Subwoofers - Front Firing vs. Downward Firing

I personally like to take two down firing subs, placing one on the ceiling above me- firing down at my head - and another under my chair, firing upwards. This makes me happy.
Anyway, with front firing subs, I like to set two of them on opposing sides of my head like headphones...of course one is set a little louder, cause my wife yells into one ear more than the other...so it balances the sound, and stuff.
BTW, what's a subwoofers?

Shadorne,

Always enjoy your articulate and fact filled responses. I learn something every time...

9rw - home theater based mid-fi? Your ability to read is clearly as bad as your ability to (not) listen.

Here is an anecdotal explanation on why downfiring gives a smoother response in the 100 to 300 Hz range. This is quite an old discovery. The technical explantion is "quarter wave cancellation", which I gave above.

I checked out REL's design (uses downfiring). Richard Lord uses a 12 db/octave filter on the sub amplifier close to the corner frequency of the sub. This is very clever. It allows him to make a small subwoofer sound musical. Small boxes have higher Q (resonance) which is the main cause of HT boomy sound. By rolling off the driver before it hits resonance means that REL can maintain low Q across its output bandwidth even in a small box. The compromise with this design is that the main acoustical output is below resonance and SPL output is limited and distortion will be higher than alterantive designs. The added benefit is that the natural roll off below resonance will tend to integrate better with the in room bass boost and furthermore the 12 db/octave roll off from the amplifier will mate very well with most full range speakers. All this to say, REL makes a sub that will be highly musical (low Q) and one that integrates well with full range main speakers in a convenient small package. It may not kick the proverbial butt of the JL F113 in measurements and pure SPL output but for many audiophiles with full range speakers it may immediately work much better for them in their room from the get go. REL's design is less suitable for use with small satellite speakers. YMMV

Shadorne, you are quite correct about the REL subwoofer designs (or at least the early ones).
Having had a REL Stadium II for 10 years, I found it integrated well with my full-range speakers when run from the main speaker terminals (in other words, allowing the main speakers to still run full range).
When trying to high-pass the main speakers through the REL, the degradation in sound was significant.
The Stadium !!s however, in my room didn't go much below 40 Hz, and when I added the Halcro DM58 Monoblocks to my system, they managed to drive my full-range sealed-box speakers (with 12" paper woofers) down to exactly the same 40Hz?
I now have 2 Vandersteen 2Wq subwoofers with their truly transparent passive high-pass filter and get +- 3dB down to 32Hz.
My room simply won't produce audible sound below this although I do hear pressure waves at 25Hz though probably -10dB?