Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Room size questions

I am putting together a home theater system in my newly remodeled basement. The basement room is approximately 30'x30', with a 6' partial wall down the middle. the room will have a pool table and bar area along with the home theater area. The listening/viewing area for the HT will be in one corner and be approximately 15' wide by 12' deep. This area is open to the other areas of the whole room. So my question is, when considering speaker systems, do I focus more on the size of the HT area, or the whole room? I will be doing a lot of two channel music listening, probable way more than HT.

I was considering going with M80's, VP150 and Q8's (5.1). not sure about a sub, and that is where the question really comes up. I would like to keep the sub small as possible for cost purposes. Should the sub be sized to the smaller HT area only, or do I need to consider the whole room size and go with a bigger sub?

Alan from Axiom answered this question for me once. You really need to account for the whole "connected" air volume. Since you are not making a full wall, the air volume for the whole area should be taken into consideration. Keep in mind that a sub is moving a LOT of air.

Think of it this way. Take a 5 gallon bucket, put some water about 1/4 of the way up in it. Drop a small rock into it. What happens? It makes rippples (kind of like sound waves) in the water.

Now, take that same rock, and drop it in a small pool (like those classic little plastic ones) filled to a "normal" leel with water. What happens? You MIGHT get ripples throughout the whole pool, but the farther away from the place that the rock was dropped, the more noticeably the ripples are less. That is similar to what happens with the sub's ability to push air (which is a main function of a sub)...

What is your budget and what sub(s) are you looking at? You will always get honest advice here.

Hey Bob,

I have almost the exact situation as you. My room is 30ft x 31ft with 9ft ceilings. It is one big room with no partial walls. One side of the room includes the walkout area to the back yard and HT area. The otherside is the pool table and bar area.

Prior to the basement being finished I had all my equipment upstairs in the living room, which was 15 x 18. I had m60's, ep350, vp150, and 4 Qs8's. Things were great.

Then, when I moved everything downstairs, things were still pretty good, however, I later decided to upgrade to the ep500. The cabinet size of the 500 and 350 are similar, however, the more powerful 500 and DSP design outperformed the 350 easily. I now have an ep600, which does a better job than the 500, but they are pretty close.

Axiom now has an EP400, which is an amazing sub in a compact design which has more power than the 350, and is a little cheaper than the 500. In reality, there is not much difference in size between the 350, 400, and 500, so I suppose it is more up to your budget.

Nick is right, that is a big space with a lot of volume. It might be a good idea to consider a little bigger sub if it fits your budget. You could always go with m60's which I owned for over 2 years and they did great in my basement, I now have m80's.

Also, if you order from the factory outlet, you will save 10% on top of the already 5% you get if you order 5 items at the time of order, this may help.

good luck...randy