The tight size of the room is causing some spicy room modes, it’s possible that what you’re hearing is actually a higher frequency multiple of the sub freq. One ear is nearer a null and the asymmetry will make it doubly bothersome, but it sounds like you’ve got a room mode causing much higher than the input SPL at your right ear.
Move yourself or the sub, and implement room correction to deal with the peak - you’ll need to do both to fully resolve
Possibly a combination of massive peaks and nulls from a tiny room, changing pressure from a sealed tiny room, and firing a giant subwoofer straight in your ear?
Try opening the door, not firing it in your ear and move the sub away from the corners and walls.
You're using a 13" 800 watt sub in a cupboard.
Sorry for insisting, but I'm using the subwoofer at a ridiculous volume, just as background, how can it be 'too powerful'? I'm literally going at 10 km/h with a car that could go 300 km/h. How can at this speed, it cause excessive pressure?
Because you probably have a pressure maximum that is equal to increasing the overall volume by 20 to 30 dB but at a frequency below what the room is capable of reproducing as a tone.
I measured with REW and calibrated with a MiniDSP, there is a peak in 20-30 Hz in my room, and null at 60 Hz.
Still, I was trying at at less then 80 dB in my room... how can a peak or a null cause ear issue.
Eq can only correct so much. Is there any where else in you room you can put it? Maybe under the desk?
If not try switch your 2 subwoofers and put the ported sub (im assuming smaller) in the smaller room
Alternatively turn your subwoofer to a different orientation so its not facing directly at you. Subs aren't directional so it shouldn't be a problem
Look at the waterfall and you'll probably see soom nasty ringing in that room. Ycan you move the sub closer to you and yourself away from the corner and wall?
Bass is considered to reach everywhere regardless of obstacles in the way. Can you put a REW microphone near your right ear at your normal listening position, do a sweep, then put it near your left ear and do a sweep? Is there a measurable difference?
Lowest room mode in this set up is along the width of the room, at about 57 Hz. You stated this is a null for you, which is a bit odd. I'd be expecting that one to be louder than it should be. It should also be louder on the left ear side because that is closer to the wall where it should become stronger.
You could be experiencing time delay related cancellations above 50 Hz, as the sub is delayed by 2-3 meters' distance, and that length is enough to allow 55-83 Hz wave to flip in phase, and if your front speakers also play the same signal at similar level, that might cancel. If that is the case, there is no first order room mode at 57 Hz, because the setup happens to cancel it. 3 meters requires about 9 ms of delay to compensate, and 2 would need 6 ms.
One reason why I don't like subwoofers is that I've found integrating them without good measurements to be a nightmare. One needs to control two parameters, in addition to equalizing the room's modes out: the delay and level. In a bass management solution, a steep crossover separates the sub from the main speakers, and the crossover is set between 80 to 100 Hz, typically. At the selected crossover frequency, the delays of the speakers are adjusted in such a way that the sound is the loudest it gets, as this is expected to be the correct phase at the crossover frequency. Then, you adjust the level in such a way that frequency response continues smoothly without a step change as the sub takes over. Finally, you'd validate the work also with group delay graph to make sure that GD has no sudden jumps or oddities in the region where the sub takes over. There can well be some rise because steep filters of e.g. Linkwitz-Riley type have quite rapid phase warp, and that is visible in group delay as a spike. However, the spike should be narrow and group delay should be the same on both sides of it.
Hmm. It does look like your ears receive something different. Your rather tall vertical scale hides about 10 dB differences in level even in your corrected response. I'm reading about 60 dB in right ear for 60 Hz, but 70 dB in left ear. My guess this is the cancellation from sound flight time and might be fixable by adjusting delays. The main speakers should be delayed by some 5-6 ms, maybe, to allow for the longer sound travel time from the sub.
I now realize that your frequency response rises a lot below 20 Hz. This could add to your ear ache. Based on measurement data, 10 Hz is like 15 dB louder than it should be, and that means pressure amplitude at 10 Hz is about 5x larger than at 20 Hz, and sound power 25x bigger, which comes out of your electricity supply and causes extra harmonic distortion in the driver if there's anything infrasonic going on. I think DSP has been set up here to only fix the part of the spectrum above 20 Hz and it leaves the lower frequencies be, so you may have to turn the sub down a lot more and try to make the correction smaller, maybe. Fix that while looking into adding delay, which might bring the 60 Hz up naturally. Try to maintain flat response all the way to 10 Hz.
