DirtDawg
Ex Member
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[quote author=HT-EXT link=1134492004/15#16 date=1134574735]My main problem when it comes to bass enclosures is how loud will it play........ Do high output(SPL) enclosures have better low bass, speed , response, room loading even at moderate volumes. I know SPL is not everything but I have a hard time leaving it out. All info gladly appreciated. [/quote] Well ..... that can be a problem, all right. I have seen the oppostite more often than not. In order to get really high SPL, many concessions are made in sound quality. For instance, most cabinet designs that support the lowest bass are somewhat less efficient in the rest of the range they work in.
As far as speed, I think of a compression driver front horn loaded cabinet, because the lowest frequencies are hitting you at the same time as the rest of the spectrum and there is no group delay at all. All ported cabinets show some group delay, which varies as the frequency changes, usually the lower the frequency the more it lags behind the mid-bass frequencies. That's why you have probably heard that sealed cabinets are cleaner and more dynamic, no delay.
Room loading can change drastically just angling a cabinet a few degrees or moving it a few inches. Where you place your subwoofer cabinet probably has more bearing on how your room is loaded than any other single factor. Adding a second source of pressure with another HWK, will not necessarily make the sound any better, but it can certainly alter the location and intensity of nulls and voids in the sound caused by standing waves. Adding, yet another with a WO complicates things even more.
Talking about response, the most perfectly flat responding driver can be made very uneven, tone-wise by placing it into the wrong cabinet and the most perfect cabinet/driver combo can have many peaks in the response in a certain room or room placement.
Another response that comes to mind is transient response and many large Xmax drivers don't do well following rapidly changing waveforms common to music. Of course with Home Theater, many people don't take clarity and sound quality seriously and a large quanty of bass becomes the quality they are looking for. As someone who watches a movie almost everyday over a fairly clean system, I can tell you that many movies don't have clean, well defined low frequency content to start with. Getting those lows off the disk and over to your listening area is not a simple game to play.
Before you get too crazy with adding more and more cabinets in the room, maybe you should try just one House Wrecker iso loaded with 4 drivers and enough power to really drive the thing, then move it around some and try different locations.
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