About to reposition my sub and I have done this before; placing the sub on the ground with a spare tile underneath it. Moved it up the table and the result doesn't sound an different. But for preference sake, do you place your sub on the ground or on top of something like a furniture?
Ground. Always the ground.
It probably depends on the type of box you have your sub in. I use a sub in my vehicle with a homemade box, can change the sound if I point the speaker in a different direction. This might have to do with the size of my cab though.
Does your PC start to rattle after a while? I always wondered what the sideeffects of having a subwoofer next to a pc were.
When I had a subwoofer I used an isolation platform I made (similar to the Auralex Subdude.) If this sub is for music then decoupling it from the floor is a good idea. Though subwoofers introduce all kinds of acoustic problems so decoupling it may not even make a difference in your room.
It doesn't really do any kind of seismic-like rattling to my desk. It ain't that beefy also.
For those that are wondering what type of sub I got, well, it's the one from the Logitech G51, so the vent is at the front and the driver is faced downwards.
Always ground, under my desk, near my feet.
Acoustically, subs work best on the ground in corners. With a sub like this though it probably isn't big enough to make a huge difference. Don't forget to adjust your phase control, if the sub has one.
Acoustically, you shouldn't have corners in your room.
This is a common suggestion for home theater. More vibrations will go through your walls and ceilings allowing for more rumble in the room. This is no good for music however. For music if you even have a sub at all it should be no further than the distance between you and your speakers (though it can be anywhere if you draw a circle using this measurement.)
I actually found 2 homemade speaker stands (made 17 years back, as I remember). Sounds like a good idea for me. I'll get the recabling underway tomorrow. The reason I would want to do this is so that I could compensate more space on my desk, till I can figure out a more effective, long-term plan.
For me it depends on the setup of the room and the speaker system. I have a small set of Boston Acoustics computer speakers and it's sub is on my desk. My sub in my main home theatre/music listening setup is on the floor, with the floorstanding speakers (there's no peice of furnature I could really stick the massive thing on anyway. The reason the one for the computer speakers is on the desk is because my desk is very large and having the sub (which is really tiny) on the floor had too much acoustic separation between the mids and low mids, so i stuck is behind one of my flatscreen monitors.
One thing to remember is that a sub is basically a huge magnet, so you don't want to have it to close to a PC or external hard drive on your desk. They aren't that sensitive but magnetic fields around magnetic media isn't always a fun experience. I remember having VHS tapes that had degraded severely in quality or a floppy disk with corrupted data because they were left on top of a speaker.
Directional subs can be placed anywhere but downfiring subs need to be placed on the ground. Their designed that way and should always be placed on the ground. Btw, Logitech subs are very strong. My X-540's can rival many professional setups.
Agreed. Same Here.
+1
Rule of thumb is to always use big drivers on the ground.
Small drivers can have an exception to be on furniture though.
Strong != Accurate
Put it where ever it sounds best
All subwoofers are omnidirectional, because low frequency transversal waves through air are slow and diffuse.
Trust your ears when it comes to placement. Make your decision on where to put the subwoofer on where it sounds deepest, if it sounds deepest and most natural closer to your ears, it's a near-field speaker design, and it will work better on your desk. Most compact subwoofers have a small driver in a tuned enclosure, sound about the same near and far from your ear, and work best when firing away from you and when standing on a non-resonant surface and as free as possible from walls (in order to avoid standing waves and acoustic amplification, aka the awful booming bass effect). Decoupling the bass enclosure from the desk or floor can be done with either spikes (motherboard stand-off screws do the job, they are brass, screw in easily, everyone has them laying around) or with some closed cell packaging foam pads. It's well decoupled if you don't hear obnoxious booming bass somewhere else in the house (typically in a corner of the room below or above). There is a big difference in how bass sound behaves in brick houses (European building standards) or in prefab wood houses (US building standards), in that bass goes right through the wall in a wooden house, but creeps up the walls in a brick house (that's why there is such a large difference in design between US speakers and European speakers, even in guitar amps, a Fender amp has a lot of bass, and in Europe, you can't just put it anywhere you want, you have to place it carefully to avoid the bass creeping up the walls and causing a big standing wave in the room if you play in a club for instance, whereas a Marshall is basically a Fender Bassman design amp, but with another tone stack for tons more mids and a non-floating baffle board, in a birch-ply rather than pine wood cabinet, just to tame the bass, make it directional, have a clear sound in cellars and clubs and smaller venues, which are more common in Europe). Most non-differentiating speaker products have a potentiometer to regulate the amount of bass, so that the bass can be turned down when it's used in a smaller solid wall room, or turned up if it's used in a large room or a room in a wooden house.
Come to think of it, if I place it near the outer wall of the house, it could send vibrations all around the place and maybe a better time to get the neighbours to hear what I'm doing? Sounds fun.
And this will be in a much isolated spot. Currently, it's sitting behind one of my monitors with a modem and a switch sitting on top of it, which I doubt it's in the best position right now. I will also be assessing how well it performs in its new spot once it's moved. It sounds fairly decent on top of the desk but space is just as important as it gets. Especially how my analogue audio cable that connects to my big PC is stretching. And even the current cable arrangement for the speakers, as it was arranged for the former setup.
So this might sound fun.
Always on the ground for a sub. I recommend the farthest corner from you in the room firing at the wall facing you 6'' away from it and about 1'' away from the other wall. This all gets thrown out the window with different rooms and subs though... Zoltan knows whats up.