[Muser]

Hi
I searched as well as I was able here to find an answer, but my issue seems a little different than what I've read others are faced with. Maybe I'm wrong, don't know.
I'll pose my question after I lay out my situation.

In a nutshell, my room, or rather my floor, is acoustically transparent to the out put of down firing subwoofers. What I mean is that I had a very powerful ATC C4 subwoofer in my listening room, and it added some bass output in the listening room, but, I was surprised that it was not more impactful. My listening room is over our garage. In the garage, there was a MASSIVE output of bass, bearing little apparent relationship to the output in the room. I've had front firing subs that were impactful, from this I see front firing subs are fine and also suggests it's not a room issue. FWIW, I live in southern California so the structures are designed to be flexible rather than rigid.

I have a downfiring subwoofer and would like to keep it, rather than sell and buy a front firing sub. Are there any acoustic "treatments" that will reflect or somehow keep the bass from a downfiring subwoofer in my room?  I"ve seen platforms to put your sub on, that raises the subwoofer, but I wonder if that does much to ameliorate the apparent "leakage" of bass into my garage. FWIW, I don't care that I have massive bass in the garage, I don't work or stay there except to park the cars. I just want to be able to use my existing subwoofer in this room.

[BPoletti]

Try moving the sub to different parts of the room.  And try moving your listening position to different parts of the room.  With deep bass, it's often more the room and the position of sub than anything else.  A good starting position is to move the sub into a corner (or midpoint along a wall), the listening position against a wall, or on 25% boundaries within the room.

[Muser]

BPoletti
Thanks for the suggestion. I think I understand the direction of your suggestion,  which is that there's a bass mode that creates a suckout or the like. Is that correct?
In service of brevity, I might have left out too much information in my initial post. A front firing sub in the same location produces a noticeable impact, so the issue doesn't seem to be a mode, so much as a porous floor, if you will. With both a front firing sub and front firing floor standers (I'm now using stand mount speakers) I didn't have the issue I am having now.
If I have missed something here please let me know, but it seems my issue is different.
Thanks.
Larry

[gooberdude]

Is it possible to rotate your down firing sub so it fires towards you temporarily?  Do you have any footers or rubber feet to use that won't mar the cabinet, to keep the cabinet off the floor & stable during a listening test?

I've used the Auralex SubDude (and Gamma pads), which are pads that go under a sub or speaker.  Effective in some scenarios, but muddies up the sound a bit since you lose the solid anchor to the floor.  The Subdude is great to mitigate 'neighbor below' issues, but not with SQ or bass impact.

Your issue reminds me of highschool & big booming car stereo's that made so much deep bass that they sounded great 50' away, but not while in the car...since it was too small of a volume.

[BobM]

Flip that downfiring sub to upfiring. Put a board on top (like a 1" maple butcher block cutting board) and place something relatively heavy on that to hold it down. Then adjust the volume accordingly to bring things back into balance.

You should get tighter bass for sure, which will allow you to turn it up a bit without generating any non-musical booming.

[Muser]

Gooberdude:
You seem to have captured the issue, exactly with the car bass. The bass in the garage is stupendous, as in stupid big and billowy.
I was curious about the Aurelex SubDude. I'd heard of something like that, but couldn't remember the name. Glad to hear the muddying up of the bass issue before I tried it. Very helpful reply. Thanks, Larry

[Muser]

BobM

Thanks for the reply. The issue isn't "balance" so much as absence of bass.

You are correct, I could turn the subwoofer upside down (I have that right, don't I?), but I was trying to use the sub as designed. As I reply here, I realize there's a component of vanity here, in that I want the sub to look "like it is supposed to look" and operate as designed. I know that placing the sub on its side allows satisfactory bass, I just didn't want to do that. Given the $$$ involved here I wanted a "pretty" and elegant solution. To pull back the curtain a little further, if I can't get a solution for bass disappearing into my garage I can sell what I have and either buy or build a front firing subwoofer. I was just trying to find out if there were any acoustical band-aids that allow me to use what I have, but with something like the aurelex subdude that was recommended above, only effective for my use. But, thanks for your input.
Larry