Subwoofer question

[Audiophile_At_Birth]

Originally Posted by erict

Just out of curiosity when I here people talk about bass being to localized what do they mean? I always thought bass was omni directional and normally you're unable to tell where it's coming from. If you had a sub woofer lets say 10' from you're sound stage would it be easy to tell if the bass was coming from where the sub is located versus you're sound stage?

The higher the frequency, the more localized the sound will become. For example, 120hz is easier to locate than say 60hz, and so on and so on. This is partially because of the room and the wavelength of the frequency.

Another way bass would become localized, would be when you have poor sub placement. That's why so many suggest doing a bass crawl with a SPL meter in hand. There might be one place in your room that might spread the bass better than say two feet away where it would be localized.

Regardless, you should resource to the sticky threads that big daddy has written on bass management and sub placement.