Quote Originally Posted by Florian
Personally i have never heard any subwoofer that could blend in with a panel perfectly and like SirT said the 30Hz wavelenght is longer then most rooms anyways but there are chairs, couches, furniture etc..that help you notice the subs direction. So the question is what we want to discuss, do we discuss the subwoofers localisation in a normal living surroundings or on a wide open field with emptyness.

-Flo
Hey Flo...

This caught my eye a bit,not sure I understand what you're getting at. I haven't known couches, chairs, etc to produce such an effect that a subwoofer could be localized because of the furniture interactions in a room. If anything those interactions frequencies have with furniture would do just the opposite, randomize reflections and make it even harder to localize a sub, wouldn't it?

As for panels and subs, well, I think this all comes down to proper integration. While panels do have a sweet sounding "speed" to them, there are plenty of traditional woofers with measured transient responses that are on par and even better. I think there's just a lot more budget/entry-level woofers and tweeters that people hear, and not many panel speakers at the same price points.

Some subwoofers have pretty good transient response. However, that said, low frequencies aren't very transient to begin with and a lot of the "speed" disadvantages you hear with subs has more to do with human perception and physics than the subs being "slow". Without a lot of technobabble, you can hit a barrier for speed in low frequencies much earlier than you hit it in the midrange. This happens regardless of how speakers are produced. It then becomes more of a question of how slow can you tolerate the subwoofer being. Lots of high output subs have terrible transients.

A friend of mine in the local DIY group here finished a large Bohlender Graebener/Aurum Cantus design (the AC's did just the highest frequencies in his design), and built in a pair of 15" woofers into a sealed box design. The subs had a relatively low xmax compared to most of the woofers you see these days. The low excursion and sealed cabinet resistive pressure made for a very fast attack and decay that had no problem keeping up. These speakers are tall and ugly looking, but damn they sounded nice. Total project cost him about $2400 or so.