It’s always a good thing to not only see things from the frequency perspective or on paper, but really look at what is happening in the room. It’s true that humans are not good at localising very low frequencies. We loose that ability somewhere around 60Hz or 80Hz on paper. We can measure that in a laboratory. Keep in mind that we are talking about home cinema here. When you place a subwoofer in one spot in the room, a point one subwoofer (.1) or LFE, then chances are you can localise it. Why is that? That is because the subwoofer interacts with the walls. You don’t have a sharp brick wall filter anyway, it creates some overtones and our brain is quite good too. It will try to localise it, if you just feed it a little information. A lot of things are happening in the room.
Close your eyes and do that localisation test
You can try it! I ask everyone with this localisation theory in mind, to have a crossover frequency at 80Hz and then switch off the front speakers, surround speakers, center speaker, so you can only hear the LFE. I bet that you can localise it with closed eyes, like there he is! That’s because it interacts with the room. You can really localise it. That’s why we promote having 2 subwoofers in the room, that really integrate well together with the front speakers.
Visit the Steinway Lyngdorf website.
Visit the Lyngdorf Audio website.