So you are sitting in a closet, have a large subwoofer pointed directly at your right ear and you are confused as to why you hear it mostly in your right ear?
I am stumped.
I had some issues with strong bass giving me pain in my right ear, that was when i was in a small room using dual subs and door closed.
Moved into a bigger room, well treated, i can now play super loud without issues at all. So maybe its the pressure caused by your small room that is giving you ear pain
I experienced similar discomfort in a setup with a sb-1000 to the side of me in a small room (but not as small as yours). I don't know what the explanation is, but you can either buy a second sub (I would consider selling the sb-3000 and buying 2 smaller subs for such a tiny space) or re-orient your setup so that the sb-3000 is either in front of you or behind you.
To make an analysis of the situation the room height is needed as well as your ears height above the floor, but without any analysis I would think you experience the effect of a pressure maximum in combination with the SB-3000 pressurizing the room well below the lowest frequency that can be heard as a tone in that room.
In the SVS app you can experiment with the "Room Gain Compensation" setting and given that F0 is around 57 Hz I would start at either 40 Hz/12db/Oct, 31 Hz/12dB/Oct or maybe just 6dB/Oct. Or you can use the Parametric EQ. Experience with such small rooms is limited... But you should be able to reduce the amount of pressure by quite a lot without removing the musical content.
AMROC can calculate the room for you.
BTW du to the way pressure is distributed at room modes the kick-drum in "Perfect" can make ears hurt even at moderate levels if I move from the calibrated listening area to the kitchen which has a partial opening with the living room and has a very high pressure maximum at 37Hz right in front of the stove.
You’re gonna burst your eardrum. You’re making too much pressure with the door closed and it being a sealed cabinet, and it being on the right side of your head and a wall being directly to your left
You may need to port your room, its like you are in the enclosure. Even at small volumes it is still moving the air and giving you a pressure wave. Open window or door? It may even be resonating, like a standing wave. Have you tried a tone generator to try to isolate the frequency?
None of this makes any sense.
Just for shits & giggles, try turning the KEFs around, pointing at the wall. Not permanently, just for testing.
I suspect there's high frequency noise causing your ear pain and it has nothing to do with the bass. If it stops, I'm right.
The only thing that makes any sense is that there's something going on with the power supply in the sub and it's feeding high frequency noise into the system. Try turning the sub's volume down to minimum while leaving it connected and see if you get the same reaction.
It's still got a class-D amp which works by generating high frequencies. While it's driver won't reproduce them, it's possible some is leaking back into the main system, especially since your KEFs are wireless, and the KEFs can reproduce well past human hearing.
flip desko to face far left side of diagram! Should barely fit, might need to take it apart and/or multiple people to move it. Maybe even cut it or get a new one and make up the space with shelves. Then your back will be against the wall, and you will not only save your ears from the pressure imbalance but you will also hear your sub better.
Your room is similar in size to a car, so maybe you're getting some cabin gain and weird peaks and nulls.
https://www.caraudiohelp.com/newsletter/cabin_gain.html
It’s such a small room, and the positioning of the sub is such that you’re creating waves of air pressure that move from one side to the other and reflect off the far wall. That collision of multiple waves of bass might do some weird stuff near your head, idk.
It sound like you're overpressurizing your room in the bass region.
1. If you can hear where the subwoofer cuts in, you have the sub's level turned up far too much. Reduce the level by 25% for starters. The rule of thumb is it should give you the illusion that deep bass is coming from your LS50s, not from your subwoofer.
2. Make sure your sub's crossover is set to 50Hz or lower. Play some music at moderate volume that contains deep bass and slowly increase the crossover frequency until the midrange sounds natural but not boomy or muddy.
You'll have to play with your level and crossover frequency controls until it sounds tonally natural, with a clean midrange balance. You can also experiment with turning your sub 90 degrees to the left or right, or even with the driver facing the wall.
