How to integrate subs with full range speakers 

Thanks for answering my question!!

After hearing your advice previously, I run a pair of double impacts with A pair of Rels connected high level. It was a huge difference.

Love your show Paul. Can’t wait for the book!!

I've found that even if my full-range speakers are rated down to 30 or 40 Hz, there may be a spot at which they do not handle the low frequencies as gracefully as can a good subwoofer (emphasis on "good"). Thus, I will experiment with differing crossover points even with full-range speakers. I'm just careful to not set the crossover above what the subwoofer can most gracefully handle.

I just hope that when I go to your store you will be available.It will be a pleasure meeting you

Thanks so much for this info. !!!

Good video and informative thank you 👍🏼✌🏼 From England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

TDL produce or produced speaker that went down to 15Hz in room..They were transmission line and hell they were incredible especially at imaging :-)

Interesting tip I'll give that a go

Paul, do you recommend a pair of Subs or will one sub typically suffice?

But what about positioning of the sub should it be pointed straight forward pointing down to the floor pointing up to the ceiling or even pointing to the back wall

As we leave the idea that the IRS is the best. We focus on a smaller speaker with 1 subwoofer ,1 midbass driver, and several ribbon mids and tweeters. How can this reach high spl with low IM?

Agreed. I have always tried to set my speaker system to MY ear. Everyone’s ear is different

Everyone one of these videos are awesome!

If you're testing a sub to find out where to put it, the best thing to do is to install a signal generator app (PA Tone is a good one) on your smartphone/tablet (or you have an actual tone generator), hook the phone/tablet up to your system, open said app and set a lowish frequency using sine and then do the sub crawl after you set the sub at your listening position.

Let me get this straight: Paul would not add another sub to his loudspeaker built-in sub?! Wow, that's so bold!

i'm having some trouble tuning my sub to the mains. i'll try the listening position technique but svs ultra 16 weights 125 lbs , need some help i think, thanks Paul

Mine say they go down to 40. Can’t wait to add a sub to my setup.

There is a trend in motion pictures at present, especially sci fi amd space films, you’ll hear some gargantuan ludicrously oversized behemoth of a piece of gear, hogging its way onto the screen, and so as this beast makes its movements, the animation is reinforced by this warbally, reverberating bass sort of sustained to almost a drone of a sound. One that almost is too low to be a real sound but instead a combination of very low and practically inaudible LFO effecting on an audible tone to where the artifacts are slowly peeling away the sound from your ears and transferring them to your spine. I don’t think these types of sounds had ever been implemented so often before the year 1998 or so, and so I think of it as a trend. But it does remind me of those old colored chrome cassette tapes that they used to sell for testing your bass in your car’s audio system. Those ‘bass tapes’ are really great and I miss them.

I'm getting a null at around 50Hz, no matter where I place it in my (small) room. Adjusting the (continuous) phase setting doesn't fix it. I'm getting the same null even with just my mains (without the sub). Does this make any sense? Any suggestion is appreciated.

My 6Pi corner horns measure 4dB down at 18 Hz...

Room Corner Loaded Subwoofers Work Quite Nicely as you Basically have 3 Radiating Surfaces for the Subwoofer to Emanate from!!! Level, Crossover & Phasing of the Subwoofer should be such that the Subwoofer "disappears" and doesn't interfere with the imaging of your main speakers!!!

No mention of time alignment. I’ve never heard a properly aligned sub in a home hifi system. Been to RMAF a few times and no one’s subs are in time. A low pass filter adds delay and without delaying the main speakers back to it the lower octaves will be lethargic. The lower the frequency and steeper the slope the more delay is induced. If you wan your subs to become part of the system and not smear transients in the LF then time alignment is a must.

How the hell did you then set up the subs of the IRS5? Moving them around in the room seems pretty cumbersome.

not really hi fi but my new pa rig is turbosound and my 18 subs and every size of mains are factory set so you can tell the sub that there is a matched 15, 12, 10, or 8 on top and the full range can be crossed over to either the matching 15, or 18 sub.... no guessing!! the i,age out front sounds great and unlike a lot of shitty dj's and live sound guys; i don't have to "guess" with my subs...

