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Originally posted by mikec
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I cant give you a technically reasoned answer. But I can give you my cheap *** opinion after having attended Axpona this year and auditioned 100 or so systems. In a nutshell my wife and I preferred the sound of single large woofer systems 12 or 15 inch. Some were horn loaded, some bass reflex, none that I can remember were in sealed enclosures. Often times they were paired with horn loaded mid/high. Small or multi woofer dome tweeter System after system started to sound the same, too perfect, too clinical, with little apparent differences even at $20,000 price differential. The big boxes were just plain fun, especially on jazz with horns and stand up basses, Ella Fitzgerald, frank Sinatra, count Basie big band recordings from the 50's. Hearing the great baritone Joe Williams and the count Basie band we looked at each other and smiled. My wife and I are both dancers so we hear a couple live dance bands per week, big bands, small bands, all jazz related, often stand up bass, occasionally a slower bass like bass guitar (IOW bass with no attack) bass guitars don't swing too good. Some of our band even use a tuba player for the bass, 1920's Charleston bands. I trust my wife's ears, she isn't thinking of technicalities. After Axpona I visited here with my first post asking about doing a 15 inch system with horns and sensitive enough to hear the noise floor of my tube amps! I have a great deal of respect for folks here working all the math and voodoo, I'm not anti intellectual, a good large woofer speaker still needs that background. But this is just an empirical opinion.
as others have said large woofers simply "go lower" and have low-side headroom (foot room?). It's like if you compare the bass of a bass guitar where the plucked string is less that 3 feet long to the string of a stand up bass where the string is 6 feet long. For the 3 foot string to produce a low note it must be very loose, whereas the 6 foot long string can still be wound tight. Plucking the short string will still produce the note, but there will be no "attack" to the note because of such a loose string. It will be "slow bass". Whereas a 6.5 foot tall stand up bass when plucking that long tight string will produce an "attack" to the note that is exponentially louder than the 3 foot string on the guitar can ever produce. Musically this is what gives jazz "swing", the fast attack and decay of the bass with a 6 foot long very tight string. Large woofers can be "tight" with low excursion like the 6 foot string of a stand up bass. Small woofers need to be "loose" with high excursion to get the same note, like the short string of a bass guitar must be loose. So small woofers have "slow attack" in the bass, like a bass guitar has slow attack because it has such a short loose string, the compromise is to loosen the string a lot to achieve the same note. The compromise with a small woofer is to give it large excursion, but then it loses its attack to reproduce the same note as the large woofer which needs very little excursion, like a long but tight stand up bass string.
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