Today owning a Home Theatre has become a need of a home; to serve the movie nights. Some people even have separate rooms allotted specifically for this purpose. This is because, unlike olden times of going to a cinema hall and sitting straight for 3 long hours, people prefer the comfort of their home.
To have a fulsome experience, the subwoofer stands out as the significant part of the Home Theatre. However, you might feel some discrepancies in the performance of different subwoofer home theatre setups. One common reason is the placement of the subwoofer.
Let’s give you an insight into the subwoofer’s importance and placement.
Subwoofer’s Importance
There is something flattering about this bass-producing machine as it gives you those soothing vibrations throughout your body. Moreover, it takes care of the low frequencies in the soundtracks. These are less noticeable than those mammoth speakers in your room and include drivers capable of performing better, if not the same. Besides, they operate on dedicated power. Hence, delivering the commendable bass with the lows!
Significance of Subwoofer Placement
Most people are unaware of the simple but noteworthy fact about listening to music from their sound system. Technically, we are listening to the sound affected by its surroundings. Your home theatre subwoofer speaker is producing the sound that is reflecting and then getting to your ears. This means the placement of the subwoofer plays an important role in deciding the quality of your listening experience.
The walls, furniture, windows, and other items in the ambience affect the sound reaching your ears. The flat surfaces play a major role in degrading the bass, further the quality of the sound. Your omnidirectional waves from the subwoofer become either standing dull waves or their bass nulls.
To eliminate this problem, you can either work with the room or against it. Former means you can work on the room acoustics like adding some sound absorber wherever needed along with the smart placement of subwoofers. Latter includes modern and effective Equalizers and other software. Former is the easy and smart choice.
Where should you place the subwoofers?
Best Placement Options
We have discussed the significance of placement above. You might have realized that it is indeed a complex task to place a subwoofer in the room. You need not worry any further. To help you with this here are some suggestions for the ideal placement of the subwoofer along with explanations.
1. Placement on Table
You should first consider the positioning of the table in the room. If your table is touching the walls, then vibrations produced through the subwoofer will transfer into the wall. Thus, distorting the bass, degrading the quality altogether. We recommend you place the table a few inches away from the wall.
Another thing is that the table should be hefty so that it should not dance along with your subwoofers.
2. Placement on a Shelf
The front-firing subwoofers are suitable to place on a shelf or cabinet that is pretty hefty. As the shelf and cabinet usually touch the walls, decoupling the subwoofer of the home theatre would prove to be a useful step. Decoupling means reducing the vibrations (energy) transfer into the surface. For this purpose, you can place energy-absorbing pads below the shelf or subwoofer. Another way is to just stuff the cabinet with soft toys, clothes, or cotton. These things will absorb the vibrations, reducing the further transfer of vibrations into the surfaces like floors or walls.
3. Corners are tricky
You might be indifferent to the placement and just want your subwoofers somewhere in the room’s corner. You can put them in the corners but don’t let them touch the walls, as the bass can transfer into the walls. The omnidirectional waves will mix up with each other, producing a different intensity of vibrations. The waves can also transmute to dull or standing waves.
The appropriate way is to slide your subwoofer 8 to 10 inches away from the wall. Here also you can use sound-absorbing materials to place against the wall and minimize the vibrational transfer.
4. Embedded inside wall
With time, people have tested alternative methods of placing these devices and adopted them if they pan out. Wall embedded subwoofer home theatre is one such approach, including custom parts and installers. This might be a good idea if you are a music lover, and listening to music calms you every time. However, embedding it for fun into the wall linked to your neighbour’s apartment might not be a fun idea for them. Your wall can develop some cracks because of those strong vibrations if the installation is not robust.
5. On the floor or elevated position
Lastly, placing a subwoofer on the floor has the same issues of distorting those bass vibrations when transferred into the floor. This is not ideal for two reasons. First, the vibrations can get further transferred into neighbouring rooms, disturbing others. Second, these further debase the acoustics of your soundtrack. The vibrations will be more noticeable and interfere with the music experience you wanted.
You can use the soft materials for minimizing the transfer of these vibrations or place the subwoofers at some elevated place for effective decoupling.
However, placing them in an elevated position is more ideal. We prefer it because the decoupling is more prominent here. The placement at the ear level does not positively change the music experience. This is because the subwoofer’s high-frequency sound waves travel in all directions. Hence, at the ear level, they will eventually work similarly to the other elevated positions.
In brief:
We would recommend decoupling the subwoofer from the surface and walls. You can do this by using sound-absorbing materials. It is ideal to place the subwoofer at elevated positions like tables, cabinets which are heavily built to reduce movement and sound because of clattering.
Final Words
You can find the best suitable position of your home theatre subwoofer in the room by trying to place it in different places and hearing. The one you like the best is the ultimate position to go for. Once, you have solved the decoupling problem and find the position that suits you. Enjoy that wondrous moment with those spine-tingling bass getting along with the music.