I've heard of that method before. My only concern would be the inconvenience of having the sub sitting in front of the front door or stairway.

If you haven't dealt with the room modes you will never get the sub/mains to integrate right, or the bass to be right in general. Phase alignment/harmony/integration is also key. If you set the sub volume as Paul says, so you don't hear the sub but it is there fortifying the rest of the sound, then it can be placed anywhere in the room that happens to be that loudest bass spot Paul talks about finding by putting the sub in you listening chair.

First things first: I LOVE your videos !!!! Second: out of ALL the many subwoofer videos you've posted......none of them that I've seen so far have laid out EXACTLY how you wire them up??? I understand that you prefer high level (speaker) connection, but you never say how to do it ?? Do you run parallel speakers from your amp's output to your mains and also to your sub?? Or do you run wires to your sub...and then out of your sub's output to your mains?? Or do you run wires from you A speaker output to your mains, and run your B speaker outputs to your sub??? HELP !!!!!!!!!

What if I have 2 subs? How can I integrate them easily into my room?

I think it's possible to get a passive speaker to go down to 20 hz, but it would have to equalised (with the crossover) in such a way to make the speaker ridiculously inefficient. And you would have to cut everything else down to match the feeble 20 hz output. But it still would be more efficient than an electrostatic speaker. lol Powering the deep bass sounds separately solves the problem, without making the passive speakers ridiculously inefficient.

I'm going to raise a VERY good question now.... IF you are gonna add a sub to your two full range speakers, should it be imperative that they are NOT ported types ? The reason I've raised this is because in ported enclosures there is a massive acoustic phase shift right on that LF tuning point . Whereas in sealed enclosures this severe phase shift ( swing ) is very minimal . So with minimal phase swing it is much easier ( and very much better audibly ) to adjust the phase control on the sub .

i think i used a pink noise generator and played it through my main speakers and turned the volume up until i reached 85db, then i turned on my sub and adjusted it until my spl meter went to 86db, then dropped it down a bit till it was back at 85db and voila, sub and main speakers match

I bet you needed some help hoisting those IRS subs into your listening seat. LOL

To even achieve 20htz in a room, doesn't it have to be quite large for the sound wave to even hit in the room? Back in the 1990's Paradigm made the Servo 15 that made the claim to hit 10htz. Having heard it and other sub's like Rel's, Velodine 1812, and JL Audio Gotham's; I would believe it. Can't wait till PS Audio releases their new speakers, the expectations are growing.

Paul didn’t address the situation of using a sub to pair with satellite speakers, which is at least as important as using them with large speakers that go down to the bottom octave. I don’t agree with him to leave the mains alone, especially with smaller speakers that only go down to maybe 50Hz or so. Besides adding low end, subs are really important for lowering distortion from the main speakers. I very much recommend the use of an active crossover set no higher than 100Hz to keep the lows out of the mains which are already doing a lot of work. The crossover ought to be pretty high order to really rolloff those lows to the mains, 24dB/octave crossovers are pretty standard.

Rythmik Audio are true servo subs. They blow most of the more expensive stuff out of the water if you're an audiophile.

When watching movies, there's times you will hear the base coming from the subs no matter how well you have them blended with your speakers.

From my experience you can’t set up a sub optimally with ears only. Doing the adjustment with measurement equipment is far superior and your ears will agree. Ears are so insensitive at bass frequencies that you may be shocked how off your settings done by ear can be. I’m a fan of Rythmik Audio. I actually prefer them over the accelometer based servo subs.

I tend to disagree that speakers should always be allowed to operate full range when connected to a subwoofer. Often your stereo speakers are most stressed in the bass causing an increase of harmonic distortion due to wind noise, cone breakups and lack of linearity at near max cone excursion. When playing loud with your smaller stereo speakers outputting bass under 100Hz will often yield a poor bass performance compared to what the subwoofer can do. The ideal cross-over filtering depends on the exact speaker and subwoofer combination and in some cases the bass performance is good enough from your stereo speaker to let it through unfiltered.

