"Erik Squires" wrote in message
vers.com

Remember, the room is extremely important in bass response also.

Point well taken.

If your going to go through that much trouble, make sure you aren't
making a subwoofer that goes too far down for the room response.

Tain't no such thing! However, very small rooms can add bass boost at the
lowest frequencies, leading to a sort of woofy, thuddy sound. This means you
need less bass response at low frequencies, not no bass response.

or, get an eq.

Probably a good idea, regardless.

Since you brought up eq Erik, there is a trend in subwoofer design that I
don't see covered very often, but is quite valid and involves heavy use of
equalization. The basic idea is to put the subwoofer driver in a
minimally-sized cabinet which of course produces an elevated bass cutoff
frequency. Then you just add bass boost to restore the desired low frequency
response.

This approach usually requires far more amplifier power than the large box
approach. Therefore, it also requires subwoofer drivers with voice coils
that can take far more power. The best modern subwoofer drivers are up to
it. You might call this approach the "Sunfire" approach, although they
really don't really do it *right*.

You might think that this approach causes increased distortion at the lowest
frequencies, but as long as you don't have problems with amplifier
distortion, it doesn't have to be a problem. The distortion produced by most
subwoofers at low frequencies is primarily due to Xmax, and this approach
doesn't cause any more cone motion than occurs in larger boxes. Due to the
small box and small volume of trapped air, much more force is required to
obtain the cone motion, but that's generally not a problem as long as the
amp and the voice coil are up to handling the increased power levels.

Simply put, this approach trades clean amplifier power which now exists in
abundance for relatively low prices, for enclosure size. BTW, Sunfire is not
the only manufacturer capitalizing on this approach, and it has been long
described in the technical literature.