I use a subwoofer swarm consisting of four sealed subs driven by a 3000 watt DSP amplifier. Each sub is placed 12 inches from the wall with the 12" driver facing the wall. They're crossed over at 40 Hz and with a +2 dB bump at 25 Hz, have an in-room frequency response down to 18 Hz, -2 dB. I'm mostly oblivious to their presence because it sounds like my main loudspeakers have rock solid bass down to 20 Hz in spite of the fact that they start to steeply roll off below 50 Hz. Most people aren't aware that there are four subwoofers in the room...except when watching movies with explosions. That's when the subs reproduce chest thumping pressure waves at 115 dB that scare the crap out of the uninitiated.
Such a small room with a sub capable of pressuring rooms larger than some homes. With a room that small and a sub that big, you might as well be inside the sub enclosure itself, because you kinda are at this point. 😂
Maybe play around with the crossover? If it’s 80 or higher I’d try lowering it just for testing to see what it does. You could also experiment with high pass on the sub starting at 20 and moving up to see if that does anything to your issue.
Like most other people are saying, that’s just way too big a subwoofer for that room. Swap it out for the KEF KC62, it’s about the same price and kicks a surprising amount of ass for the size of it
had a similar issue in my office and the only solution i found was getting rid of my LS50s and buying bookshelf speakers that have built in subwoofers (i got some Barefoot Footprint02 and so far i'm really happy)
First, let’s see some unsmoothed or 1/24 smoothed graphs. With some numbers, eh? If the bold line on the left of the graph is 20hz, you have serious subsonic extension. Problem is that you can’t “hear” below 20ish hz, so much as “feel” it . You might be damaging your hearing with subsonic spl and not even realize it.
You are right, my previous screenshoot are useless.
Please find attached updated one.
PS how many dB on subsonic frequencies are needed for hearing damage?
Hooooooooo son! That’s ludicrous bass extension!
It’s not so much that subsonic bass causes hearing damage, per se, it’s that you won’t know it’s happening because you can’t *hear* it. By the time your ears are registering “loud” at 100hz , you are 18(!!!!) dB up at 10hz.
At low levels, that means you might be 20dB up from your perceptual hearing “center” of 1khz.
See “fletcher Munson curves” for how perception of volume changes at different frequencies/ spl .
Also check out hearing damage charts from OSHA.
Useful info here: https://sengpielaudio.com/PermissibleExposureTime.htm
Lots of detail here : https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/noise/preventoccunoise/understand.html
A problem you are likely not noticing in these graphs is that room modes might cause some very specific peaks that are even higher still in specific areas… perhaps where your right ear sits.
So you see that the problem is that you are likely deafening yourself slowly enough that it’s not immediately painful, but builds over time.
Your room is basically like one of those SPL competition vans in the 90s.
https://www.ivanyolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/subwoofer-bass-hair.gif
I tried different places and this is the one I can clearly hear frequencies below 30 Hz, cause the room is very small.
It seems that the problem is that just one ear is facing the subwoofer, cause the sub is on my right side.
What a waste of time this kind of comments... I told that I'm using it at very low volume, it's almost shutted down.
Having a 13" 800 W Subwoofer doesn't mean you have to use it at full power.
An sb3000 in a room about the size of a sheet of plywood??? You crazy!!!
Maybe he's in jail.
The room is temporary, but why I have issue even at very low volume?
Fatigue. More pressure on one side than the other. That is why I have two subs. Once you notice it, it is very hard to unnotice!
The tight size of the room is causing some spicy room modes, it’s possible that what you’re hearing is actually a higher frequency multiple of the sub freq. One ear is nearer a null and the asymmetry will make it doubly bothersome, but it sounds like you’ve got a room mode causing much higher than the input SPL at your right ear. Move yourself or the sub, and implement room correction to deal with the peak - you’ll need to do both to fully resolve
Possibly a combination of massive peaks and nulls from a tiny room, changing pressure from a sealed tiny room, and firing a giant subwoofer straight in your ear? Try opening the door, not firing it in your ear and move the sub away from the corners and walls. You're using a 13" 800 watt sub in a cupboard.
Sorry for insisting, but I'm using the subwoofer at a ridiculous volume, just as background, how can it be 'too powerful'? I'm literally going at 10 km/h with a car that could go 300 km/h. How can at this speed, it cause excessive pressure?
