Over in the high-end home audio world, natural-sounding bass in the subwoofer region (south of 80 Hz or so) is pretty rare. The main culprit is the room itself - the room will impose a rather horrendous peak-and-dip pattern on a subwoofer's frequency response. This peak-and-dip pattern changes as you change the location of either the subwoofer or the listener, but you cannot eliminate it by speaker placement alone. So a lot of people use powerful DEQ components to equalize the subwoofer's response. That can be very effective at the microphone location, but can make things worse elsewhere in the room.
So, Duke, essentially what you're saying is that their are some rooms that it's difficult if next to impossible to EQ out frequencies that resonate to much without really compromising the sound of the instrument. This for the most part has been my experience with cabinets that try to get lots of low end response
it's tricky to use that low end in a acoustically challenging scenario, much less a banquet hall. I've never been convinced that the folks out in the middle and rear of the hall can, actually hear those low fundamentals, sometimes it's nice to hear them on stage, but to me, that's just a player's comfort issue that doesn't always pan out.
The solution I embrace is to use four small subwoofers distributed around the room. Each one will produce a dissimilar peak-and-dip pattern at any given listening position in the room, but the sum of these four dissimilar (de-correlated) peak-and-dip patterns will be much smoother than any one alone. I have customers who have measured plus or minus 3 dB across the bass region in-room without EQ using this approach, and (perhaps even more important) this smoothness holds up pretty much throughout the room.
Interesting, that sounds like you are solving the "bass sounds boomy" scenario, by creating four zones that move the bass out into the room, rather than trying to use the "brute force" one directional sound pushed from the stage which usually fails. Using groups of smaller speakers
always sounded, better to me, until you built the TC-112 that really kind of breaks out of the mold to give one a very articulate, full range, and perfect timbre, for both Double Bass and Electric Bass. Mikes cabinets, from what we're hearing about them, are amazing boxes
What Mike's MVW cabs do is conceptually similar to what my multisub system does. But instead of spreading out the bass sources in space, the MVW cab spreads out the bass sources in time. There is a significant time delay (as the backwave travels through the enclosure) between the arrival of the low frequency energy off the front of the cone, and the arrival of the low frequency energy off the back of the cone. The MVW cabinet itself acts as if it has many internal path lengths (there is no one-wavelength cancellation notch like we see in transmission line enclosures), so we may say that the backwave energy is de-correlated (both with respect to the frontwave, and with respect to itself). At least this is my understanding based in part on the in-house measurements I've made. Note that MVW cabs have this de-correlation characteristic well up through the midrange region.
My favorite cabinet for DB before you and Mike entered the market was indeed a EA VL208, but if I go back a little further in my carer, their really was nothing that could beat the Double Baffle Reflex cabinet Jess Oliver designed for the B-15N, a much different design, but it did have rear wave and front wave correlation that worked, quite well. I also experimented with several different 2x8 cabinets from SWR (Baby Blue 2x8, Flite Sound, 2x8, and finally the EA-VL208) they had a more pleasant low midrange timbre, without over emphasizing bass, so Mikes MVW designs with multiple small drivers, and de-correlated
backwave energy, just make perfect sense to me.
I'm licensed to use the MVW technology in a different market, and I've seen it produce very articulate low bass in a setting where we'd normally expect boomy, inarticulate low bass. Imo it's a viable acoustic solution to what is fundamentally an acoustic problem. An electronic solution (EQ) can help, but it can't really solve what is fundamentally an acoustic problem, in this case poor speaker/room interaction.Imo, ime, ymmv, etc.
