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Another benefit is that you now have two drivers (antinodes) physically separated. This will tend to break up the room modes and make them more complex, resulting in less severe peaks and nulls.
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I definitely see how the SBIR effect would get smoothed out by two subs, but room modes? So you double the energy. On the SBIR side, you scatter the energy over different peaks, resulting in flatter behavior there. But the energy at room modes will be doubled as well (albeit perhaps distributed a little differently over the harmonics). And they will resultingly become greater in proportion to the SBIR pattern, which I think would result in an even more uneven response (assuming that the speakers were placed in order for the SBIR pattern to mitigate modal response).
Uh oh, I feel that old familiar head pain that I used to get in math class.
Brad, would you mind posting curves of your room with and without the sub? Maybe moving 'em around a couple times, too?
I was into the the method that the guys at
etfacoustic.com recommend for speaker placement. Their logic is sound regarding how far away the grid points should be. You would think that this would be the best way to get that sub nice and flat. What method did you use for placing your 1st sub?
The reason I'm really wanting to get to the bottom of this is that I am trying to figure out my next monitoring system move. I want to get the bass right as first priority because bass masking affects everything up the frequency chain pretty dramatically from a psychoacoustics perspective. If i don't have the bass right, i might as well mix on a My First Sony. I was thinking about going with some sort of a sub system, like dyn BM stuff, because being able to move the sub around allows you to treat the imaging as a separate issue from the modal/SBIR response issue. If I have more choices as to where to put the bass driver (because it isn't going to affect imaging) then I can potentially get a flatter bass response. Is this kooky thinking? I also plan on moving around in unpredictable small spaces in NYC. So that bass management problem is like magnified by a thousand.
Right now I'm using (don't laugh) Event 20/20bas because when I shopped around they sounded very similar to the genny 1031s, which were all the rage at the time. I'm looking to spend as much as roughly 3gs on a system now, to bump me up to the next tier.