One head, 2 cabs = One cab MUCH louder than the other, why?

[Omega Monkey]

ORRRRRRR, you could just get a single larger cab that you like the sound of (or 2 smaller matching cabs). Or just figure out how to EQ one or the other to get what you want. The GK cab (I have one) CAN be a very bright cab, but it doesn't HAVE to be, because it takes EQ very well. I say this as someone using this cab with an amp designed by the same guy who designed your mesa (a ShuttleMax 9.2), and who is the same guy telling you to get your 6x10 cab checked out.

ESPECIALLY if you are not hitting volume limitations with a single cab, that indicates you have a lot of EQ headroom. If you can't quite get there with your amp controls, you may consider adding an EQ pedal as well.

Personally, I like the brightness of the GK and find that even though it is capable of a seemingly endless amount of high end, considering it just has the same 50w tweeter as any of their smaller cabs, it's a very musical and usable high end that I frankly was finding it almost difficult to dial in a bad sound. And this is with an active bass that has often been very tricky to dial in in general. But with the bass going into the ShuttleMax and the GK cab, I found I could get a lot of different tonal characters, especially out of the upper half of the frequency spectrum. In other words, I was getting approximations of everything from Marcus Miller to Chris Squire from an active neck through 6 string with 2 "jazz" pickups.

Anyway, I can certainly understand the incentive to want to try "MORE". Using 2 amps will allow a lot more flexibility with the 2 cabs. Perhaps the Mesa 4x12 would be a better pairing with the GK though?

 

[packhowitzer]

Thank you for the suggestion but I bought this yesterday ... It was highly recommended by other TB'ers and had great reviews.

View attachment 3102765

I'm glad you found one that works for you. I almost bought that one myself, but I had had several good experiences with Radial products so I went with the switchbone. I don't think you can go wrong with either one.

 

[fatNfunky]

Assuming we're talking about home audio here, in general the in-room smoothness improves with each additional sub as long as they are spaced fairly far apart. The reason is, each sub is producing a unique peak-and-dip pattern, and the ONLY way the sum of these two dissimilar peak-and-dip patterns could be as bad as just one sub's pattern would be, if they were identical. And if they are not in the same location, their peak-and-dip patterns will not be identical.

The spatial variation also improves, so there is less difference in the bass response from one location to another within the room. This makes EQ more effective, because fixing a problem in one microphone location is less likely to make things worse somewhere else.

So in my opinion no knowledge of nodes and cancellation is needed for the average joe to get a significant qualitative improvement from a distributed multisub system. All he has to do is follow a few simple guidelines and spend some time dialing in the control settings (which applies to any subwoofer system).

Here's a bit of anecdotal evidence that two subs are better than one: There are many Magnepan owners who have tried subwoofers. If you read enough of their posts, a trend emerges: Those who tried a single sub usually went back to not using any subs, while those who tried two subs usually kept them. You see, dipoles have smoother in-room bass than monopoles, and two dipoles are smoother than one dipole. The discrepancy between a single monopole sub and two dipole main speakers is just too much to ignore. Two monopole subs comes significantly closer. I went with four for my system because four monopole subs intelligently distributed will have similar in-room bass smoothness to two dipole main speakers, which helps them to blend well. But unlike dipole subwoofers, multiple small monopole subs can pressurize the room at low frequencies, generating satisfying chest-thump.

Im sure you are right, most of my experience has been with car audio.

Aiming your subwoofer box

Small space, big drivers stupid BIG power .. thanks for the education -again !

 

[DukeLeJeune]

Im sure you are right, most of my experience has been with car audio.

Aiming your subwoofer box

Small space, big drivers stupid BIG power .. thanks for the education -again !

Car audio is a different environment! The car's interior is a small enough room that bass modes don't develop because the wavelengths more than twice as long as the "room's" dimensions. ALL of the "room's" boundaries are within 1/4 wavelength of the woofer in the bass region, so it gets boundary reinforcement from everywhere. It's like the woofer was effectively IN all eight "corners"! This is frequency region is where all of the reflections are contributing essentially in-phase with the woofer's output is referred to in acoustics as the "pressure zone", which is lower in frequency than the "modal zone".

We can still get modes in the upper bass/lower midrange region in cars, and again multiple distributed sources will make an improvement.

We can begin to get into the pressure zone in our home listening rooms at very low frequencies. It is of course a gradual transition as we go down in frequency. First the nearest wall reflections start to become effectively in-phase with the woofer's output, then the walls further away, and the net result on the frequency response is a rising trend as we go down in frequency. This is often referred to as "room gain", and "typical" room gain in a home listening room is about 3 dB per octave south of maybe 80 Hz or so (of course there is a lot of variation from one room to another).

I don't know why more subwoofer manufacturers don't take room gain into account. An unequalized sealed box sub rolls off too fast for room gain to compensate, and most vented boxes are designed for "deepest loudest bass" and so once we factor in room gain, they are too fat because very bottom end is too loud. However it is possible to design a vented box to have a -3 dB per octave rolloff before we factor in room gain, and of course that's what I do. This approach is easier on the amplifier and on the woofer (thermally) than an equalized sealed box, but an equalized sealed box (or four of them) is superior in some ways.

 

[Omega Monkey]

But how do you know what room size to design for? Somebody could be using a sub in a 1000 cubic foot room or 10,000.