REW & Mini-DSP dual subs and still no chest thump?

[Karl Harrison]

Hi there

I've been working on trying to improve the real bass kick in my dedicated cinema room and struggling so looking for help
So i will start with what I have done so far.
I Have an Athem MRX 720 which drives my speakers directly, I have one subwoofer a SVS Ultra SB13 and this was not enough(maybe wrong) I ran the ARC and there was no bass in movies and after many tweaks to the ARC profiles and help from other users still poor bass with no kick.

I was advised you need 2 subwoofers so I got an identical SVS Ultra 13, these subwoofers are placed as advised with 1 at rear left corner and the other front right corner.
Next issue is to get these setup so took tips from You tube vids on Gain matching and Alignment, to enable this I have added a Mini-DSP 2x4HD and using REW with UMIK-1 I got what I think was the aim is that with both subwoofers I get a output gain, which is shown in the attached graph.I have also attached the subs seperate measurements.
so I re-run ARC and again poor bass so I made some adjustments but I still lack Bass chest thump..
Can anyone help further as I would expect in a room this size the 2 subwoofers to be enough?

room size is length 5.36 m * width 2.56m *height 2.57m I have 2 doors both on the left side of the room, one front left and the other rear left, so the front left is the main entrance so cannot put subwoofer front left. Room has no treatments, flooring is carpet and all walls are standard 12mm plasterboard.
all pics have 1/6th smoothing applied in REW
1st pic green line is front sub
2nd pic green line has a 6db delay set on front sub via mini dsp
3rd pic blue line has ARC EQ applied with no tweaks

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

One of those subs is sufficient to blow out the walls in a room as small as that.

Typically the remedy if one isn’t happy with the sub levels set from room correction is to simply go into the receiver’s menu and increase the level. Or increase it at the sub itself via its gain control.

Just curious, what is the miniDSP doing for you? You don’t seem to be using its equalization capabilities.

Regards,
Wayne

 

[Sonnie Parker]

Look at the combined response. You have to equalize both subs together and look a their combined response. Then correct your response based on how they measure together.

 

[JStewart]

To go with what Sonnie and Wayne have said you may find this article useful to understand what frequencies the "chest thump" comes from: https://www.audioholics.com/room-acoustics/bass-the-physical-sensation-of-sound

 

[Karl Harrison]

One of those subs is sufficient to blow out the walls in a room as small as that.

Typically the remedy if one isn’t happy with the sub levels set from room correction is to simply go into the receiver’s menu and increase the level. Or increase it at the sub itself via its gain control.

Just curious, what is the miniDSP doing for you? You don’t seem to be using its equalization capabilities.

Regards,
Wayne

Hi Wayne

I was looking to try and flatten the graph as much as possible.

The miniDSP is required because the Anthem AVR's do not have seperate controls for the 2 sub outputs so the only way to do the alignment is to introduce this device. I was also thinking of BEQ...

 

[Karl Harrison]

Look at the combined response. You have to equalize both subs together and look a their combined response. Then correct your response based on how they measure together.

I thought i was looking at combined response? the first graph shows seperate and the others are both subs on together so both together does appear to cancel out the large null from the front sub and then adding the delay increases the combined output. The aligned subs are then treated as one by Anthem ARC process.. It does look like the filters ARC applies flatten the mid bass in the graph

I do not listen at reference levels as that is painful for me, so the tweaks applied previously have included a house curve or slope which is through the ARC customisation although not applied for the graphs uploaded

 

[Karl Harrison]

JStewart

Useful information thank you

 

[Sonnie Parker]

I'm confused... why do you have 6 different responses in the graphs above? You should only have one starting response, with no processing... it would typically be the same on all graphs if you want to split up the different processed results. It doesn't look like ARC is doing the job for you to be quite frank. The second graph with the red response looks to be the best, with the exception of the 85-90Hz peak. You could increase the overall bass volume at the subs to get more bass presence. We would also need to see how it integrates with your main speakers to know if everything looks okay.

You can also use the miniDSP as a parametric EQ and tame some of the issues.