Dual (Or Multiple) Subwoofers - Part II - Your Questions Answered

Dual (Or Multiple) Subwoofers - Part II - Your Questions Answered

I received a lot of wonderful questions and comments on my last video talking about, you know, thinking about using more than one subwoofer in your home theater system. And I realized from some of the questions that I received that I didn't maybe cover in detail some of the finer aspects of, you know, how you would set up or what you have to have to run multiple subwoofers.

So I'd like to answer a couple of those questions here for the benefit of everyone who might have the same questions. So one astute viewer noticed that when I was talking about examples of more than one subwoofer I had even numbers 2, 4, 10, you know, extrapolate to 100 subwoofers.

And he asked the question, "Well, what about three? Could you use three subwoofers or five subwoofers?" Certainly, you can. The complexity though is when you're looking at placement. And because one thing that I don't believe I mentioned in that video is ideally, for multiple subs, you want to have them reasonably equidistant from the listening position, if at all possible.

And with, you know, three subwoofers assuming that you have your seating position out in the center of the room, certainly, you could have a third sub centered behind the listening position so that you have an equal distance between the subs and to the listening position. Now, this is not going to be overly critical because one of the other things I didn't mention is the more subwoofers that you add into the mix, the less critical having the perfect placement is.

Many of you know about our subwoofer crawl. We'll link it below so that you can see a very interesting method for setting up a sub, where you put the subwoofer where your seating position is, your listening seat, and then you walk around the room or crawl around the room and listen for the smoothest bass and then you place the subwoofer in that position.

Now you can still do that with multiple subs, run each of them at a time with some test tones or music, and set each of them up in the ideal location. But this doesn't bear a lot of importance when you have multiple subwoofers, it's less critical. One thing I would recommend is when you have multiple subs because the goal here is to smooth out the amplitude or frequency response in the room, try not plunking the subwoofers right buried in the corners of the room.

Try and pull them out a little bit if you have the space available. Now one other great question I had is, "Do all of the subwoofers have to be the same, exact same model if I'm going to run multiple subs?" My answer to that was no, not necessarily but I would suggest that you have similar capability subwoofers.

So what you don't want is you know, a tiny little sub, you know, with, let's say, a 6.5-inch woofer in one corner of the room and then a subwoofer with a 12 or a 15-inch woofer and tons of power in the other corner of the room. It's going to be very hard to balance those properly. So look for, if they're not the same model, look for a similar woofer diameter, or woofer size, cabinet size and amplifier power, just so you can make sure that you're going to be able to seamlessly integrate those into your system.

So I hope that those answered some of the questions you had. Keep them coming if there's more. I know this is a topic that actually is gaining an interest strangely enough because I've been recommending it for almost 20 years. If you at all can add just a second subwoofer, and it can make a massive difference.

Keep those comments and questions coming.



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