Getting Good Bass In Your Home Theatre: Subwoofer Placement Tips
If your room allows, experiment with the placement of the couch – you will find that as the distance from your TV changes, so will the amount of bass energy that reaches your ears. Generally, the closer you sit to a wall, the more sound pressure will arrive at your ears and hence you will hear bass with a greater intensity. However bass will also be uneven as you move along the wall – it will alternate between boomy and weak.
Subwoofers are large, heavy and cumbersome to move. It can take a lot of effort to move the subwoofer, then go to couch to evaluate the sound, then move the subwoofer again and repeat this process many times. But there is a much simpler method.
The easiest way to find a sweet spot for the subwoofer is to reverse the roles. Put the subwoofer in your listening position. Move the couch and put the subwoofer in the area where you would normally sit. Then play music with a sustained, deep bass line. Movie soundtracks are not recommended for this purpose because they offer only brief passages of bass. As the music is playing, crawl around the room with your ears close to the floor, listening for the best bass response. Good sounding bass should be tight, have good weight, without sounding overwhelming or boomy, and should have good articulation, instead of playing bass notes which all sound the same. Once you’ve found it, move the subwoofer to that spot and verify that the subwoofer sounds good in your listening area.
Large rooms, common in suburban homes, have a nasty tendency to really consume bass. The best solution to this is to use two subwoofers which will generate enough sound pressure to fill the room. But this solution has another advantage from which smaller rooms will also benefit, if the space permits of course. Using two subwoofers helps to distribute the bass frequencies more evenly throughout the room. Hence you will benefit from a better bass performance in more seating positions in your room.
When using two subwoofers, it is recommended that they are placed in diagonally opposite corners of the room. The front subwoofer’s phase should be set to 0, while the rear one’s should be dialed in to 180. If the bass sounds too boomy with the subwoofers in the corners, try moving them away from the corners. If this doesn’t help, try setting them up in the middle of the front and rear walls, or in the middle of the left and right walls.
It is important to set the right volume level so that the subwoofer blends well with the rest of the speakers. The goal is to find a volume level that works equally well with both movies and music. Start with the volume dial in its mid-way position and listen to some bass heavy CDs and movie passages. Adjust the volume dial slowly up or down until you find a balance that works well. With music, the bass notes should play deep without sounding unnaturally loud or overwhelming. With movies, you’ll know you found the right balance when you don’t have to reach for the remote every time that the movie goes from a quiet scene to an action sequence, and vice-versa. It is generally better to set the subwoofer level too low rather than too high. It is likely that you’ll need to make some finer level adjustments in the next few days after initially setting up your subwoofer.
Further improvements to a subwoofer’s performance can be achieved with acoustic treatment. Start by placing a bass trap in the corner closest to the subwoofer. Then bring another bass trap home and experiment with its location in different corners of the room. Keep adding bass traps and acoustic treatments until someone stops you. If no one stops you, stop yourself if your room starts sounding a little too acoustically dead. You don’t want to turn your home theatre into an anechoic chamber, which is what too much acoustic treatment will result in.
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