What's the point of floorstanding when we have subwoofers?

[EJ3]

At what SPL and distance do you listen?

And I am rarely in the room with the speakers but there are major space considerations in the largest room in the house (much less anywhere else in the house).

imo, floorstanders/towers exist for scale of sound. ive been in a decent few rooms with some very good bookshelves and sub(s). sounded really good.

i just didn't get the same visceral feeling i get with, personally, towers and subs. i have a metal song that i absolutely love mwith double kick drums. not the same experience with bookshelves. at all.

room size makes a huge difference. hard to fill large rooms with bookshelves. loud. yes. heft, no.

and some of us are bassheads. i am unabashedly one. it doesn't always need to be loud, just goood.

Yes, bass is good. It seems to get that visceral feeling, you need a larger room. My previous home had that (the living room was 1/2 the size of my current main home).
So (to me) this has shown me I need more space to get that visceral effect.
It will be several years before I can get another decent sized home, so I'm stuck (as far as the bass is concerned).

 

[sigbergaudio]

Yes, bass is good. It seems to get that visceral feeling, you need a larger room. My previous home had that (the living room was 1/2 the size of my current main home).
So (to me) this has shown me I need more space to get that visceral effect.
It will be several years before I can get another decent sized home, so I'm stuck (as far as the bass is concerned).

Not sure that is true. 15-20m^2 is certainly doable.

 

[terryforsythe]

High & far away...

And I am rarely in the room with the speakers but there are major space considerations in the largest room in the house (much less anywhere else in the house).

That is a dilema. Speakers that play low bass with authority without need for one or more subwoofers, and that play loud at large distances, tend to be relatively large. On the other hand, sometimes it is hard to find a place for subwoofers when there are major space considerations. Let us know what solution you settle on.

 

[Shiva]

I'm partial to floorstanders, for the main room anyways... On a practical level, in regards to smaller speakers, unless you plan to put them on a shelf or on top of a pair of subs, you then have to buy and stress over about getting the perfect stands to get them to the right height, which then will take up the same floor space as a floor standing speaker anyways... As well, if you have dogs, cats or kids in the house, will you worry about them being knocked over... Might as well skip all that, and yet another purchase, and get speakers that go all the way to the floor.... in my opinion of course...

 

[Mike_Trueman]

Subwoofers are perfect for large PC desktop setups because you can not place a floorstander on the desk.

 

[Robin L]

I've got "floorstanders" and a sub. The Infinity Primus 250 speakers are 3 feet tall, 1 foot deep and 7 inches wide. I've got them about a foot off the floor, one is on top of the powered subwoofer, the Sonus Son of Sub. The Primus 250 audibly starts to roll off around 100Hz, the sub goes a little bit under 30Hz. I've used "bookshelf" speakers with subs in the past, they were hard to integrate. And of course, speakers in small boxes need speaker stands. Floorstanding speakers require less power than bookshelves, BTW.

 

[Cbdb2]

Having a dedicated midrange driver has advantages.

 

[EJ3]

Not sure that is true. 15-20m^2 is certainly doable.

Not without throwing away half of what is in the house, unfortunately.
The biggest room is 15.7 m square, all of the 2 vents for heat & A/C are on the floor at the middle of the wall floor interface, the whole house return for the heating/A/C takes up 1 M square of the 3rd wall ("love seat" which has to be away from the wall for the heating ac return, so nothing can block those unless the stereo, me & my wife can live without heat or AC in the house (for the last month the temps have been over 36 C [about normal for now, in August there will likely be at least 13 days over 40 C]).
In this room there are a full sized couch (against the long wall that does not have a heating/AC vent), a love seat (pulled about a 1/4 M away from the wall for the heat & A/C to function, 600 record albums stored along the wall in walnut boxes & th3 speakers/ stereo system along the other wall) and a coffee table in front of the main couch.
So, effectively the room is less than 14 sq M.
And that is also the room with an inversion table in it (the only place that I have for that, which I need for my back0, as well as other exercise equipment.
The choices to remove some of our things from that room are not possible, as all the other rooms are considerably smaller.
Redoing the heat & A/C so that vents & returns are in the ceiling is not financially feasible.
Moving out of a place that we have owned since 1977 is also not happening (at least for a few more years).

View of the largest room of the house prior to putting the dehumidifier (3 large ones in the home) stereo, speakers & 600 albums (70 per) cabinets in:

other priorities (hand painted, NOT wall paper):

and naturally Food:

 

[EJ3]

That is a dilema. Speakers that play low bass with authority without need for one or more subwoofers, and that play loud at large distances, tend to be relatively large. On the other hand, sometimes it is hard to find a place for subwoofers when there are major space considerations. Let us know what solution you settle on.

2 homebuilt 12" ported 4 ohm dual voice coil floor firing subs with 500+ watts RMS (@ 4 Ohm's) each work pretty well. Dahlquist's N-905's sitting on top of them with a 3.5 degree wedge in between, in top of the square's that they set containers on when they put them on concrete (have no idea what they are called but had some on hand).

 

[izeek]

And I am rarely in the room with the speakers but there are major space considerations in the largest room in the house (much less anywhere else in the house).


