Where should I place my subwoofe? My room is 14x10 I currently have it in the left corner like 2 inches away from the wall on both sides next to a closet door also should I adjust my bass settings on my front speakers via receiver? one more question is there some kind of device I can make or buy that will turn my subwoofer off automatically when I shut down my receiver almost forgot should I put some kind of grips on the bottom of my subwoofer
Subwoofer placement for best position is quite a topic. Here are two quick and dirty ways to do pretty well. Place the sub where you will be sitting listening ( like on the couch you will sit at when you watch your Home Theater. Then take an SPL meter ( you must have one of these to position a sub about 50 bucks from radio shack) and walk around the room watching the readings of a low frequency test tone ( my denon AV receiver has this built in but you could use a set up disk). The place where you get the highest SPL reading in decibels is a good place to start.
The other way to do it is to try diferent positions in the room and sit with your SPL meter in the listening spot and the place where you get the highest reading is it.
TO go to the next step requires a bit more effort. You have to essentially sweep the room across a spectrum of low frequencies and see if you ave any nulls or voids, ie frequencies where the sound just bottoms out. You then use an equalizer ( many subs have them pre-installed) and even out the frequency map.
I use two identical subs that have not only a parametric equalizer on board but also phase controls/gain controls etc. They actuaaly are in both front corners and face each other. Bizarre but it seems to work well and since my room is almost a square its not an easy room for bass frequencies.