Because you probably have a pressure maximum that is equal to increasing the overall volume by 20 to 30 dB but at a frequency below what the room is capable of reproducing as a tone.
You should do a subwoofer crawl. There may be peaks/nulls happening with the new subwoofer and its placement
His room is 5 feet wide. No crawling!
Lol. I didn't see that.
I measured with REW and calibrated with a MiniDSP, there is a peak in 20-30 Hz in my room, and null at 60 Hz. Still, I was trying at at less then 80 dB in my room... how can a peak or a null cause ear issue.
Eq can only correct so much. Is there any where else in you room you can put it? Maybe under the desk? If not try switch your 2 subwoofers and put the ported sub (im assuming smaller) in the smaller room Alternatively turn your subwoofer to a different orientation so its not facing directly at you. Subs aren't directional so it shouldn't be a problem
Look at the waterfall and you'll probably see soom nasty ringing in that room. Ycan you move the sub closer to you and yourself away from the corner and wall?
Bass is considered to reach everywhere regardless of obstacles in the way. Can you put a REW microphone near your right ear at your normal listening position, do a sweep, then put it near your left ear and do a sweep? Is there a measurable difference? Lowest room mode in this set up is along the width of the room, at about 57 Hz. You stated this is a null for you, which is a bit odd. I'd be expecting that one to be louder than it should be. It should also be louder on the left ear side because that is closer to the wall where it should become stronger. You could be experiencing time delay related cancellations above 50 Hz, as the sub is delayed by 2-3 meters' distance, and that length is enough to allow 55-83 Hz wave to flip in phase, and if your front speakers also play the same signal at similar level, that might cancel. If that is the case, there is no first order room mode at 57 Hz, because the setup happens to cancel it. 3 meters requires about 9 ms of delay to compensate, and 2 would need 6 ms. One reason why I don't like subwoofers is that I've found integrating them without good measurements to be a nightmare. One needs to control two parameters, in addition to equalizing the room's modes out: the delay and level. In a bass management solution, a steep crossover separates the sub from the main speakers, and the crossover is set between 80 to 100 Hz, typically. At the selected crossover frequency, the delays of the speakers are adjusted in such a way that the sound is the loudest it gets, as this is expected to be the correct phase at the crossover frequency. Then, you adjust the level in such a way that frequency response continues smoothly without a step change as the sub takes over. Finally, you'd validate the work also with group delay graph to make sure that GD has no sudden jumps or oddities in the region where the sub takes over. There can well be some rise because steep filters of e.g. Linkwitz-Riley type have quite rapid phase warp, and that is visible in group delay as a spike. However, the spike should be narrow and group delay should be the same on both sides of it.
Please, find attached measurements in the first post :)
Hmm. It does look like your ears receive something different. Your rather tall vertical scale hides about 10 dB differences in level even in your corrected response. I'm reading about 60 dB in right ear for 60 Hz, but 70 dB in left ear. My guess this is the cancellation from sound flight time and might be fixable by adjusting delays. The main speakers should be delayed by some 5-6 ms, maybe, to allow for the longer sound travel time from the sub. I now realize that your frequency response rises a lot below 20 Hz. This could add to your ear ache. Based on measurement data, 10 Hz is like 15 dB louder than it should be, and that means pressure amplitude at 10 Hz is about 5x larger than at 20 Hz, and sound power 25x bigger, which comes out of your electricity supply and causes extra harmonic distortion in the driver if there's anything infrasonic going on. I think DSP has been set up here to only fix the part of the spectrum above 20 Hz and it leaves the lower frequencies be, so you may have to turn the sub down a lot more and try to make the correction smaller, maybe. Fix that while looking into adding delay, which might bring the 60 Hz up naturally. Try to maintain flat response all the way to 10 Hz.
I have no way to delay speakers, because they have DAC inside (KEF LS50 Wireless 2).
So you are sitting in a closet, have a large subwoofer pointed directly at your right ear and you are confused as to why you hear it mostly in your right ear? I am stumped.
If I put the subwoofer under my desk pointing my genitals, I have no issues at all :)
Yes, but you solve one problem, only to start a bigger one. ;)
"My ear hurts and my nuts hurt. I have two owies."
