I agree with the room comments, very nice! I'd love to hear your take on what it sounds like with and without those corner traps. I can't find any before/after actual measurements anywhere.
Speaker Placement provides by far the biggest benefit to the sound system. It's not "instant gratification" in the sense that you can flick a switch and hear the difference, but it can be one of those things where when you get it right you KNOW it! I used the knowledge gleaned from a video I watched about speaker placement which got me to what I now enjoy. Centerline of the stats is 30" from the front wall, and they are extremely toed-in such that the flashlight reflect about 1/5 from the OUTSIDE edge of the panel, and I'm sitting in an almost perfect equilateral triangle. I've experimented with gong nearfield which works well, but keep moving back to current setup simply for movies and sharing the experience in a wider seating arrangement.
My room is a multi use room. The Left speaker is in the middle of the wall and I use one absorption panel a few feet to its left to tame some reflecting that hits a wall another 10 feet away. The Right speaker is in a corner with absorption on the first 3 feet of the front and right walls. The ceiling is cathedral with a low pitch and gains height as it goes from the front wall, like an auditorium, which is probably why it's such an easy setup in a lot of ways.
Bass is unique to each room and setup within the room. Previous layouts resulted in extremely poor, one-note bass with a huge boom at 55Hz I couldn't avoid with the seating. Now, things are much better after removing a couple walls. See? Easy!
My friends used to go up to the subwoofers to see if they were on and active, only to find they were not. That was with different subs and different sub locations.
For the last few months I've been using four new ML 1100X subs in stacks of two, one stack for each Expression. Dynamics are excellent! Bass is quick, accurate, and effortless. I "wanted" subs because of the volume of air in the large room and I figured using more woofers together would let them all work less, making the ensemble more efficient. I did not expect the dynamics to improve as much as it did. Plus, the soundstage is wider. The setup is what Rel suggests with the stacks outboard of the Main speakers and almost touching, although, moving the subs more rearward of the face of the Main speakers did not prove to be the best arrangement for my setup, so the subs are pretty close to being even with the fronts of the speakers.
I've been distracted by other things lately, but I need to tackle a null from 60-70Hz that is quite deep that only appears when both fronts are playing mono bass. It's flat above and below. I know what I'm going to do, just need to implement, maybe this coming weekend. I have a ML 800X sub in the back of the room that is only used for my LFE group, and its sole purpose is to eliminate that null. There is 5 subwoofers, two stacks of two, and the single at the back. The bottom two subs and the back one are tied together into a separate channel that is only for the .1 LFE channel for movies. It works so well I want to incorporate that fifth sub to be used for the Fronts, but those are all connected using the Speaker Level connections so I need to be creative about how to go about it. I've got ideas, but until I try them I won't know if things will workout.
Meanwhile . . . . . Piano has never sounded this good before! And, low volume music sounds wonderful, don't need higher volume to achieve a pleasingly full sound. Using subwoofers or even more subwoofers doesn't equate to "more bass", but it can result in "better bass". Since I don't know how to measure better bass I'm stuck with explaining what it means to me. The bass shows up in the right amount for the volume level being used. It's not like turning up a bass tone control and adding bass everywhere, and it doesn't "sound" as ear bleedingly loud to get the amount of bass I was seeking all along, but it's there. I'd like to use the word "enveloping", but it's not quite that, but it is close. What it has lots of now is impact!, which most often is probably associated with something loud, but in this case it also means the little delicate subtle sounds which now have more impact.
Sorry for the long diatribe, but, suffice it to say, I'm happy with the results of adding subwoofers.
