Hey guys, I just got booked for a house party tmrw night and have a small problem: my sub is 100 miles away. I have a home theater sub I can use, but I want to make sure I don’t wreck it or anything. It’s a 12" active sony wm5000 rated at 150 watts. I know it’s a long shot, but does anyone have any insight as to how this is going to sound paired up with 2 speaker cabinets (each containing a 15, a 4.5, and tweeter) being pushed with a 600x2 amp?
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could make the sub louder without just turning it up? Would some kind of oversized enclosure help with that?
Well, all I really know is that it’ll be in the basement of the house, so there shouldn’t be tooooooooooooooo many people. And I would’ve just used the 2 cabinets without a sub, but it sounds like there’s some kind of HPF on them. For having 2 15"s in there with a 600x2 amp behind them, there doesn’t seem to be too much low end at alllllll… Is that common on cabinets like that? To have a filter on em? I’d mention the brand and type, but there’s nothing on them but black carpet.
oh they’re passive? hmm, what cabinets do you have? It’s a hit or miss really, I’ve heard some passive speakers without ANY bass, and others with a nice amount. To be honest though for the amount of space and amount of ppl likely to come, it should be fine. Plus everyone will be drunk so they won’t notice the missing bass that much
oh nono, i’m not saying im going to power the sub thru my amp. the sub itself is already powered, just gotta plug her into the wall. Basically just trying to see if there’s something else I can do to make it sound louder or boomier.
well, thanks for your input here. Have you seen cabinets with a filter in them before though? Just wondering if that’s the case or if it’s just me. Thanks!
Really that’s about it. It should have a LP Filter Cutoff adjustment as well as phase inversion…play with those until it sounds right. I mean…there are “rules” as well as “guidelines,” like setting the filter about twice where the LF rolloff starts on your tops…but that control is rarely labeled on home audio subs, and most speakers don’t come with useful frequency response charts that can be trusted.
Oh, and it’s worth using it. Any subwoofer makes a difference at a house party.
IDK where the hell this misconception that small parties don’t need subs came from. If you want to hear sub-bass (hint: for dance music, you do) then you need a sub. Period. Full-range speakers say they’re full range, and the spec sheet might say 20-20,000 Hz frequency response, but in reality they roll everything off below 120ish as a consequence of how they’re built. And while the details change, that’s true from white van speakers to function 1 and stadium arrays to studio monitors…it’s just kinda the way things work. Heck, the studio I work/study in has a fairly decent Genelec monitoring setup…based on some 8030a (think RP5…but a lot nicer) full-range tops, and they have a Genelec studio sub with a 15" cone…in a control room that’s acoustically treated and can’t fit 15 people in it comfortably.
Based on some random guidelines I read somewhere, the advice of people who do sound reinforcement for a living, and my own personal experience…for modern EDM, you want about twice as much power going to subs as you do tops…without hi-passing the full-range speakers. But that’s really hard to do with home-audio gear. That sub is useful, and you will hear a difference, but it would likely take about 16 of them to sound “right.”
Despite how hopeless that sounds…the first sixteenth of the way there does make an audible difference.
So you have two passive, full range speakers, loaded with a 15" woofer, 4.5" mid bass, and a tweeter. These will be powered by a 600w x2 channel amp.
There is also a home theater, powered 12" sub with a 150w amp built in.
Starting with the two full range speakers, I would skip the sub. Using the sub will add complexity to the setup, without really getting much additional output.
If you insist on using the sub, I would setup the active crossover to feed the sub 40-70Hz, and send 70Hz and up to the full range cabinets.
If you are willing to run without the sub (or even if you do)…setup the tops on sticks, put them as high as the ceiling will allow (the top of the cabinet touching the ceiling would be good). Place each top in a corner along one wall of the basement. Have the backs of the cabinets touching both walls at the corner (or as close as practical given the stands). This boundary loading will add significantly to the low frequency response from the full range cabinets. Setup like this, the additional home theater sub should be unnecessary.
That said, sound reinforcement in small rooms (i.e. any room where the principle dimensions are less than one wavelength of the lowest frequency content) is very hard. There are an enormous number of room modes and cancellations that can wreak havoc on low frequency content. So, it is worth your time to experiment and try two or three different positions for the speakers to find a good overall balance of sound in the room.
The sub will only help the situation. It sounds like your tops will be a lot stronger than your sub. There might be an adjustment for the HPF on the tops. Play with it till it sounds good. Keep in mind sometimes overlapping frequencies will hurt the sound performance, and you don’t want to set it to a such a low where the tops aren’t producing much sound. The tops will only be waisting time and energy on producing notes it can’t effectivly make. They tell you to place the sub on the floor in a corner for best SPL so maybe that might help with sound output. On a side note, one thing that I like about home theater subs is that they usually can produce very low notes.
