Where to place a subwoofer in your room

The Subwoofer Placement guide helps you pick a layout for one or two subwoofers in your room, matched to a specific use case: home theater, stereo listening, or a versatile general layout. Three standard scenarios are available: a single subwoofer in a corner, two subwoofers in the front corners, and two subwoofers at the mid-points of opposite walls. For each scenario the tool shows a top-down room diagram, the source and listener positions, the pros and cons of that specific geometry, and a step-by-step guide to finding your listening sweet spot. Why it matters: the subwoofer is the most position-sensitive source in any room. Low frequencies most strongly excite room modes, and even a 30 cm shift along a wall can completely change the bass response at the listening position. Without understanding how geometry shapes pressure distribution, it is easy to end up with a room where bass booms at the sofa, dips in the middle, and rattles by the window. Pre-set layouts give a proven starting point and explain the trade-offs each option locks in. How to read results: the diagram shows the subwoofer and listener positions relative to walls and the stereo pair. "Corner loading" is the passive bass boost gained from pressure summing across three (single corner) or two (front corners) adjacent surfaces. Symmetric layouts perform best for stereo and music; the single corner yields the loudest output at the cost of uniformity. The "sub crawl" method (crawling on the floor with the sub playing) empirically finds the position with the fewest peaks and dips. Common mistakes: dropping the subwoofer wherever feels convenient — typically behind a couch in a corner along the long axis, which coincides with the first axial mode peak and full SBIR activation; placing two subwoofers asymmetrically or out of phase — cancels part of the bass band; trying to compensate a bad position with EQ alone — equalization cannot recover energy lost to destructive interference. Next steps: after picking a layout, open the Room Modes calculator to see which frequencies will likely become problematic, and the SBIR calculator to gauge subwoofer-wall interaction. If you are placing stereo monitors as well, verify the geometry with the Speaker Placement calculator.