Do you think you need a subwoofer?

I just moved to new digs in Scottsdale, Az. My stereo rig sounds so different here because of the room. The floors are French limestone blocks, 12 foot ceilings, the room is 14x30 with a totally glass wall on one side, and an open floor plan on the other. The bass is nearly non-existant and the echo is severe. ..sounds like 2 sub-woofers are in order to bolster the Vandersteen 5A's.

Dear Halcro: Yes, I already read it.

What I want point in my last post is that ( at least in my system/room ) the wall subwoofer reinforcement position help to smooth the bass response against an " open " subwoofer position.

The other subject was to re-confirm that the use of subwoofers has to be in true stereo way.

I already point it out that IMHO the most important improvement that we can/could have adding a pair of true stereo way subwoofers is to lower the intermodulation distortion on the main spekaers, in this way you don't only have ( for the first time ) true undistorted low bass response ( that when you hear it for the first time it will be extremly hard to live with out it. ) but you clean up all the whole system frequency response: mid bass, midrange and high frequencies, that give to us several advantages : lower distortion response, lower coloration, higher accuracy response, better dynamics, improve over all the sounstage/imagin/focus, improve on inner detail perception, etc, etc that at the " end of the day " can(could take us nearer to the recording and nearer to the live event.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.

Dear Stringree: Well a not easy room. Adding two subwoofers in real stereo fashion will be help you in many ways but additional to that that room could need some kind of " treatment " trying to even its frequency response and kill those echoes.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.

Sorry Raul I am a bit late to respond, a while back you asked what I cross over my VMPS woofers at on the outboard cross-over and I believe I am at 135HZ as the midrange takes over a bit lower than that.
Since posting my original reply I added a HSU sub but only for HT and it is not tied into tube preamp, I just wanted to roll off woffers at 40hz to not worry about an expensive error just for watching a silly movie.

Thanks Raul. Actually, I had a sound engineer come up. He did a frequency response check of the room which included reflections, and phasing. He suggested putting a soft island suspended from the ceiling the whole room through. Although the room is box-like, he suggested a very large oval shape. He also suggested accoutic floating soffets with indirect lighting, and some kind of treatment for those very large windows (not draperies or anything - they look great as is, but perhaps an accouticaly impenetrable window with 5 thicknesses of glass and a near vaccuum between them. This and other ideas sound good to me - the price is about 30,000 dollars. I suspect that I'll do it in stages.