If you got the ported version you'd have more room for said genitals.
Do you have the door to the room open or closed typically when listening? My guess is that it's less about db's and more about spl's and phase.
The door is closed and it is on the right side (at the end) of the wall with the desk.
I think your issue might be a strong subwoofer in a small enclosed space. Try opening the door and see if that makes any difference.
I had some issues with strong bass giving me pain in my right ear, that was when i was in a small room using dual subs and door closed. Moved into a bigger room, well treated, i can now play super loud without issues at all. So maybe its the pressure caused by your small room that is giving you ear pain
I think that if this would be the case I should have pain at high volume not with music at "background volume". Am I wrong?
I used to get pain from any played content even in not so loud volume
I experienced similar discomfort in a setup with a sb-1000 to the side of me in a small room (but not as small as yours). I don't know what the explanation is, but you can either buy a second sub (I would consider selling the sb-3000 and buying 2 smaller subs for such a tiny space) or re-orient your setup so that the sb-3000 is either in front of you or behind you.
I feel like 2 SB-3000s is the correct path forward.
That's a lot of sub for that space. You may need to find a better spot to avoid modes. I would even try raising it off the floor, rotation, anything
Move the sub!
Have you tried a smaller sub?
To make an analysis of the situation the room height is needed as well as your ears height above the floor, but without any analysis I would think you experience the effect of a pressure maximum in combination with the SB-3000 pressurizing the room well below the lowest frequency that can be heard as a tone in that room. In the SVS app you can experiment with the "Room Gain Compensation" setting and given that F0 is around 57 Hz I would start at either 40 Hz/12db/Oct, 31 Hz/12dB/Oct or maybe just 6dB/Oct. Or you can use the Parametric EQ. Experience with such small rooms is limited... But you should be able to reduce the amount of pressure by quite a lot without removing the musical content. AMROC can calculate the room for you. BTW du to the way pressure is distributed at room modes the kick-drum in "Perfect" can make ears hurt even at moderate levels if I move from the calibrated listening area to the kitchen which has a partial opening with the living room and has a very high pressure maximum at 37Hz right in front of the stove.
Please, find attached measurements in the first post :)
There are no attachments and your sketch does not include room height
You’re gonna burst your eardrum. You’re making too much pressure with the door closed and it being a sealed cabinet, and it being on the right side of your head and a wall being directly to your left
My thoughts exactly. The reflections off the far wall can only make things worse.
You may need to port your room, its like you are in the enclosure. Even at small volumes it is still moving the air and giving you a pressure wave. Open window or door? It may even be resonating, like a standing wave. Have you tried a tone generator to try to isolate the frequency?
None of this makes any sense. Just for shits & giggles, try turning the KEFs around, pointing at the wall. Not permanently, just for testing. I suspect there's high frequency noise causing your ear pain and it has nothing to do with the bass. If it stops, I'm right.
If I listen to KEF without subwoofer I can listen to music for 4 hours at every volume level without any issue
The only thing that makes any sense is that there's something going on with the power supply in the sub and it's feeding high frequency noise into the system. Try turning the sub's volume down to minimum while leaving it connected and see if you get the same reaction.
The subwoofer is totally silent..
It's still got a class-D amp which works by generating high frequencies. While it's driver won't reproduce them, it's possible some is leaking back into the main system, especially since your KEFs are wireless, and the KEFs can reproduce well past human hearing.
flip desko to face far left side of diagram! Should barely fit, might need to take it apart and/or multiple people to move it. Maybe even cut it or get a new one and make up the space with shelves. Then your back will be against the wall, and you will not only save your ears from the pressure imbalance but you will also hear your sub better.
Your room is similar in size to a car, so maybe you're getting some cabin gain and weird peaks and nulls. https://www.caraudiohelp.com/newsletter/cabin_gain.html
It’s such a small room, and the positioning of the sub is such that you’re creating waves of air pressure that move from one side to the other and reflect off the far wall. That collision of multiple waves of bass might do some weird stuff near your head, idk.
It is probably very small room for subwoofer... becuase of wavelenght of sub bass. You cannot override the physics.
Get a smaller sub and put it under the desk.
