Hey all,
Ive never really been knowledgeable about hardware but have years of experience on the software side.
I make electronic music and have always cut my lows out because ive never owned a subwoofer to hear it and do any manipulation in that range, despite wanting to make bass music. I’ll have a bigger space next year and want to start developing synth patches that take advantage of that range (subwork like GRiZ and Bassnectar stand out).
I know that there is some relation to diameter and ported/nonported that will make an impact on accurate reproduction, but most of the threads I find are for “BIGGER BIGGER BASS” and mainly Car AV.
I was originally going to get a ported 10" because i think that would reach the deepest notes but then I wonder if it wont be a very tight response. So then I was thinking 2x 8" because it distributes the power more evenly and i can use higher gain for clarity without just overblowing the sub bass. I also heard that nonported subs have a flatter response? I got a bit lost in the search.
If you wanted the best fidelity you could get, down to 20-30Hz range, what speakers would you go with?
FYI: up top i am thinking 6.5" with 1" tweeters to compliment.
This is not the right sub for this question… you need to be asking people experienced in music mixing, not home stereo hobbyists.
Try r/audioengineering or r/wearethemusicmakers.
i suppose so, though i figured in the end an audiophile would be looking for perfect sound reproduction. Full frequency spectrum, flat, clarity. Which is ultimately the end goal, especially in contrast to a lot of audio enthusiasts who just want louder and louder sound.
Both of those reads are wrong.
There are many people into hifi as a hobby who are not after absolute accuracy, and there are also many established, widely respected hifi brands who don’t pursue absolute accuracy in their speaker designs. And I would say the increasingly dominant approach in this hobby, even for the people who are more analytically minded, is to pursue a response that takes cues from one of several psychoacoustic response curves… which are not flat.
And I don’t think there are any experienced mix engineers who just want louder and louder sound. Maybe that’s true of teenagers who are spending money from their summer job on some KRK Rokits at Guitar Center… but music mixing is an actual job, and good mix engineers want one thing from their monitoring, which is mix translation. You want your monitoring to be accurate, with minimal coloration of its own, so that when you play your track back on a different system, you don’t end up with completely unpredictable results. If your system has major nonlinearities and idiosyncrasies that you have to compensate for to get things to sound right, those compensations (which apply to your system and yours only) will end up baked into your mix, and your mixes will translate poorly to any other setup. That means your records will sound bad, and you won’t get hired again.
Ex Machina Pulsar / Quazars are about the best monitors you can buy without selling your home. I own a set of Pulsars and they’re quite incredible. Super tight and fast lows down to 35hz. But one thing that is concerning, you’re cutting your lows out of your production because you don’t have a subwoofer? That’s a major mistake. Get a pair of Sennheiser HD650 headphones and you can hear the low end. You shouldn’t be cutting out the most important part of electronic music just because you don’t own a sub. There’s also spectral visualizers for this.
I may have exaggerated when i said i cut my lows. Theyre not gone, theyre just not very well-built. I usually just cut or sidechain the sub out of pretty much everything and layer a sine wave down there in those spots instead. The end result is actually pretty good, and i do go test it in my car which has 2x sealed 10" subs just to confirm everything is where it should be. i would much prefer to be able to sit at my desk and manipulate the sub in my synth patches without having to export and go for a drive lol
So it looks like the Quazars are 3 speakers whereas the pulsars are 2. Is there a reason to go with one over the other?
A 10 or 8” speaker isn’t where you want to be for 20-30Hz. There’s no replacement for displacement. I don’t think you can even begin to touch that range lower than a 12” woofer, unless you are talking something really exotic like Carver Sunfire subs that have huge excursion capability.
I’ve been lucky finding good yamaha avr at goodwill CL etc. Any good 100 watt with sub out will do. I like yamaha but denon is good too, some sony and onkyo are cool. Techno is usually good with a hall effect and too much bass.