Yes, bass is good. It seems to get that visceral feeling, you need a larger room. My previous home had that (the living room was 1/2 the size of my current main home).
So (to me) this has shown me I need more space to get that visceral effect.
It will be several years before I can get another decent sized home, so I'm stuck (as far as the bass is concerned).

i need to correct to that. i meant i wasn't fond of bookshelves.

 

[DVinylfan]

The majority of floorstanding loudspeakers will still need an additional sub/s if you want really full-range.
Keith

Says a retailer who literally makes a crust flogging gear.
Objective, impartial, unconflicted much?

 

[NTK]

Says a retailer who literally makes a crust flogging gear.
Objective, impartial, unconflicted much?

Plain bulverism (also see appeal to motive).

Dr Toole's previous system in his California home has Revel Salon2's as L&R and a Voice2 as C, and still have 4 subwoofers. May be you should learn his reasoning.

 

[Oddball]

Says a retailer who literally makes a crust flogging gear.
Objective, impartial, unconflicted much?

He is actually right. Unless you have anything else up your sleeve to counter?

 

[sq225917]

Says a retailer who literally makes a crust flogging gear.
Objective, impartial, unconflicted much?

I look forward to seeing your list of domestically acceptably 20hz-20khz floorstanders.

 

[Oddball]

I look forward to seeing your list of domestically acceptably 20hz-20khz floorstanders.

Not sure why anyone would even bother to compile that list. Nowadays it's easy with bots. Takes no time at all and I am looking forward to seeing what you came up with to counter the argument in a more constructive manner than just punting it to other's court.

Shortcut is that if bass modules are not active, and you don't believe in ferry-tails, there will be really nothing that can do 20hz at 115dB which is the HT requirement for full range.

This will be different if you drop down the full range requirement to 30hz or 40hz. Which, on balance, is still pretty awesome.

I would love to have Kii's with bass module in a domestic environment though, but in that case need some crowd-funding.

 

[terryforsythe]

nothing that can do 20hz at 115dB which is the HT requirement for full range.

I don't know who came up with that specification, but I suspect they didn't pay attention to the danger for hearing damage:

https://www.asha.org/public/hearing/loud-noise-dangers/#:~:text=You%20can%20listen%20to%20sounds,can%20damage%20your%20hearing%20faster.

 

[kyuu]

I don't know who came up with that specification, but I suspect they didn't pay attention to the danger for hearing damage:

https://www.asha.org/public/hearing/loud-noise-dangers/#:~:text=You%20can%20listen%20to%20sounds,can%20damage%20your%20hearing%20faster.

I'm assuming that 115dB spec is for peaks. It would be unwise to the extreme to listen to anything at that level for any meaningful length of time.

That still implies an average SPL of 95dB, assuming 20dB peaks though. According to your source, it would be safe to listen to an average SPL of 94dB for only an hour, and so 95dB would be a bit under that. Still probably a bad idea for a movie. 85dB should be safe for 8 hours, so that seems a reasonable max average SPL for movies.

Although one other thing is that the spec is in dBA, so A-weighted. I'm unclear what that means for bass frequencies, considering that weighting rolls off below 1kHz, not to mention the effect of Fletcher-Munson equal loudness curves.

 

[bmc0]

I'm assuming that 115dB spec is for peaks.

Yes, and only for the LFE channel which is +10dB relative to the others. The rest of the channels are supposed to be able to do 85dB average with 20dB of headroom (105dB peaks).

Risk of hearing damage is highest where the ear has the greatest acoustic gain—around 2-4kHz. Frequencies in the LFE range need to be extremely loud to cause hearing damage. Dr. Toole wrote a summary of some of the research which he posted here. A relevant extract:

 

[EJ3]

I don't know who came up with that specification, but I suspect they didn't pay attention to the danger for hearing damage:

https://www.asha.org/public/hearing/loud-noise-dangers/#:~:text=You%20can%20listen%20to%20sounds,can%20damage%20your%20hearing%20faster.

Not a problem in subwoofer frequencies

 

[rdenney]

I have a subwoofer on the HT system, but I live in a home, not a movie theater, and 115 dB SPL (what weighting?—it matters) might knock glassware off the shelves.

And it would get me divorced. And probably arrested if it didn’t live in the country.

I use my floor-standers for music, and not music that is defined by bass. I am a tuba player, so I think I know what acoustic bass sounds like. Good floor-standers can do bass that isn’t purposely made boomy by amplification (like it is for a lot of amplified music in live venues). I have also carted around and mixed Altec A7’s (aka Voice of the Theater) for live bands, so I know what sounds like, too.

Use cases are the basis for requirements, and have to be understood and stipulated along with the requirements.

I just bought a Dayton sub to augment a pair of Canton bookshelf speakers for the playback system on my electronics test bench. It was necessary, to be sure. But I kept turning it down (and the crossover up) until I could no longer hear it as its own source—only then did the music sound acoustic and not amplified. No, I didn’t measure it—I had five minutes to devote to it and just needed basic acceptability.

Rick “subs shouldn’t be conspicuous in the sound—that’s not why they are there” Denney