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Why do you recommend corner placement for REL subwoofers?
There are really two or three components to this. One of the things that’s happened is over the years so called experts going back 20 to 30 years started recommending against this. I believe that the origin for this was that the not terribly competent crossovers used 30 years ago tended to cross over quite high.
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When you start doing that putting it in a corner can really tend to exaggerate room boom. We of course do nothing of the kind. Our crossovers all start as low as 20 hertz, and I mean that it would be 20 hertz and below coming through that crossover, so we’re operating in a very different sphere.
The other reason we do this is, well it gets you more gain, more output, but that’s not really why we’re doing it. All the modern RELs play extremely loud. When you use a corner, when you project from a corner across, first of all, you’re toed in 45 degrees, we’re not firing down the length of the room we’re toed in.
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Why do we do that? Because what we really want to do is get the longest throw distance. From one corner to another is typically about 30% longer, which means that we can extend that much deeper into the bass before it hits a room boundary and folds back into the room. Getting that extremely deep bass is really the primary focus of our engineers and designers.
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So, the corner placement works really well. That’s typical for a single, occasionally for a pair.
When you start moving up into line arrays where we’ve got six, for example of either S or our reference class it’s a very different game. There you’ve got so much driven base and amplifier power to throw at it that what you really want to do there is connect it up with the main speaker, get them so their time signature is exactly linked.
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But for a single unit, when you’re just starting off with a REL the corner placement gives you the deepest, really most comfortable low bass, and it also requires less amplifier power.