Yes, you've definitely missed some things.
You've missed defining what a "house sound" means relative to bass. I have never see any indication that matching brands between subwoofers and mains offers any audible advantages whatsoever, with the exception of active systems with their own internal DSP/bass alignment (Genelec GLM, for example).
Also, the most capable full-range speakers on the planet won't help you to address a difficult room (which encompasses the majority of domestic spaces) where the best positions for bass are rarely shared by the best positions for stereo speakers. Discrete bass sources can absolutely address this. To rely on full-range mains is much more often a "compromise" than the opposite.
But yes, you will need placement flexibility, a means to properly integrate them, and an understanding significant other (if applicable) for subwoofers to work well. Not everyone possesses the above, but happily I do.
Interesting points, but I find the alternative approach to subs works better in my room and to my ears. Let me elaborate.
I possibly shouldn't have mentioned "house sound" without explanation. We generally choose our speakers based on how they sound playing the style of music we enjoy and how much satisfaction they deliver to our ears and brains. This varies very considerably from brand to brand, as much as it does from one listening room to another. However, most of us will select a brand that delivers the sort of sound that pleases us most, and likewise we often find other brands offering apparently similar speakers not to our liking. One brand of speaker (or sub) may please us while another doesn't, and logically it seems illogical to attempt to match speakers of different brands, even if some deliver bass only.
In a good full-range speaker, the brand will have spent huge design and testing effort on matching all parts, so they work, as far as possible, in perfect harmony – treble, middle and bass. Chucking an untested (by the main speaker brand) and obscure sub into the mix isn’t necessarily a useful addition to the recipe!
"Room Correction" (possibly the biggest misnomer in audio) cannot be done by messing with the nice accurate signal that you pay good money for your amplifier to deliver. It seems absurd to spend several thousands on an accurate amplifier and then to deliberately destroy its accuracy by adjusting its frequency response away from the flat line that we have paid all that money to achieve.
We are led to believe that the room anomalies that most rooms suffer from to a degree can be “corrected” by signal manipulation away from accurate. Why don’t we look at the room rather than the signal we send to the speakers? There are numerous reasons (often of our own making) for the sound at our listening seat to have lost the accuracy that the amp sends to the speakers. We should look towards correcting these anomalies in a more thoughtful and intelligent way than by messing with the amp’s output. Do we expect the musicians at a live performance to “adjust” the output from their instruments to cater for the particular hall they are performing in that night? No, of course they don’t apart from tuning them after their journey to the hall and the change of temperature, etc. In practice, the hall will have been carefully treated so that the instruments will sound precisely as they should without artificial adjustment.
Shouldn’t we look at our homes in the same light and correct (as far as possible) their anomalies and keep the amp’s signal as accurate as it should be?
1 - First things first – have we bought the right TYPE of speaker to suit our own room? Probably 90% of us have never seriously considered this and we buy, or move from our previous home, whatever type of speaker we are used to – mostly conventional box speakers. [Note – I’m guilty of this when I bought £18K speakers that were very well reviewed and sounded great at the showroom, only to have to sell them at great loss after 6 months because their type didn’t suit my room – even with Anthem DSP doing its best to help!]
2 - Have we chosen the speaker model well to suit our room? As above, often not considered carefully enough – we probably didn’t even arrange home demos of 6 candidate speakers within our budget to compare their sound in our own room. Shouldn’t we do that before coughing up thousand on speakers incompatible with our own room?
3 - Have we spent enough time with speaker placement, toe-in, tilt, etc to get them sounding as good as they possibly can? Often not done thoroughly enough
4 - Have we seriously considered how the carpets and curtains (or lack of) affect the sound, and is our soft furnishings compatible with the playing of music in the room. Again, often not thoroughly enough.
5 - If, after getting the ideal speaker type and model, getting them ideally placed and set up, ensuring that the furnishings are suitable, we still think the sound can be improved, artificial room treatment such as ceiling or wall panels to absorb unwanted reflections, etc needs to be considered.
After all that, if the sound isn’t right, we have failed somewhere along the line and need to get help. Or perhaps, move home and start again! Chucking DSP at the problem destroys the whole principle of accuracy, and we may as well get cheap, poorly designed amps and speakers and believe that all their inaccuracies can be corrected by the magic of signal processing. Sorry, that’s balderdash!
Full-range speakers, properly set up in a room that has been given reasonable thought in terms of furnishings, etc will always sound better than a pair of limited range speakers, plus subs, fed by a DSP-buggered signal from the amplifier!
Others may disagree