Very carefully! I have a pair of mains that go down to 45 Hz. From their up is where the magic happens! But for lower bass I use a sub built by the same shop as my mains. Now these guys weren't your average schlubs. But they weren't as Uber high end as Paul's stuff. My sub goes from 120 Hz down to 23 Hz @-3 db. But the slope is very flat. In fact at 20 Hz it may be only at -4 or -5 db. -5 would be a stretch. To be honest, 23 Hz and below is nothing but flutter. It's not musical. If the music was recorded with that low end flutter in it, then you want to reproduce that. But if not, 23 Hz to 20 Hz isn't anything to worry about. So I cross my sub at 50 Hz, and use the volume control to bring in just so it blends in to the 45 -3 db point of my mains, which are ported. My sub is a sealed box with a Q of .81. That creates a rise in volume just before it starts to roll off. So when I blend it in with the mains it's provides a very natural sounding bass. As for ported subs, well, after hearing what mine does I wouldn't use one unless the -3db point was at 20 Hz or below. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth it to me. With a sealed cabinet like mine 20 Hz is still very audible! Now I know the guys who built my speakers very well. I've known them for well over 30 yrs. And I know that when they built my mains, a Coda Amplifier rep came into their store looking for someone to sell their amps. So my buddies hooked up their best amp to the speakers I bought as my mains, ( out of absolute dumb luck I happened to have stopped by that day on a mission to find replacements for the speakers I had built my self with drivers I bought from these guys). The sales rep sat in the main listening room, where my speakers on display, and after a few minutes he got up and walked out of the room. As for myself, there was no way I was giving up my prime seat, and continued on with the audition for a replacement speaker. After a few minutes on a phone call, the came in and offered my friends a spot in the booth where they were selling their amps at CES that year. Coda offered them half of their space at the booth for CES as long as they allowed Coda to use their speakers to demo their amps. That wasn't the thing that sold me on their speakers. Neither was twenty yrs of friendship at the time. It was all about the quality of sound they managed to get! And they did just that. So I was the first buyer of the Celestial Audio Sirius Speakers along with the matching Phobos Subwoofer in, well, the world. Only 3 pairs of those speakers were produced solely because Focal redesigned the drivers before any more could be built, but several were under the Sirius 2 designation. I haven't had the chance to compare the two versions but I'm sure I would still be happy with the results. At the time when these were being developed I also listened to the top of the line Kef's, B&W's, Martinlogan, and Carvin along with Magna Planars and anything else I could find in the Phoenix area. None sounded as good as the Sirius speakers I bought. And that took many auditioning sessions to come to that conclusion. And when I pared them up with the Phobos sub, the only thing I would have done different would be to find a center channel speaker as good as the Sirius, and buy another pair of Sirius speakers along with a second aphobos for the rear of the room to set up the worlds best surround sound system!

Focal’s Grande Utopias have a -3 at 18hz and -6 at 14.

I would love to know your opinion on loudspeakers made out of concrete, anyone here on the comments as well please.

Full-range Bass no sub- ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-hIwZjJanXag.html

Hi Paul. People are always mentioning how after a certain age the human ear can't hear above a certain frequency anymore. I've heard that 18k is quite high to be able to hear, and I've heard that 14-15k is average for a middle aged man like myself. But the thing is, it's only about FOUR semitones from 18khz down to 14 or 15. Just a couple notes' difference! So how much difference does it really make? I don't think my hearing is much, if AT ALL, worse than it was when I was in training decades ago, what do you think?

I think those who come from well set-up home cinema set-ups have a better natural understanding of the proper role of a subwoofer. A subwoofer should never (rarely) ever be 'heard' - however what it does do, when set up properly - is add *atmosphere & presence*. You can't put your finger on it - but turn the sub off - & 'something is missing' - even to the untrained ear. If your sub is indeed being heard - you have set its crossover too high. This in turn can be 'forced' on one, when the main speakers don't actually go low enough - people then try to fill that gap with the sub, thus creating all the wrong settings on the sub. The solution here instead, is main speakers which meaningfully go low enough to where the sub can correctly take over, say 100Hz & lower.

In case anyone doubts a pair of 6.5's can play bass notes, I can attest they exist and sound good to a basshead.

