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Subs

— By Paul McGowan —
When I started the theater project I was hell bent for leather to have the biggest, baddest subwoofer setup know to man. More bass than one could use, with subwoofers just loafing along. Remember my post on being obsessive? I like bass and it's a critical element to a successful home theater. But not too much and never over bearing. As in a good music system, subwoofers should be felt and add to the music or film, never show themselves or point out their location. That's sometimes hard to do and my initial thought was to populate the front of the theater with a horizontal array of woofers. Three in fact, 15" each. The spread should help with room modes and simply overpower any issues I might have. When we built the theater it turned out there was not enough room in the screen wall to place the subs so they might be flush with the screen, protruding out the back wall and into the garage. Turns out we unexpectedly ran into a damn fireplace the previous owners of my new, old, house had covered up. When we pulled the drywall off what we thought to be the dividing wall between the garage and the basement where the theater was to go, surprise! An ancient fireplace that wasn't going anywhere. Here's a picture of what we ran into. Original You can see the problem. To solve this we decided we'd have to built a forward facing horizontal box to hide and house the subwoofers, which we did. Since the custom subs I contemplated using had yet to arrive when we finished the theater and wanted to try it out, I grabbed one of my favorites, the REL T9 which REL head John Hunter had sent me to try. Turns out the REL, a mere 10" subwoofer, kicks butt big time. It's wonderful and I question whether I need more. On my list is to bug John for a couple more just to be on the good side. REL is still by far my favorite subwoofer. You can see the theater screen and room in this next picture. The long black box below the screen is the subwoofer enclosure we built to house many more subs than a single 10, but hey, there's room to grow. Note the windows have fancy shades, called cardboard. Hopefully in time we can do better. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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