Choosing a Sub Woofer for a Home Theater

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Reggie Hayes here with Expert Village, and we're talking about the subwoofer. What is a subwoofer? The subwoofer is just an oversized speaker. Again this one is like a 12-inch speaker right here. It, it is your base. It is your explosions. It's your booms. It's your rattles. It's everything. It shakes the couches. It shakes the walls, and it shakes the neighbors sometimes. But, they're very cool to have. Now this one is a much more powerful speaker than the one that we have for our little 12-foot room here, but it is designed for much larger rooms. Now the purpose of the subwoofer is to protect the main speakers. Your main speakers, especially the smaller main speakers you have, they really cannot handle these really low tones, and that's why you have these. Now, what's so intimidating about 'em sometimes is this right here- the hookups. Now, this one right here has a lot of features. It has more features on it than are really necessary for a subwoofer. And what I mean is that it can separate your speakers right here. It takes speakers out, excuse me, it takes input from your speakers and can output your main speakers. You really won't need that. The main thing you really need to worry about is your main inputs right here. Those come from your receiver. Now, right here is your volume. Pretty much all your subwoofers are gonna have a volume, and you can play with that and find out how loud of the bass tones you want. Phase. Now phase is something really interesting. As we said earlier in the main audio, speakers push air. But it's very important that when speakers push air at the same time and at the same rate. Your speakers are pushing in like that. Now if all of your speakers are pointed the same way from the front of your entertainment center, they're going to be in sync, or what they call in the phase. They push and pull at the same time. The subwoofer usually sets across from the other side of the room somewhere, like in our case, near the couch. However, usually you'll turn it around which means that it's working against your other speakers. When you do that this one is nice enough to have the phase feature. You just flip the switch to 180, if you spin it around like we had it earlier. It's really technical. It's probably way more technical than I need to go into with you guys, but you guys should, it?s just there for you guys to know in case you want to explore. The best thing to do is to play with it and see what sounds best for you. The crossover frequency is the last part of the subwoofer. It's very important. It is the point at which, it sends, it stops sending low tones to your main speakers and starts retaining them in the subwoofer itself. The larger the speaker, the larger the main speaker, the more base they'll be able to handle. However the smaller the main speaker, the less base they'll be able to handle, and that's where the subwoofer really kicks in. If you have a large speaker, it'll be able to handle the 120Hz number. If you have a really small speaker you're gonna need to cut this down closer to 40. The best thing to do is to play with it and see what works best for you and see what sounds best."