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I have an unusual piece of furniture for my gear. It was formerly part of an office desk system and it is about 40 inches tall and five feet wide. It is divided in two from top to bottom. The lower left (from my view while seated--it is directly in front of me) is about 20 inches deep, 25 inches tall and 30 inches wide. In the middle of that space (on the floor--there is no bottom shelf), I have have placed my sub, though not fully recessed (tried that--too boomy). So it is partially in a corner, partially out into the room and partially along a wall. With my Anti-mode 8033, it measures nicely flat with REW (not perfect by any means but a lot better than w/o the 8033). No other place to put it in my overcrowded room. Planning to change rack and other furniture over the next year or two which will afford me flexibility and room for another sub to complement my Boston Acoustics PV900.

My main home theater is really setup in our open, step down living room. I initially tried the only true corner in the room and the bass was terribly boomy. I then setup the sub in the listening position and crawled around the reiner for the best trade off of location and sound. I did also play with sub orientation and phase and found that pointing the sub 90 degrees to the left actually sounded a bit cleaner than 0 degrees facing into the room. I tried the techniques for Bass Jim Smith outlines in the book, Get Better Sound and what Floyd Toole Writes about in his book.

For subwoofer owners who do not have electronic equalization, Veledyne makes an inexpensive subwoofer maangement system that can control up to three subs and do it with an eight band parametic equalizer automatically or manually. It is supposed to work with any sub. By using this system, placement is not as critical and boominess can be controlled. Kudos for Velodyne for thinking this product up. Hmmmm!!! Sounds like a good review topic for Home Theater mag. Curious minds want to know, Scott!)

Most of you don't really have sub-woofers. Your sub-woofers are really a substitute for woofers because your mains are small, with small drivers, in tall narrow boxes that simply aren't able to push enough air for real bottom end. Today's sub-woofers exist because the marketing guys at the speaker companies figured out a new profit chain, and thus you all have to buy a "sub-woofer" even with higher end gear. In our theater/sound room are a dozen or so main speakers: EPI's, Genesis, Advance, ESS, Klipsch, and a pair of hybrid Altec/JBL's in WEM/Hiwatt boxes the size of a washer and dryer...driven by amps and pre-amps with power transformers the size of bowling balls - all from yester-year and all that easily pull down to 20 Hz (flat +/- 3dB). And yes, I've tried many subs with the mains set to small and the result is always the same - smaller sound stage and sloppy bottom end. The only subs that worked were six JBL Pros borrowed from the band. These were real sub-woofers, came on at around 20 Hz and pulled down to about 8 Hz - pipe organ territory; well below any LFE effects on any blu-ray. We tested those subs with a foghorn fx disc from an engineer friend and seriously, you need a g-suit for this one. The window in the room blew out, the drywall cracked on the adjacent walls: all I could hear for a week was white noise, pink noise and Pink Floyd tunes they never recorded. Next door, the neighbor complained their cat left home, a light fixture dropped from the ceiling, and their swimming pool guy posted a tsunami warning. That's what 1,000 watts RMS per channel will do. Friends have everything from sound bars , HTIB, to ribbon speakers, mini's with a sub, old school/new school setups...and without fault they all sound pretty good - so here's the bottom line on bottom end, and audio in general: your system should sound good at any level. Your ears are the only judge of quality that matters. Happy new year to all. PS...I ordered half a dozen tactile transducers (bass shakers)...sometime this month we'll be ready to rumble.

"Where Do You Put Your Subwoofer(s)?"

On Craigslist.

And if they don't sell to a sucker this month, they go to the curb.