Do I Have to Pressurize My Room With Bass?
People seem obsessed with bass! No matter who you talk to, they seem to think you need massive subwoofers in every room of your house. All you want is better sound. You’ve never been much of a bass head. Do you really need to pressurize your room with bass to get the best sound? Let’s discuss.
It’s Your Room
People online love to speak in absolutes. They’ve decided that thunderous bass is what they want, therefore it is what everyone wants. We get it that you maybe don’t feel that way. It is your home, your room, and your home theater. If you don’t want bone-shaking bass, you don’t have to pressurize your room if you don’t want to.
The Case for Pressurization
Bass interacts with your room to create the bass you hear. Pressurizing your room means that you’ll actually be able hear all the bass that is in the music or movies you are enjoying. The argument for pressurization is clear: If you want to hear all the bass, you need to pressurize the room.
What They Don’t Tell You
What they don’t tell you (likely because they don’t truly understand bass), is that bass doesn’t only live in your subwoofers. Many of the sounds that we would describe as “low bass” are played not by the subwoofers but by your speakers. Your subwoofers generally play the sounds from 80Hz and lower. Bass, even what we think of as “low bass” starts much higher than that. Closer to 200Hz.
On top of that, many speakers can and do play cleanly down past 80Hz. They can hit that sweet spot of “bass you can feel.” Can they do it as loudly or as easily as a subwoofer? No. But they can get there.
When Pressurization is Actually Bad
If you have a very large room, trying to pressurize it with bass is probably a bad idea. These large rooms require a lot of subwoofer power to pressurize. This requires very large and very expensive subwoofers. Large spaces are often multi-use. Because the bass will sound just as loud in one area of the room as another, it makes using the room for anything other than home theater (or just watching TV) impossible.
Wrap Up
This brings us back to the original question. Do you really need to pressurize your room with bass to get good sound? No! Oftentimes, people are just wanting better sound. They want to understand what is being said on TV, they want more immersive surround sound, or they just want things to be a little louder. Not everyone wants to have a similar (or better) experience to a movie theater. And that’s okay. So, what subwoofer should you buy? Well, that’s a different article.
