I just completed a new addition (family room) in my home. In it, I plan to have my home theater set up on one end, and on the other end, a bar/lounge area.
The room is approx. 14.5 feet x 39 feet (565 sq. ft), long and rectangular. It has cathedral ceilings and tile (no rug or sound absorption). For speakers, I have a Niles system containing 2 in-wall speakers, a center in-wall speaker and 2 in-ceiling speakers for the "theater portion" of the room. By the bar (the other end), I will have only 2 in-ceiling speakers on a separate channel.
My fear is that the bass frequency will get lost in such a big area if I set the sub woofer on the side of the wall where the front speakers (and TV) will be. Do I need another sub woofer by the bar area as well? I think the distance of cables would also kill the performance of an additional sub woofer across the other end of the room.
What advice do you all have for such a large room, and the concern of losing the bass for reverberation and other factors?
Good thick subwoofer interconnects cost maybe $50 for about 25 feet.
The main problems of bass response in a room is due to frequency nulls or blooms (ringing) that are inherent in your room acoustics. Ie. the interaction between the subwoofer and the room. Of course, if you play your music or movies loud you can have inadequate bass performance by having a subwoofer that isn't capable of moving enough air without breaking up or just being limited by internal circuits.
The best way to ameliorate any nulls or ringing in a room is with an EQ device. Some subwoofers have these built in and some are sold as outboard units. Velodyne makes an outboard unit for $600 and Onix has a unit (R-Des) for $300. The Velodyne unit is more robust and comes with the microphone. Often you can have one or two nulls and even a ringing frequency or two. With a multi-band parametric EQ device you can flatten the frequncies to improve the speakers performance. Of course, using too much EQ can cause other problems, so it should be used judiciously.
Ultimately what you get boils down to your budget, your playing levels, and the amount of deep bass you want. The SVS PB12Plus costs between $900 and $1200 (depending on finish). It gives excellent performance down to 20 Hz and even includes one parametric band to tame the most egregious frequency problem in the room. If you need more correction you would need to buy an outboard EQ device, as mentioned earlier.
If you don't need to plum the absolute deepest bass, you can try Onix UFW12 at $1099 (in beautiful rosewood) and comes with the R-Des. They sell a pair of these with the R-Des at $1999.
The Onix doesn't quite plum the deepest bass as well as the SVS model, but for most people it is plenty.
On more of a budget, HSU (online) makes excellent subwoofers, as does Outlaw Audio (in conjuntion with Dr, Hsu--and also online). The better models run from $500-$800. They are great for 95% of listeners.
You might start with one subwoofer and see if it meets your needs. You can always double up later.
Joe, I use 2 subs in my room. Now mind you, these are older, cheap subs driven by a dedicated Technics receiver. I have the subs pointed at the fronts across the room and the results are varied depending on the type of movie. For blow up stuff, the bass directed at the mains works very well to cancel the residual 'ring' of the mains as they roll off about 35Hz or so. For music, I point the subs off about 20 degrees, and let them push the bass towards the center of the room, no target intended, but they converge at an open part of the room to avoid 'booming'. The 2 subs have equal length cords of course. Dual subs in a room that size sounds like a fine plan, be sure to leave enough cord to move them around a bit.
For a short time I had a pair of Mirage S12s in my 6000 cubic foot living room and yes I have to say it was great. (Unfortunately the wife made me take one of them back to Tweeter.)
Harman Kardon has a white paper somewhere on their website about subwoofer placement and the issue of having multiple subs. Pretty lengthy, dry and technical---about 25 pages if I'm not mistaken, but what I do remember is that they found that the optimal positioning of dual subs is to have one sub about midpoint between the front mains with the second sub facing it from across the room against the opposite wall.
For extra long subwoofer cable look on eBay, all you need is a single shielded RCA cable.
I have read the paper eddie was talking about twice. It actually was trying to determine the optimal number of subs. The answer, gfrankly, was four, BUT the improvement from two to four was minor. SO two was the practical answer, However, the poster up there discussing nulls and voids, placement, and EQ has the right idea for sure. Your room is HUGE. Placement is key. The UFW-12, as a sealed sub, cannot fill that room well and will have trouble generating the SPLs of some other choices. I'd personally look at the HSU vtf-3 HO ( with the turbo). It will do it in that room. Also, the Axiom EP-500 is another one that will cut the mustard. The SVS pb Ultras and Plus have been and are being extensively tested agaianst the other two and are coming up just a tad short, as the balance between boominess/SPL/and detail/articulation is falling behind the other two, although there is great tension on this issue in several online forums. I dont ANY of these products but have demoed the SVS offereings and the HSU 3 HO in detail. I am basing my axiom EP 500 ratings on cpomparative graphs and threads I have printed out for reference.
All this being said, not too long asgao the SVS PB Ultra was the reference HT sub in the less than 1500 dollar range for subs.
There is a model called the SV PB Ultra/2. This is one powerful baby and dry cleaned my pants while I was listening to the cannon scene in MAster and COmmander at CES in January.
I own two subs as well but in a smaller room and they blow the doors off at 50% gain and about +2 on the receiever sub setting ( it goes to plus 12)