The subwoofer is considered the most capricious element of home theater. To achieve the desired sound, you have to tinker a lot with it.
The fact is that the sound of a sub is highly dependent on the size and acoustics of the room, on the location of objects in the room, and, of course, on its location, as well as on the listener. And how far from the wall the subwoofer should be also affects the sound and user experience.
It is believed that the subwoofer can be placed anywhere in the room. This is because the bass sound is characterized by a long wavelength that exceeds the characteristic dimensions of the room (for example, low bass at 20 Hz has a wavelength of 49.2 ft (15 m)). Still, the subwoofer will sound better when placed to the side and in front of the listener. This is due to the fact that sitting in front of the subwoofer, at the first moment, a person hears the more direct sound and less reflected sound. After all, every room is an element of the system, a kind of equalizer that is connected between the amplifier and the speaker system, and very often, even the best acoustics in an acoustically ill-prepared room sounds bad.
Experts do not advise to place the subwoofer at the same distance from two walls, as this will worsen the uniformity of the frequency response in the low-frequency region, and distortion may appear. It is for this reason that it is sometimes recommended to use not one but two subwoofers.
If you are setting up a home theater setup, try to position the subwoofer near the same wall as the TV to avoid phase shift in low-frequency waves. It is also best to feed the sub’s dedicated high-level input to the full-range signal from the amplifier’s speaker output. Another important point, placing a weak subwoofer in the corner of the room can slightly improve the mid and high bass.
And as a result, we can conclude that the location of the subwoofer on the speaker line is considered optimal for a music system. Center, left, or right of the acoustics. The benchmark is the quality of bass, bordering on its optimal amount. For cinemas, the search for a place should not be limited to the line of the front speakers – here, the field for experimentation can be expanded within the area where your system is located. The main thing is not to put the subwoofer close to the wall.
