Sub Woofers Options

[Saoirse O'Shea]

People here have beeb asking if adding a sub can help with a lack of bass in their monitoring. Each time I've suggested that they be careful as they can introduce more problems then they solve. Just to add to that here's a quote from a forum post by Hugh Robjohns, the technical editor of Sound on Sound:

''subwoofers can cause more problems than they solve very easily and I would suggest some very careful thought before commiting.

Subs in a movie system perform a very simple role. They just have to make loud bangs. Tunefullness isn't important. Standing waves in the room aren't relevant. Subwoofer distortion doesn't matter. So it's easy to make an impressive difference in that situation.

In a music system, though, the performance of the sub is dominated by the room modes -- standing waves. It doesn't matter how good the sub is, if your room has untreated mode issues -- and all rooms do -- then the LF response will be hugely lumpy with some musical notes booming out and others almost non-existent. So unless you have sufficient well designed bass trapping in the room the sub is unlikely to perform very well and is more likely to be misleading than helpful.

Next, budget subs tend to produce a lot of harmonic distortion because getting low-distortion bass costs a lot of money in terms of driver and cabinet design. Harmonic distortion arising from a 40Hz low bass will produce energy at 80, 120, 160 200hz and so on... smearing right through the lovely clean midrange of your main monitors. So adding a poor sub will often reduce the clarity of your monitoring system rather than improve it.

And then even with a really good sub you have to get the set up absolutely right in terms of crossover point, level, phase and positioning. None of these are trivial.''

So as I've said elsewhere if you need to use a sub make sure that you have it properly matched to your system and installed correctly. If you don't you will introduce more problems than you solve.

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