BoredMonkey
Member
A post on r/hometheater has a problem I recognise. Guy runs 7.1.4 with a Klipsch RP-1600 sitting right behind the couch, and by his own account there is plenty of low end and enough nearfield tactile effect to shake the living room. What he is missing is chest punch - the John Wick gunshot, the kick drum landing. His room is over 5,000 cubic feet and open to the basement and the rest of the house, so he is not expecting to pressurise anything, he just wants a bit more. He is weighing two SB-3000 against one SB-5000, and he already knows the standard warning about not mixing ported and sealed.
Two things worth separating here. Slam is not deep bass. That impact you feel in your sternum lives roughly in the 40 to 80Hz band, and a sub that shakes the sofa at 25Hz can be doing very little up there. Before spending anything I would look at the crossover point and how much of that band the mains are actually being asked to carry, because a room that big with a single nearfield sub often ends up with a hole right where punch happens.
The sealed-versus-ported rule is also softer than the internet makes it sound. The issue is phase and group delay in the overlap region, and that is a measurement and time-alignment problem, not a law of physics. People who report it going badly usually ran two dissimilar subs with no measurement at all.
For an open floor plan with no meaningful room gain, my money goes on two subs over one bigger one, mostly for seat-to-seat consistency rather than raw output. But before that: has anyone here found their missing punch was actually the room correction pass pulling the sub trim down after calibration?
Two things worth separating here. Slam is not deep bass. That impact you feel in your sternum lives roughly in the 40 to 80Hz band, and a sub that shakes the sofa at 25Hz can be doing very little up there. Before spending anything I would look at the crossover point and how much of that band the mains are actually being asked to carry, because a room that big with a single nearfield sub often ends up with a hole right where punch happens.
The sealed-versus-ported rule is also softer than the internet makes it sound. The issue is phase and group delay in the overlap region, and that is a measurement and time-alignment problem, not a law of physics. People who report it going badly usually ran two dissimilar subs with no measurement at all.
For an open floor plan with no meaningful room gain, my money goes on two subs over one bigger one, mostly for seat-to-seat consistency rather than raw output. But before that: has anyone here found their missing punch was actually the room correction pass pulling the sub trim down after calibration?
