Do you have a subwoofer in your system? Great. Then your speakers are small. Before you get all upset, read on. This is one of those audio myths whose time has come to be busted. To understand why, we need to talk about Bass Management.
In the early days of home theater it was thought that in order to reproduce the full movie surround experience at home it was necessary to place 5 large loudspeakers in the room. The reason for the size was the woofers. To play at theatrical reference levels and reproduce the deepest bass available in the content requires each speaker to have 12” or larger woofers. Let’s just say that this theory didn’t get very far in the real world.
A better and more practical approach came after studying human perception. The mechanisms that we use to determine the direction of arrival of sound depend on the frequency. At high frequencies the wavelength of sound is small and so sound coming from the side is shadowed by our head. That creates a level difference between the sound reaching the ear closest to the source and the ear on the other side. Our brain analyzes these level differences and produces an estimate of where the sound is coming from. But at lower frequencies, the wavelength of sound gets longer and our head is not large enough to produce a level difference at the two ears. Instead, we analyze the difference in time of arrival of sound at the two ears. Sound arrives first at the closest ear and we use that to determine the direction. But even that ability fails us below about 80 Hz. The wavelengths get very large and it was found in listening tests that 80 Hz is the frequency below which most people can not localize the direction of sound.