Smoother bass by running woofer out of phase?

What nags me is whether or not this is the way to solve the problem. I got this idea from owning a Rel sub where they suggest in hooking up the sub out of phase which may reduce bass boom.

Of course it is not correct - you are changing the impulse response significantly. This may be why it sounds more spacious...probably more laid back - less distinct on transients or muddy. The inteference pattern that you create will have a null down the center line of the room (if it is symmetric). A better solution would be tone control or PARC or placement further out into the room. Electrostatics are designed to be placed well out in to a room (less bass reinforcement) and therefore it seems likely that ML's will bass heavy if placed up against a wall.

My room dimension is 13x30. I have the speakers set up on the short wall. The speakers are 5 feet out into the room and 2 feet from the side walls. Listening chair is 9 feet from the center plane of the speakers. The floor is concrete with double wall construction. My ceiling slopes from 10 feet to 7 feet from left to right. Carpeted in the seating area bare painted floor in the speaker end. Perhaps then my only solution will be to applied some sort of EQ in the low freq.region. Thanks guys for your input.

Interesting that you find that it sounds better with the woofers out of phase, in as that back in the early '90s, when Stereophile reviewed the Martin Logan Sequel IIs, that they too found that if they wired the woofer out of phase, that it too sounded better.

Thought you might find that interesting.

The other issue I did not mention will be cancellation or a dip in the crossover region on the one speaker that is wired out of phase.

The ear literally responds slowly at very low frequencies. We cannot hear less than 1 cycle at very low frequencies, and by the time 1 cycle has reached us enough time has elaped that we're past the direct sound and into the reverberant sound. Unfortunately I don't know the (probably fuzzy) cut-off point for this phenomenon. But it can be said that from the standpoint of psychoacoustics, there is no "direct sound" in the deep bass; at least not in the size rooms we typically have at home.

The increase is spaciousness is probably somewhat artificial because very few recordings actually have stereo information below 80 Hz. The ear interprets a low-frequency phase difference at each ear as a sign of very large acoustic space, and that is what is being synthesized by reversing the phase of one of the woofers. Out-of-phase subwoofers placed to the extreme left and right of the listening position will maximize the interaural phase difference and hence the simulated sense of spaciousness. David Griesinger, inventor of the Lexicon processor, advocates this technique.

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