How is bass divided among speakers?

Question:

How is the bass divided among speakers if there is no sub in the home theater system?
If a 5.1 system has identical speakers all around with 15 inch woofers and all of the speakers are set to “large” on the processor, does the serious bass get evenly distributed to all speakers? Say, like an explosion or a dinosaur stomping? Is there much serious bass info sent to the surround speakers if they are set to “large”?

– Mitch D
Los Angeles

Answer:

If you do not have a subwoofer, then set the speaker setup menu in your processor or receiver to “None” in the subwoofer selection. All bass in the soundtrack will go to the respective speakers. Most people do not have large speakers in the rear, and in my experience, there is not much going on in the surrounds anyway. This has always surprised me, as having a full range of sound in all channels would be very exciting to experience. If you set the rear speakers to “Small”, any low frequencies in those channels will be directed to your front left/right speakers, which should be set to “Large”.

Your center channel should be set to “Small” as I have never seen a center channels speaker with a 15″ woofer in it. If, in an unlikely scenario, you had identical full-range speakers in all channels, but no sub, you would set all speakers to “Large” and the subwoofer menu to “None” as mentioned above. However, even full-range speakers don’t really do very well below about 40 Hz due to constraints in the enclosure design, so, personally, I would use at least one very large subwoofer, and set the speakers to small, with a crossover at about 50 Hz.

John E. Johnson, Jr.

Editor-in-Chief Emeritus. John E. Johnson, Jr. founded Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity in 1994, shortly after publishing a hardcopy book of the same title. He served as Editor-in-Chief of Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity until 2022. John has been involved in audio and video for more than 50 years, having built radio transmitters, amplifiers, turntables, and speakers from scratch. He was also one of the founders of the Northern California Audio Video Association, now The Bay Area Audio Society. John holds four university degrees, including a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and has published numerous scientific books, along with dozens of scientific articles on biomedical research topics as well as imaging technology. He was the founder and Editor-in-Chief of two medical/scientific journals for 20 years. John holds several patents, including one on high resolution image analysis and one on a surgical instrument. He has been affiliated with NASA, The National Institutes of Health, The Johns Hopkins University, Stanford Research Institute, and The University of California at Berkeley. He is President of the consulting firm Scientific Design and Information, Inc., which is based in Redwood City, California. John resides in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and multiple kitties! His daughter, Cynthia, who was an integral part of SECRETS for many years, resides in San Francisco.