Is mo betta? John Darko recently tackled the 1-or-2 subwoofer question for himself. From his report with measurements, "notice how the second sub gives us a shade more sub bass and maybe smooths its appearance. This is consistent with the room acoustics experts who tell us that multiple subwoofers are one of the most effective ways to even out a hifi system’s bass response in a room. Because all loudspeaker systems play in a room and the room is the loudspeaker system’s overlord. When we measure at the listening position, we are taking a snapshot of a single point in space. But if we walk around our room, we hear areas where the bass is strong and areas where the bass is weak. When I do this here with two subwoofers in play, the audible differences between the weak and strong areas are diminished. That’s compared to having only one subwoofer in play."
A snarky commenter might retort twofold. 1/ to get a bit more sub bass, I simply dial up the volume on my single sub. 2/ I'm not going walkabout during listening. I don't care how lumpy the LF distribution across the room might be as long as it locks in for my listening seat. As a solo sailor myself not big crew spread across a long couch watching movies, Mister Snark speaks to me. That augments by the fact that for his second sub, John mentions no improved soundstaging or image focus as a mono vs stereo bass argument might have expected. I've read claims that on most music, sub 100Hz content records in mono in the first place. I can neither confirm nor deny that not because I've got multiple lines of inquiry going and an arrest is immiment but because I don't know.
My own mo-betta experiments limit themselves to this recent encounter with Voxativ's short Alberich² stack. That had single-woofer 12" RiPol subs acting as stands for 5" widebander monitors. That stereo bass in classic stereo locations I compared to my 2×15" RiPol sub seated centred between the monitors. Here mono amps drive the sub with discrete L/R-channel signal for stereo bass in a mono location. I thought that just maybe, something about stereo bass in stereo locations coincident with the upper bandwidth was a bit more specific. The qualifier was 'maybe'. This was subtle. It was nowhere near enough for my unholy trinity of ears and wallet to knock my solo sub approach off course. Of course the 'super'-dipole semi cardioid dispersion pattern of RiPol bass interacts with a room different than omni-dispersing classic sealed or ported box bass. I don't know whether the 1-or-2 sub inspection translates cleanly between these types of subwoofers. I only know that in the seat hence not walking about the room to inspect my evenness of LF coverage, I'm still on the 1-sub wagon. John's findings with classic box-bass subs just built out and reinforced that position. If one did home theatre where infrasonic events tie to specific onscreen cues watched by multiple people each hoping for a sweet-spot experience, I can well imagine that multiple subs would be superior. For pure music in a single seat however, I'm not yet convinced. Like my cat Chai Baba, to that my wallet purrs contentedly…
