Best multi-purpose subwoofer

noble100,

Thanks Tim for your perfect post and this excellent link http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/audiokinesis-swarm-subwoofer-system/

Uncommon around here, I actually clicked the link and read the whole article. Being cursed with excellent long term audio memory every word of that review rings true. I can't enter a large space like a concert hall without immediately being aware of the size of the space by the way it sounds. Even without any sound. The space itself generates its own acoustic signature. Something completely lacking and lost in every single system I have ever heard, regardless of its ability to play impressively low bass. 

Also uncommon around here, I just don't like to go banging my head against the wall, or throwing money down a pit. Which, just how long does it take to try every possible sub location and listen and understand what you said, the single sub solution simply does not exist? Possibly an infinite amount, to judge by the responses to your post. Or an afternoon, if like me you actually do the work and listen (and measure). 

Between reading your post and reading the absolute sound review I actually followed the link erik provided and spent a fair amount of time reviewing various sub designs. Which there definitely are some great ones for getting awesome bass outdoors or in very large rooms. Not in a home. In a home they are all just more head banging and money pitting.

Why don't more people see this?

Oh well. I've got enough experience to know what to discount and disregard and what might actually work. Thanks to you I now for the first time in years have something that might actually work. 

So you helped me, at least.

Thanks!

noble100

I don’t really understand what is meant by pressurizing the room. Can anyone please explain this physical process and its benefits?
I do, however, understand many of the terms and concepts involved related to achieving very good bass response in a given room.

Yes Tim its clear from what you wrote that you do indeed have a good grasp on the situation. Having read everything here its apparent a lot of others would do well to read through your comments carefully, and more than once. And then go and read the referenced work as well.

This is something I’ve been studying for quite a long time, going back to when I built my first transmission line (Roger Sanders, published in Speaker Builder) back in 1980. Like most things I don’t work on it consistently but in fits and starts, which I just happened to be doing recently, and so was really good timing coming across your Swarm experience here. One sold last October and if another one comes up I am on it, otherwise will probably be ordering new some time later on this year.

Pressurizing the room is kind of descriptive but ultimately misleading. The only way the room could truly be pressurized is a closed room with speakers mounted in the walls. Even then it would only be pressurized when the drivers were moving into the room, depressurized when they move the other way. And even then there would still be the time it takes for the waves to propagate. There would still be nodes and anti-nodes.

A lot of what we read about acoustics is like that, descriptive in a way that makes sense, sort of. Actual experience though, like you have with your Swarm, there is nothing like it for turning abstract idea into concrete reality.

Like, we all talk about this stuff with regard to bass, when in reality its not only bass but all frequencies. With bass its in your face obvious. But its across the board.

My listening room is a standard rectangle- 17x24x9. No odd shapes and when first built nothing in it, no furniture, no carpet, no nothing. At one point in fact it didn’t even have sheetrock! I had the unique experience of hearing this space go from framed up to fully treated, and everything in between.

At one point the only "room treatment" was the carpet. Playing a CD with test tones you could clearly hear the distance between the nodes! As the frequency increases the node spacing decreases, some of them down to a few inches, something you can easily hear if you’re ever in a plain room like this. Clap your hands, you could hear it echo back and forth real fast- and even hear the difference between the fast echo lengthwise and the really fast echo crosswise!

Same thing with bass of course, only as you know the wavelengths are so much longer. So one wave doesn’t even have time to generate a full cycle before it could start getting canceled by its own reflection.

Another thing, almost always the talk is about the speaker location. As if that’s all that matters. When in reality (and as you so clearly understand) listener location matters just as much. Anyone who has ever had the experience I have had, of being able to stand where you cannot hear anything at all, then move your head just a very small amount and its loud, would know this. Its not abstract. Its reality.

This is why the Swarm concept is so patently obviously correct to me. Any one speaker/listener setup can never get us where we want to be. It has to be a combination. Its simply physically impossible to eliminate the nodes. So don’t even try. Instead, make enough small ones to seem smooth.

Brilliant.

You old optimist, you!