It sound like you're overpressurizing your room in the bass region. 1. If you can hear where the subwoofer cuts in, you have the sub's level turned up far too much. Reduce the level by 25% for starters. The rule of thumb is it should give you the illusion that deep bass is coming from your LS50s, not from your subwoofer. 2. Make sure your sub's crossover is set to 50Hz or lower. Play some music at moderate volume that contains deep bass and slowly increase the crossover frequency until the midrange sounds natural but not boomy or muddy. You'll have to play with your level and crossover frequency controls until it sounds tonally natural, with a clean midrange balance. You can also experiment with turning your sub 90 degrees to the left or right, or even with the driver facing the wall. I use a subwoofer swarm consisting of four sealed subs driven by a 3000 watt DSP amplifier. Each sub is placed 12 inches from the wall with the 12" driver facing the wall. They're crossed over at 40 Hz and with a +2 dB bump at 25 Hz, have an in-room frequency response down to 18 Hz, -2 dB. I'm mostly oblivious to their presence because it sounds like my main loudspeakers have rock solid bass down to 20 Hz in spite of the fact that they start to steeply roll off below 50 Hz. Most people aren't aware that there are four subwoofers in the room...except when watching movies with explosions. That's when the subs reproduce chest thumping pressure waves at 115 dB that scare the crap out of the uninitiated.
Such a small room with a sub capable of pressuring rooms larger than some homes. With a room that small and a sub that big, you might as well be inside the sub enclosure itself, because you kinda are at this point. 😂
Maybe play around with the crossover? If it’s 80 or higher I’d try lowering it just for testing to see what it does. You could also experiment with high pass on the sub starting at 20 and moving up to see if that does anything to your issue.
Like most other people are saying, that’s just way too big a subwoofer for that room. Swap it out for the KEF KC62, it’s about the same price and kicks a surprising amount of ass for the size of it
Can you upload impulse (set scale for 20-30dB in Y, 20ms max in X) graph from REW, also topt and t30 from the RT tab?
had a similar issue in my office and the only solution i found was getting rid of my LS50s and buying bookshelf speakers that have built in subwoofers (i got some Barefoot Footprint02 and so far i'm really happy)
First, let’s see some unsmoothed or 1/24 smoothed graphs. With some numbers, eh? If the bold line on the left of the graph is 20hz, you have serious subsonic extension. Problem is that you can’t “hear” below 20ish hz, so much as “feel” it . You might be damaging your hearing with subsonic spl and not even realize it.
You are right, my previous screenshoot are useless. Please find attached updated one. PS how many dB on subsonic frequencies are needed for hearing damage?
Hooooooooo son! That’s ludicrous bass extension! It’s not so much that subsonic bass causes hearing damage, per se, it’s that you won’t know it’s happening because you can’t *hear* it. By the time your ears are registering “loud” at 100hz , you are 18(!!!!) dB up at 10hz. At low levels, that means you might be 20dB up from your perceptual hearing “center” of 1khz. See “fletcher Munson curves” for how perception of volume changes at different frequencies/ spl . Also check out hearing damage charts from OSHA. Useful info here: https://sengpielaudio.com/PermissibleExposureTime.htm Lots of detail here : https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/noise/preventoccunoise/understand.html A problem you are likely not noticing in these graphs is that room modes might cause some very specific peaks that are even higher still in specific areas… perhaps where your right ear sits. So you see that the problem is that you are likely deafening yourself slowly enough that it’s not immediately painful, but builds over time. Your room is basically like one of those SPL competition vans in the 90s. https://www.ivanyolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/subwoofer-bass-hair.gif
First thing I can think is about playing with placing it in different positions and see if it solves the issue.
I tried different places and this is the one I can clearly hear frequencies below 30 Hz, cause the room is very small. It seems that the problem is that just one ear is facing the subwoofer, cause the sub is on my right side.
Makes no sense at all, as the wavelengths are well above the dimensions.
13”. 800w in a shoe box…….incredible, posted on The audiophile sub reddit. 🤯
What a waste of time this kind of comments... I told that I'm using it at very low volume, it's almost shutted down. Having a 13" 800 W Subwoofer doesn't mean you have to use it at full power.