Notice the arm of a couch toward the bottom of the right-hand side of the picture. That's where the prime listening couch is located, and where Ken and I sat the whole time we were there (in between trips to the CD tray, anyway). The sub is only 6 feet away from the middle of the couch, but darned if we could tell where the bass was coming from. Unless you stand right in front of the thing -- and therefore feel your clothing flapping in the prodigious amounts of air moving in and out of the port -- it blends in so well to the texture of the music, it's sonically invisible despite its ominous presence.
Bravo Axiom. I bow to your engineering prowess.
I just remembered something about calibrating the sub. We discovered that the one of the best ways to dial in a sub to the right level is to use a recording that features a cello. Ken brought Bela Fleck's
Perpetual Motion, which features a number of excellent cello tracks. One toward the end of the CD is particularly good because the cello does a virtual sweep of frequencies from high to low quite often.
Too high a setting on the sub will bloat the cello's resonances and muddy up its low end. Too low a setting will leave it sounding thin. Of course, it helps to know what a live cello sounds like, but the effect of too much or too little sub in the mix should be apparent to most people with working ears.
