Oh no, one of those spin, spin, spin, spin to move the numbers by 10?

That’s going a bit hard on the ‘fine-tuning’ bit of calibration for me.

Rythmik? They do sealed subs in 8, 12, and 15 inch sizes. Ported subs run that range and add an 18" option.

Have kept my eyes on them as the 15" sealed subs seem the perfect bass cab for our Heresy IIIs. If we keep them. ;)

What SPLs are you hitting?

The tinnitus in my ears right now tell me to give the standard PSA, mind your exuberance with the volume knob or pay the price. Can you tell I did not in my youth? ;)

I’ve found I prefer less going on with drivers and crossovers. 2 way speakers tend to be easier for me to relax and just experience where a 3 way may make me work a touch harder to make sense of what’s going on.

Oh, and 6.5" is my max midrange/woofer size. 8" mids are asking too much of the driver to cover the mids, much like 5.5" mid/woofers ask too much of them to cover the upper bass.

Yes, these are very much generalizations and many designers have done great work mitigating these issues. That is why the adage to ‘get out and listen to the speakers you are interested in’ is so apt.

I do reserve the right to change my mind at a later date, and to bounce back and forth on this issue as well. ;)

Thems fighting words! ;)

Bass is usually the most problematic. Placement of speakers and seat should be biased towards being able to reduce the level of bass being generated. Yes, I’m thinking speakers against the wall/corner and listening seat against the back wall. Yes, this is rife with problems for you and the lumpy bass response this tends to net.

But using room boundaries does enable one to turn down the bass output which should lower the transmission thru the building.

Oh, those ‘out in the room’ systems your see pictures of do sound great but tend to end up with higher SPLs to get one to the fun part of music listening.

I guess it comes down to how much you want to sacrifice for being a good neighbor.

an absolute ideal response

Isn’t that what Yamaha tried to do with their loudness knob solution in the 80s and 90s? You set the max volume you wanted with the traditional volume knob and then turned down the volume with the loudness knob. This circuit would massage the frequency response to match the loudness curves associated with our ears’ variables.

Yeah, I too didn’t find it that useful as it never really matched my ears. It seems the market said, thanks, no thanks and Yamaha killed off this feature.

Depends at what SPL you listen to.

The red curve may better align with your hearing at lower SPLs, and thus sound more flat. There should be some point as the SPLs rise that the red curve sounds like the picture shows, a little bright and a little bottom heavy.

The green curve will sound flat once the SPLs climb into the area where our hearing is flat. But this may sound foreign or ‘un-fun’ as we probably didn’t grow up hearing a flat sound system, either at home or at live events. We typically get ‘trained’ on very not-flat systems and I’ve found it rather difficult to retrain my hearing to appreciate a flat system.

In the end, it is your system, there for your listening pleasure. Live your best life is my best advice.