Convention Paper
How Many Subwoofers are Enough?
AES Convention 112 · Paper 5602 · April 2002
Abstract
From an intuitive standpoint, putting a large number of subwoofers at different locations in a room might seem likely to excite room modes in a more 'balanced' manner, as compared to a single subwoofer. This idea has particular appeal where there is not a single listening location, but rather a listening area. In this case one looks for consistency of acoustical response with in this area. Typical approaches to this problem involve exciting all modes evenly, or trying not to excite modes at all. With this in mind, an investigation was made to determine if using a large number of subwoofers is advantageous, and in particular what configurations give the best results. Several interesting and surprising results were uncovered along the way.
