One or Two Sub Woofers?

[teamh3]

I want to add a sub woofer to my system and have a general question.

Is there anything gained, other that loudnest, by having two sub woofers instead of one?

Currently I have a pair of Adam S3A's.

Thanks in advance!

[lvjazzman]

Pretty much just loudness, unless you have a large space to fill (large control room/ listening area). More often than not, one is plenty.

[Ed Belknap]

Originally posted by lvjazzman
Pretty much just loudness, unless you have a large space to fill (large control room/ listening area). More often than not, one is plenty.

I'm going to respectfully disagree. There has been extensive research into the behavior of multiple subwoofers by some esteemed acousticians, most notably Floyd Toole and Todd Welti at Harmon International. (See http://www.harman.com/wp/pdf/multsubs.pdf for Welti's comprehensive results.)

The biggest advantage of multiple subwoofers is that you can get a more even low frequency response across a larger seating area. By physically locating 2 subs on either side of the room nodes formed by standing waves, you can effectively get that null to cancel out, smoothing out the room response.

[lvjazzman]

That more or less was what I was saying about the amount of room volume to fill. By a large space to fill, I meant larger than most peoples home studio stuffed in a closet in their bedroom. The examples given at the link were in a 20X24X9 rectangular room. That is a very large room volume (cu. Ft.) wise. It also was done in a room with no treatments. Listening position was said to be in the center or more toward the back, and they were looking at average response at 16 locations. All this sounds like a great home theater situation, not necessarily a recording control room situation. If a smaller room is treated acoustically to minimise room nodes at one single listening position, I don't think is is as important to have a large number of subs. Good reading none the less.

[michaelhoddy]

Is it even feasible to try to treat a small room at really low (below, say 55 Hz) frequencies to minimize room modes? Not sure it is, given that the smaller room will be struggling to reproduce those frequencies to begin with, even in a perfect modal environment.

[lvjazzman]

Very true. It all depends on room size and of course if it is dedicated to one purpose, or if it has to be used for multiple purposes... sleeping by day, recording by night...