Placing subwoofer inside cabinet to hide. Bad idea?

This is most certainly a bad idea. The vibrations will be unnerving and will interfere with your viewing pleasure. Your wife will really hate this arrangement. My suggestion would be to place the subwoofer in the most discrete location possible, rent a chick-flick with some low frequency effects, and demonstrate to her how essential the subwoofer is to the home theater experience. Good luck.

I also agree. Placing a subwoofer inside of a cabinet or inside of any other structure is always a bad idea. People always keep trying to do it to try and increase the WAF factor. A subs enclosure was already engineered and built to a specific size with specific internal measurements to sound good. When you try and put a sub inside another structure you throw a lot of that engineering away.

Is a new wife economically out of your budget at the moment?

Tell the wife to let you sell the PB12(nsd I assume?) and buy an PB13Ultra in a nice wood finish. That way you get awesome bass and a pretty end table too

Congrats on the baby coming! First one? The good news is that you will hardly have time to watch anything for a few months, so you have lots of time to plan! I mean plot.

As long as the cabinet/piece of furniture is made very sturdy, it not greatly oversized, and it can easily breath, there is no reason why you can't go this route. I have often had custom tables built for this purpose with no bottom in them. The sub sits on the floor, and the table slips over it.

The same rules apply though with regards to LF small room acoustics. Given your room proportions, will the sub location and your primary seating area be in acoustic harmony?

Im a married guy myself. Im lucky that I get away with the stuff that I do as far as audio equipment goes as well as some of my other hobbies. Being married can be difficult at times as far as agreeing on decorating aspects of the house. I don't say a thing about what my wife wants to do in her kitchen or the bathrooms. Lucky we have 2 bathrooms so she didn't girly up the one that I use to badly. She did our bedroom how she wanted, and it is nice. She let me have the second bedroom/office for myself. It still has to double as a guest bedroom. I also have free reign as to what goes on in the garage. The living room is a dual purpose room. It has the theater in it and it has a lot of gear in it. She doesn't complain to bad about it. If it where up to her it would still have A/V gear in it but maybe not as much as it has. For example, it has four 15'' subs in it as well as some mains that are as large as some medium sized stand up refrigerators. I love my wife for this. She does like music and movies and realizes that to get the type of sound in the room that we have it cant come out of speakers or subs the size of pop cans. You sort of have to give and take. Im sure you know about this. For crying out loud you only want one sub!!! I don't think that's to much to ask. With all due respect to you and your wife. Take a walk into the kitchen and go to that shelf where your wife puts her cooking goods. Look for a glass jar. This jar will contain your NADS. Take them out of the jar and place them back in your pants where they belong.

cooterbrown000 said:

You can. Do what I plan on doing to my sub when I get it and that's to veneer it. Figure out what your furniture decor is and then get a sheet, pick out your stain, find some clamps, a veneer saw and edge band iron, and pick out the adhesive that's best suited to your weather. Practice a bit if it's your first time. If you can't do it yourself, find somebody in your metro that has a good rep that can do it for you. What you'll get is a beautiful sub that can be used as an end table. If it's a down-firing one, it's a slam dunk as far as the actual veneering it is concerned.

Secret Squirrel said:

I think we married the same woman.

If you have room, put insulating Styrofoam around the sub. Leave the back open for air flow over the amp. Push the front of the sub flush with the front of the cabinet so it connects with the room properly. Otherwise it will boom in the cabinet.

You mean like this? It is fine. A lot of you guys seem to work real hard at taking the "Home" out of Home Theater. Unless you sink it way back into a cabinet the sound will not change. Use felt or rubber bumpers under the sub and where the door makes contact. No rattles or vibes at all for me and the sub goes down pretty deep (well used to). As soon as the Rythmik high power drivers come back in stock I am going to DIY them into the cabinet on both sides so I can utilize a full 4cf for the sub enclosures. I got the 82" TV due to my consideration of the WAF. Still sounds good and we are both happy.

Here is a link to my post of the entire wall unit.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=1221

Very nice RD. As an amateur woodworker, I can appreciate what you did there.

Thanks! IMO I would avoid stuffing anything around the sub. Even though the stuffing is soft it may provide some sort of coupling between the sub enclosure and what you are hiding it in. I used thick felt pads under the sub that I found at the home center. Provides some isolation and makes it easier to slide the subwoofer in and out of the cabinet. I used a thermostatically controlled ducted fan with an inlet and outlet in the back of my cabinet due to the tight constraints. If your design has some breathing room I would not worry about it (like the doggy crate). As far as adhesive I like to use a poly construction adhesive on a lot of my projects. Cannot recall the name right now. I can dig up a tube and get the name later for you later if you would like.

I have to agree with much of the above. While you can put a sub in an cabinet, it will be difficult to make it work right. You have to put something between the sub the feet of the sub and the cabinet to prevent rattling and vibration. You have to make sure there is airflow around the amplifier. To do that around a PB12 would make that a huge cabinet. I recommend just selling the sub and buying one she could live with. Elemental Designs can do different kinds of tasteful wood finishes. Rythmik has a couple wood finishes too, not to mention piano gloss finishes. The Hsu has a nice Rosenut option on some of their subs, a Rosenut VTF3 might make a acceptable substitute for an endtable. Funkywaves in Canada has some incredible wood veneers, but they will be a little pricier. They can customize your sub to a fair degree though, so if anyone can make a powerful sub with a high WAF, it's Funkywaves.

How are you securing the door to your entertainment center, I plan on borrowing this idea from you.

Thanks in advance.

Getting all the rattles out would be a nightmare. You're better off to build your own sub from scratch as a piece of furniture, like this:

Is this post directed at me? If so I will try to get some pictures for you. The doors are held in place by metal tabs and rubber bumpers, friction fit. In the middle of changing my work truck motor this weekend so it may be next week.

OK just when you get time, thanks in advance

Sorry this took a while.




No disrespect to Mr. Fitzmaurice as I am sure he has built and designed many more speaker systems than I. But as you can see I now have an 18" LMS 5400 (two of them) with 4500 watts apiece powering the drivers. No rattles in the wall unit, the rest of the house is a different story but I have got most those rattles under control as well. Hope this helps

Looks great I will use this as a reference, Thanks

Hello again if you would, could you please send me a walk through of how you built your cabinet door for sub-woofer, I am having trouble with it, if you could send me parts list and tools used and how you took your measurements , I would really appreciate it. Having a little trouble..Thanks in advance