paudio]

Don't think I have happened on this massive thread before but I see low bass fetishists mentioned above...

Obviously I have some large 3-ways (K+H O410s) and I still would probably add some subs. These go down real far in room already but I wouldn't mind going even further for super low electronic such as LORN.

 

[boxerfan88]

Just started my fb2k foo_crossover journey integrating subwoofer to the KH310 mains.

What are the considerations/approaches to selecting the crossover frequency?

Secondly, what are the considerations/approaches to time aligning the subwoofer with mains? Is this step even necessary at all?

Appreciate any comments/suggestions. Thank you.