joncourage wrote:
Can you explain what you mean by "used only as a sub, and not as a
general woofer"?
Does this have to do mostly with what frequency range you send it?
Yes, and the frequency response of the other speakers.
In the olden days, speakers had woofers and went down at least
unto the 40 Hz or 50Hz range. AR3, Large Advents, Klipshorns,
lots more. Many of them didn't go down all that smoothly
and there was often a fair amount of doubling as then went lower.
But since 40 Hz is about where all kick drum sounds are, and is
the lowest note on a bass guitar, everyone except Organ freaks
were happy.
Over the recent years, speakers have gotten smaller, and
marketing driods have gotten loose with the terms.
They talk about 6" woofers. In the olden days,
something that small would be a midrange.
So the idea of a subwoofer is to handle frequencies below
what your woofer can handle. With a decent speaker that
goes down to 35 Hz, the sub woofer only has to cover 10 to 40 hZ or
so. And there isn't much below 25 Hz in most music.
(I think the organ pedal notes in Thus Spak Zarenthrustra
is about 18 Hz.).
But to increase the WAF and for movie tracking that needs
four or five speakers, the woofers shrunk or real processing
was replaced by market droid speak. Something that has a "4 inch woofer"
is not going to deliver real clean notes below about 90Hz.
So the 'sub' now has to cover from 10 to 110 or evern 120 Hz.
Some home theater systems have 'sub' spec'd at 120 Hz. which is
not below anything that I'd call a woofer.
I'm not sure of where bass becomes localized. It is clearly way
below 120 Hz. And it may vary by person, training, golden ears, etc.
If you have to have two of them, and they are reproducing the
low E of a normal guitar (~82 Hz) then they are woofers, not
subwoofers. At least to me.
--
Pat
http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html
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