Working together

I am pretty certain few rooms support perfect bass. It's not that rooms are particularly biased against low frequencies, the problem is those pesky long wavelengths. Consider that a 20Hz wave is 51 feet in length. A 30Hz note is 38 feet long and even a 60Hz note is just under 10 feet in length. These long wavelengths mean they don't fit into most rooms, so, with nowhere to go they bunch up like the bellows of an accordion. This squeezing of sound creates hot spots and dead spots within the room. What to do? The easiest is to find where in the room you can sit that has the smoothest response for the greatest number of frequencies. That, coupled with moving your speakers without mucking everything else up (like imaging and tonal balance), is the best way to make the most out of a tough situation. Indeed, there are other means like adding digital correction and, if your bass is generated out of a subwoofer or separate woofer enclosure that can both be moved as well as digitally manipulated, then that's a positive step forward. What I don't advise is to digitally manipulate anything other than bass frequencies—something requiring a separation of the woofer from the rest of the speaker. As I cover in The Audiophile's Guide, finding the best spot in the room for bass is a bit of a compromise, but it's better to work together with the problems than wage war upon them.