Okay. Is there an appreciable difference between standing up a subwoofer the tall way or laying it down horizontally? Yes, there is. What are the advantages and disadvantages? Well, some of them are dumb and obvious. Standing a subwoofer up vertically gives you a higher stack platform to put something else on it. Okay. How much are you going to pay in terms of sound pressure level performance with that speaker standing up versus if it were lying down and you had something else to bring that top box higher up?

This is down to boundaries. The floor is your consistent boundary. Generally speaking, if you've got your subs on the floor, the more floor you have reflecting the sound from the subwoofer, the better. Relative to the lower frequency. So you will get slightly better low frequency response on axis with a horizontally deployed subwoofer versus a vertically deployed subwoofer. But that's on axis, particularly on the floor. As you come up from the floor that shifts.

So sometimes people will notice that a standing subwoofer will have a little bit more impact than a subwoofer on the floor. And that's partly due to the fact that you're getting that energy from both those drivers on axis. It’s also due to the fact that when you have that boundary load of the floor on both woofers equally, they load against a pressure boundary. That's the same on both woofers. And when you stand a box up, you have one driver closer to the floor. So it's actually pressure boundary is less than the pressure boundary on the upper woofer, so they actually react slightly differently. So they react very slightly differently in terms of frequency response and in terms of time, it's very slightly.

But you know, it's one of those things where we can perceive it to an extent. So when we're standing in front of a standing double 18, we will probably get a slightly more impact from it in terms of what we perceive rather than when that's lying down. The low frequency advantage that them being horizontal or it being horizontal is providing. We're more sensitive to the upper bass gain than we are to the lower bass gain.

And again, with the proximity and the fact that that upper woofer is actually now closer to us than the two woofers on the floor would be, these things factor in to how we perceive that energy. Yes, you can do it either way. You will be able to, if you go to the trouble measure, slightly more deeper bass response on the floor with a horizontal subwoofer if it’s a double 18 or ZV28 and standing up it will measure slightly less low frequency on the floor in front of that box.

All of these different factors that one woofer’s further away, the acoustical center’s now further away, you've got less boundary load, you've got less pressure boundary for the woofer to act against. So, but perceptually, it's not going to have an improvement when it's on the floor horizontally versus vertically. It will have a measurable benefit at those low frequencies and how they propagate it and how far they go in terms of, you know, the back of the venue further away from the speakers, it might become a little bit more noticeable that that horizontal deployment is better for those very, very low frequencies.

We humans are not that sensitive to those low frequencies. So we don't notice the changes in those low frequencies as readily as we notice the changes in the higher frequencies in the regions that vertical subwoofer tends to advantage. There you go. Advantages and disadvantages. It's kind of like picking a flavor, chocolate, vanilla. Take your pick. There are no right answers.