I've been building bass speakers for many years, and I have never seen a driver that will operate flat down to 20 Hz regardless of the alignment, that is, without additional equalization. The speakers I build will go down into the upper 20's, and I would argue that is about as good as anyone could ever imagine having, and I suggest that most of us cannot hear the difference btw two speakers of the same design, one with an f3 of 28 Hz, and the other with an f3 of 20 Hz. So if we can get down to the upper or mid 20's, that's all one needs.

Hello sir. About your videoes. I dont know if i´ve ever commented on them before. But i really like your videoes and the way you say things. I got no experience in your area but i do think ful range speakers are BS. At least for most if they claim to go down to a certain heartz and then cant. I decided to go with M&K´s S150 serie and i added 3 subs. Ofc the S150 can´t play deep but holly bib. But when combined with subs, they are a blast. I did place my subs in the center chair. And i pretty much was lucky to be able to place them each in their own corner. I think i got great sound now. But i am stil waiting for my hifi shop dealer friend to come put his final touch on my system. Can i ask you what your take on KEF´s Q950 speakers are. Because i myself are blown away by them. Only be a 2½ way speaker and put this much bass out. My vinyl collection have come to life again with a pair of Technics 1200mrk7 turntables. Yes, i used to DJ back in the 80´s and 90´s. So before coming a soldier in 96. I packed away my records for safe keeping. And now retired army. I can enjoy my music while the world is falling apart. Kind of ironic isnt it. Anyway. All the best. Lets not forget how good sound is for our bodies. The right hertz can heal us. 432 for one.

Please, how can I apply this to car audio or is it even possible to since I can't put my subwoofer box where my listening position is. please and thank you.

just bought firs subs .and they really work-doubt audiofilic sikness.no subs.nonsense

Good speakers is all you need , all in phase .

You should take a look at the 55 year old KEF B139, you don't have to imagine anything

One thought for not rolling the mains is the speaker is designed to used as intended without a sub. That means its design was compromised to have the lowest possible response. The mid bass suffers a little when trying to go for the lows. As Paul is trying to create a speaker with the sub included, this is the true way of doing a sub. To be designed from the beginning. To me, adding a sub to a speaker that was not designed from the beginning is something less than best. Like putting big wheels and tires on a truck. Throws off gear ratio, wind resistance, center of gravity, etc. It works but, In the end, a subwoofer that compliments the mains will be the final destination. Not an add on.

The positioning technique you describe is what I call 'Node reversal' (probably wrong, but hey) that's how I set up my REL Q50 and it sounds great, really integrates seamlessly with the mains, I use the high level inputs (speakon) for music and LFE (phono) for films, it's one of those crappy twin voice coil units but does me just fine, took about 2 days until I was happy with the positioning and levels but we'll worth spending the time, My cat used to love sleeping on top of it (even through my Orbital/Crystal method/Underworld phase in the 90's/early 2000's) which was highly amusing until she recently decided to use the cone as a scratching post, totally fragged it :-( can anyone give advice on re-coning a Q50? I can't afford a better sub and I'm rather attached to it

letting the fullranges go down that low isn't a good idea. there's going to be a lot of excursion leading to higher intermodulation distortion and lower dynamic headroom. all you need for the sub to blend is to cross them over regardless of the frequency as long as it's not higher than 100 Hz. and the most important thing is the crossover has to be a single unit for the whole system. with multiple crossover networks, there's a good chance it's going to be a mess. lowpassing the sub could work if its filter happens to match the existing crossover's characteristics but there's a good chance it doesn't, it's kinda like tossing a coin here. because if it doesn't, there's going to be a phase shift problem.

At 6:07 the clock goes to 13:37 :)

Walk around or crawl around? That is called the subwoofer crawl.

First comment

Thanks for repeating the question for half the time as usual and then some oh. So it seems there is no difference in integrating with full range speakers. It is like just adding a subwoofer. I guess this will not work at all. You will have cancellations between the speakers and the sub. Perhaps a crossover has to be introduced here.

" most speakers dont play down to 18hz , thats why i am a big fan of subwoofers" My subs do just that BROTHER! You need to sit in my truck bud for the "BOSTON ACCOUSTIC"BASS DROP .I hit a 157db at 30hz before, but 156.6 at 30 is more constant for me . i did do a musical 1 minute run on the meter last Saturday at Demo Wars car show and had a score of 149.9 dbs on a 1 minute rolling average .