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Subwoofer placement simulator

Every spot on the floor, colored by how even the bass at your seat would be with the sub there. Use it to pick where to start the real crawl.

Home Theater Guides Updated 8 sources
Your room 16 × 14 × 8 ft · typical
  1. Enter your room’s size.
  2. Choose Your seat under the map, then click where you sit.
  3. Click around the map to try spots for the sub; the rings mark the best three.

Length runs from the TV wall (front) to the back wall.

Room furnishing
Positions

Subwoofer 0.6 ft from the TV wall, 1.1 ft from the left

Your seat 9.9 ft from the TV wall, 7.0 ft from the left

Subwoofer 0.6 ft from the TV wall, 1.1 ft from the left. Bass unevenness 9.5 dB, uneven.

Bass unevenness at your seat
9.5 dB
Uneven

A simplified model: rigid walls and a 0.5 s bass decay. Use it to compare spots, then confirm by ear.

TV wall 123YOUSUB
Click the map (or use the arrow keys)Tap the map to move

Five bands, smoothest to roughest, ranked by how even the bass at your seat would be with the sub there: about a fifth of the floor each, relative to this room, lightly smoothed so lone squares don’t show. Rings mark three promising spots, kept apart so they’re real alternatives.

16 ft long × 14 ft wide · ceiling 8 ft · grid lines every foot

Bass at your seat · 25–120 Hz, in dB −24−18−12−60+6+12+18+2425 Hz40 Hz60 Hz80 Hz120 Hz

Flat is the goal. Peaks are notes that boom; dips are notes that go missing at your seat. 0 dB is this seat’s average level. Unevenness is the curve’s typical distance from it (its standard deviation, 25–120 Hz); lower is smoother.

Promising spots to try first

Click one to move the sub there. Then confirm by ear with the real subwoofer crawl.

How it works

Below about 200 Hz, a room behaves like a set of resonances, or room modes. Each mode has a frequency set by the room’s dimensions and a pressure pattern that is high at the walls and has dead spots in between. The bass you hear is the sum of all of them, weighted by how strongly the sub excites each mode and how strongly your head sits in it.

The simulator uses the standard modal model of a rectangular room from acoustics textbooks (Kuttruff’s Room Acoustics): for each possible sub position on the floor it adds up every mode below 320 Hz at your seat, at ear height, with damping set by the room’s low-frequency decay time. It then measures how uneven the result is from 25 to 120 Hz. Because sound travels the same way in both directions, that’s the same thing the real subwoofer crawl measures.

The “two subs” option mirrors a second sub on the opposite side of the room. Harman’s Welti and Devantier found two well-placed subs nearly as effective as four at evening out bass across seats; opposite wall midpoints are a strong starting point.

What it leaves out. Real rooms have furniture, doors, openings and walls that flex; L-shaped and open-plan rooms behave differently from a rectangle. Treat the map as a guide to where to try first, not a prediction to the decibel. Room Studio’s acoustics view shows the same physics in 3D for your actual room.

Questions people ask

How accurate is a subwoofer placement simulator?

It captures the biggest effect, the room’s standing waves, for a rectangular room with uniform damping. It ignores furniture, doors, openings and wall construction, which can shift peaks and dips by a few hertz. Use it to choose candidate spots, then confirm by ear or with a measurement microphone.

Why does the best spot change when I move my seat?

Because bass at your seat depends on both positions: which room modes the sub excites and which ones your head sits in. That’s also why moving the sofa a foot or two can fix bass as well as moving the sub.

What does the dB figure mean?

It is the standard deviation of the bass level at your seat across 25 to 120 Hz: how far individual notes stray from the average. Around 3–5 dB is smooth for a real room; 8 dB or more means some notes boom while others almost vanish.

Sources

  1. SVS. The Art of Subwoofer Placement.Manufacturer
  2. KEF (2025). Phase and positioning: where to place a subwoofer.Manufacturer
  3. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society / Harman (2006). Low-Frequency Optimization Using Multiple Subwoofers (Welti & Devantier).Research
  4. CEDIA / CTA (2023). CEDIA/CTA-RP22 Immersive Audio Design Recommended Practice, v1.2.Standard
  5. Room EQ Wizard. Room Simulation (modal simulator) help.Professional guide
  6. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (1979). Image method for efficiently simulating small-room acoustics (Allen & Berkley).Research
  7. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society / Harman (2006). Loudspeakers and Rooms for Sound Reproduction — A Scientific Review (Toole).Research
  8. Genelec. How to place your monitors.Manufacturer

Numbers on this page follow these sources. Where a figure is our own calculation or a rule of thumb, the text says so. Found a mistake? Tell us.

Keep planning

Related guides

Guide Subwoofer placement and the sub crawl Corners, walls and the crawl, step by step.
Research Rules of thumb, tested The 38% rule and two subs, in 1,000 rooms.
Tool Room mode calculator Which notes your room will exaggerate.