Bass absorbers are important/most effective at the boundaries in a room/studio… floor/wall, ceiling/wall and corners. Bass absorbers or traps stop bass build up and resonances.
Professional bass absorbers are typically designed for these boundaries. Some of the new absorbing materials are very effective and have greater space/absorption efficiency. I have personally had good success with GIK Acoustics.
In my experience addressing room sound issues massively transforms your hifi… far more than any electronics can do… including so called ‘room DSP’… you notice pace, dynamics, timbres, details, presence that you had not noticed before, as they might have been all smeared out.
One would think so, but this seems fairly rare in regular home hifi. There are subs that take the full range signal and filter it to send sub bass to the subwoofer and send the remaining frequencies to your main speakers or there are active crossovers that split the signal from the preamp.
Rel seem to take a different approach. When I spoke to them a few years ago they insisted that main speakers and sub should both be fed a full range signal, leaving the sub to process that signal itself.
I can see an argument for the a full bandwidth signal going to the sub… but not so the main drivers…you are likely going to need to tailor the main drivers to avoid horrible interactions… unless perhaps the bass drivers have a relatively high and steep bass cutoff… perhaps 80 Hz or higher… but then I would imagine other issues…
Anyway each to their own, and let’s be honest many of us I suspect have heard some über hifi replay systems where clearly the owner is immensely proud and satisfied, but to us it sounds a mess, false and un natural we have to avert our eyes so as not to appear rude.
And re DSP, it can certainly improve some things, but cannot fix all and unless people know what they’re dealing with, attempting to do so potentially can be destructive to speakers. But used after whatever acoustic treatment is achievable in a room can improve things further, and even where no treatment is possible it may be far better than nothing, provide used with care, mainly cutting peaks and with only very limited boosting of dips.
I had a REL Stygian sub around 30 years ago but could never get it set up properly.
I remember thinking I had it perfect then played Peter Gabriel’s “Up” and the deep bass on that was overpowering. Adjusted the gain to that LP then everything else seemed lacking again.
I remember speaking to Richard Lord(?) and him explaining the need to underpin the sound and not overpower the main speakers. I just found the gain setting to underpin the sound needed to be different for many records.
Not tried one since so it could easily have been those electronics, with those speakers in that room that stopped it working properly. Different electronics, speakers and room now and lack of bass is not an issue.
Connected to the speaker terminals a sub amp’s input presents negligible load on the power amp. However it should be recognised that the connecting cable potentially could alter the capacitance and/or inductance “seen” by the power amp, which under som circumstances could be significant. A cable with a high capacitance and inductance relative to the speaker cable would have least effect, with capacitance possibly being the more significant parameter.
i see, perfect position for single person listening in your system.
I need to sit in the “middle” of two-seat sofa due to very limited setup in small room of my 2nd system.
By chance i have just borrowed a T5x from a dealer today. I’ve just moved house and have a larger lounge. In this new room my system sounds more detailed and open, but the bass is a bit lacking.
I’m still playing with the various knobs etc, but overall I like what it does.
Now I’m wondering what better REL subs sound like (I love the sharp isobaric bass sound from the kudos), or two REL subs sound like?
I really wouldn’t call those speakers full range, at least not playing reasonably loud. 17 cm drivers won’t really do it. I wonder if the 28hz is an in room measurement? My Spendors had 2 18cm bass drivers + 1 18 cm midrange. They claimed 27hz. They were very slim sounding compared to my Gold Notes which goes down to 30hz. The Gold Notes sound like full range. There is no comparison really.
My guess is that the difference in real life in an average room between a T-sub and an S-sub by REL is dwarfed by the difference a properly placed pair of T-subs vs. no subs makes!
In my little experience with subs, at normal listening volumes, the output is so low that I think I’d be hard-pressed to hear the difference between a T and an S. Conjecture of course as I’ve never heard them side-by-side like this however.
Prefacing this by saying I am only guessing, not having studied this particular aspect, but based on pretty detailed awareness over the decades of different speaker designs, sound quality and cost: For bass of comparable sound quality to the rest of the spectrum from main speakers that don’t go low, and assuming twin subs, I wouldn’t be at surprised if I had to spend something of the order of magnitude of the cost of the main speakers, more with main speakers not going low at all, and perhaps less if is only the bottom octave or so where they are weak.
But that is certainly not to say that you might not get an enjoyable improvement in sound for less.
