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When You Should Upgrade or Add a REL Acoustics Subwoofer to Your Audio System or Home Theater
Part two
The below text is a transcription of the video.
The first thing you really should do is go to REL.net and look up the subwoofer pairing tool. It’s called subwoofer finder. Many of the speakers that you’re probably looking at will already be there, but there’ll be things that are close enough. If it’s one of the more obscure brands, if you write into us and we love to get emails but let me tell you what we’re going to ask of you, because it is an interactive process.
The first thing we’re going to ask you is about your room and it’s not just what you think of as your room, understand that we want to know what the primary environment your speakers and you listening are going to be in. But in many, many instances houses these days have open floor plans. So, if you’re fortunate enough to have a regular sealable, meaning close the doors and the room is sealed rectangular box of a room, God bless you.
You’re in the minority. Most instances, we start talking to somebody and the individual says, oh yeah, my basic room is 14 by 20 with nine foot ceilings. Then you start talking more, well, that’s the living room, but the living room is attached to and consistent with and open to the dining room, which gives onto the kitchen.
And right behind the kitchen, there’s a door that goes down a hallway that’s 15 feet long. All of these are spaces that a REL has to drive. It’s one acoustic mass. So we really need to know both the primary and the secondary connective tissue if you will. In my own home, I’ve got an open floor plan with a centrally mounted staircase with a bathroom underneath that
and it goes up it’s like three stories high. And so each floor is about 1500 square feet and it all talks to each other. So, you know, when a customer calling up going, well, you know, my living room’s roughly 22 by 17. That’s one space, but that’s not it. I’ve got a 10 foot opening to an entryway. I’ve got an eight foot opening into the dining room and then it just flows from there.
That’s a very, very difficult space to drive. So, space, and if you can beg borrow or steal one of those little Bosch or similar laser range finders, just put it on one wall, zap that zap the length and then the others. If you’re talking about secondary spaces, you can approximate them, but that’s really useful.
Second thing we’re going to ask you is what are your electronics? Why do we need to know that? Well, first of all, we can spot stuff where you go, you are not going to want to use that with those speakers for a variety of different reasons. Maybe you need far more power than that. Maybe you have a 500 watt amplifier and a pair of Klipschorns that, you know, virtually manufacture sound.
So we will be asking questions about your electronics, but more importantly, if you’re going to use one of our classic RELs that hook up traditionally through the high level connection, we’re going to want to know what that is and how to guide you towards doing it. There are different kind of, we call it topologies,
different kinds of amplifier designs that some of which don’t even have a ground, which is really necessary for a REL to operate properly.
So let’s find out what those things are. And if you’re in a state of flux and you’re changing things, we can often give your insight into really good suggestions. That would make really nice natural pairings for that too. So those are just some of the things you’ll need to know and of course, then we need to know what the speakers themselves are and where you plan to cite them.
And what I do with anybody that I wind up interacting with directly, I require, I don’t suggest, I require that you send me 360 degrees stand up from your listing position, photographs of the room. And if you will, it used to be much more common where you digitally stitch, I’m not requiring you to stitch them, but just sort of take the picture, including your left speaker and perhaps the left wall.
You know, then move it over to approximately where that left off, then do the same over here. The same, the same. So, I can see everything. I first started doing this about six or seven years ago when a fellow wrote in with a problem solving question. He couldn’t understand why his left subwoofer was so loud and played so beautifully, but his right one just seemed to be lost.
And he gave me the room dimensions, and everything seemed. And I finally asked him to send me a picture at the time, just to the front of his system. So, I could see the speakers, the subwoofer where was it located? And I called him back and said, when were you gonna make mention the fact that there was a staircase going upstairs, just right at the landing where your right subwoofer was?
And it went up three stories straight up above the subwoofer that didn’t occur to you. One’s under an eight foot ceiling and the other one goes 23 feet straight. Yeah, they’re gonna be very, very different. So these are some of the context we can spot. Acoustic anomalies we can point out things in electronics that might be better, or it could be problematic and really are gonna require a little bit of problem solving on our part to help you with connections. Pairing with the speakers, of course, right?
All of these things come together and even better ways to cite the furniture within your room. People often get locked up in living their life in a certain way. That made sense. Maybe they had three kids and at the time it made total sense. We had to keep foot traffic just flowing through there. You know, we had three boys, and they were playing soccer or football or whatever it was and they’re coming through.
And now you don’t have to worry about those things, and we can help you envision a much better acoustic way to organize the room so that everything in your system works better. Every part of your system sounds better.