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Bass is hard

Posted by tomservo (M) on October 25, 2024 at 06:32:46

In Reply to: Sorry posted by E-Stat on October 25, 2024 at 05:49:59:

The sad part for loudspeakers is that if one had a magic wand and could make any driver parameters imaginable instead of what is limited by physics, one still finds that the sensitivity, the -3dB lf corner and cabinet volume area all tied together.

Pick two and the third is determined.

Worse, sensitivity sells, switching between two speakers, the louder one is often chosen.
BUT if you had the same cubic volume cabinet but you wanted a different alignment with the -3dB point to be an octave lower, you have lowered the best case sensitivity about -9 to -12dB. No way around this.

A wise person in audio (Don Davis) once coined (best as i remember) the only free lunch in audio is when you can take advantage of the room gain slope.
To best do this, one needs a sealed box subwoofer with the resonance at around the frequency of the rooms 1/2 wavelength.

IF this is done, one can get in room bass response flat with no eq into mid single digits.

It's easy to do this in a room as small as a car cabin and is why one can have a small sealed box that (in the car) goes down WAY below resonance, you are in the pressure mode below about 50Hz where you have this gain. This is also why vented boxes are rarely used in car audio, the sealed alignment is perfect for the size of the sealed car cabin..

This is not the same "room gain" that turns a speaker with flat response close up to a sloped response that Floyd Toole and others have found to be ideal / preferred at the listening position, that is tied to directivity as well as response.

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