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Two subwoofers in smallish HT room?

My home theater system is set up in a 16x11x8 ft room. I currently have one line-level HT subwoofer in the front-right corner. It's a very good subwoofer (Vandersteen V2W), but it needs to play pretty loud to produce good LFE. When it plays loud, it seems to localize.

I've been thinking about getting a 2nd sub and locating it near, but not in, the back left corner of the room in an attempt to smooth out bass response and give me the opportunity to turn down the volume on the front sub.

Does this make sense, or will it make in-room bass response worse? Is the room too small for two subs?
rex
rex OP
245 posts
 
Thanks for all the input! Looks like I will have to invest in a second sub for my room. More than two subs in the room isn't feasible purely from a space standpoint, unfortunately.

I'm quite curious as to why the there is a strong recommendation for two identical subs though. I guess I was kind of hoping I could get away with a smaller, less expensive sub as the second sub - a matching sub wouldn't be outrageously expensive, but it isn't cheap either, and these subs are LARGE. What would be the major disadvantages of non-identical subs?
goinbroke
105 posts
 
Eldartford,

"I tend to think of subwoofers as just another driver of the speaker system, so that each speaker should have its own colocated SW. I have three for my front channels, and would have two for the rears if I thought that the rear LF response was a problem."

It is my opinion that a truer sentence has never been spoken. Now if I could just find room to put a center channel sub...
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Sogood51...My observation of bass boom when there was an out of phase speaker in the rear did not involve subwoofers or crossovers. Just plain vanilla speaker systems.

I bet that Rives mention of killing room modes with a rear subwoofer involved driving the two subwoofers in phase with each other.
gregm
3,021 posts
 
Wy on earth would one drive stereo subs channels out of phase? They would cancel at some frequencies and add at others, surely...
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Gregm...If the two out-of-phase SW are physically half a wavelength apart they will add at that frequency. I guess some people use this to boost the SW SPL. My point is that if this distance between SW is the length of the room that frequency is already boosted by the room, and cutting it by a rear located inphase SW makes more sense to me..
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