[Bubblejuice]

I don't know where to ask this, but I've had little luck researching this, and this is the Sound Science forum, so i'll give it a shot (I don't pretend to know what I'm doing what so ever lol):
 
So I built a scrap speaker a while ago from a broken gaming chair someone was throwing away. After I made the casing and added a nice long channel for the woofer, this thing sounded amazing and got amazingly loud.
 
Last week the tweeter broke (I think the cone/spider is loose). Being a no name tweeter from a chair that I salvaged, I don't know if it's worth fixing, but the woofer still kicks like a mule.
 
So i'm curious... I just got a pair of LCD-2 from the B-Stock sale. If I run the woofer from the back end of my computer with mirrored sound out of the front (to my O2 amp, to my headphones), will enough bass leak in from the woofer to improve my experience with the headphones?
 
Will it clash with the sound because of some slight delay? 
 
Will it not make a difference unless the woofer is directly behind my head?
 
Other issues?
 
Alternatively, 
 
If the sound of the woofer makes no difference, if I position it maybe behind my lower back, will the air / vibration from it mentally enhance my perceived bass response in my headphones?
 
Thanks for any and all responses!
 
EDIT: Btw, if this is a thing already, more info about it would be much appreciated!

 

[castleofargh]

delays shouldn't matter much as long as your woofer sticks to only being a woofer. the higher the frequencies, the more a delay could become audible. but for real low frequencies, you could almost use the wrong music in the woofer and still subjectively feel an improvement over just using the headphone. ^_^
 
- the first problem if you use some doubling plug out of the O2 is to have a mean to set the loudness separately on the headphone and woofer. even if you have a volume knob for the woofer, depending on how much voltage you need in your LCD2, you might clip the amp in the woofer. if not there you go.
 
 
 
 
-the roundabout way is to use something like Virtual Audio Cable to send 1 signal to 2 output devices. do you use the O2 straight out of the computer headphone out or do you also have an external DAC? if so you could mess around with VAC to send the same music to the computer headphone out and to your external DAC at the same time. that way you should be fine adjusting the volume levels for both woofer and headphone.
then if you're into SM stuff

you can add a vst host in the path(pedalboard2 or the well named VSThost, both free). like say, foobar goes to VAC that sends one repeater to vsthost that you'll use to apply some EQ, which itself will output into your usb DAC(if you have one), and to your headphone.  and the other repeater will be set to go to the soundcard of the computer, to feed the woofer.
it's doable, but VAC isn't free and I don't know what allows to do the same doubling path from one original signal for free. also you'll have to follow a bunch of tutos(VAC is all but intuitive) and probably fool around a good deal to find the ideal settings, sample rate, and delays(via buffer settings everywhere along the way).
 
 
 
 
 
-and the last option would be to do all that from one single source, and then dealing with the respective gains and possible high pass /low pass cross over in the analog domain with good old electrical components.

 

[Bubblejuice]

  delays shouldn't matter much as long as your woofer sticks to only being a woofer. the higher the frequencies, the more a delay could become audible. but for real low frequencies, you could almost use the wrong music in the woofer and still subjectively feel an improvement over just using the headphone. ^_^
 
- the first problem if you use some doubling plug out of the O2 is to have a mean to set the loudness separately on the headphone and woofer. even if you have a volume knob for the woofer, depending on how much voltage you need in your LCD2, you might clip the amp in the woofer. if not there you go.
 
 
 
 
-the roundabout way is to use something like Virtual Audio Cable to send 1 signal to 2 output devices. do you use the O2 straight out of the computer headphone out or do you also have an external DAC? if so you could mess around with VAC to send the same music to the computer headphone out and to your external DAC at the same time. that way you should be fine adjusting the volume levels for both woofer and headphone.
then if you're into SM stuff

you can add a vst host in the path(pedalboard2 or the well named VSThost, both free). like say, foobar goes to VAC that sends one repeater to vsthost that you'll use to apply some EQ, which itself will output into your usb DAC(if you have one), and to your headphone.  and the other repeater will be set to go to the soundcard of the computer, to feed the woofer.
it's doable, but VAC isn't free and I don't know what allows to do the same doubling path from one original signal for free. also you'll have to follow a bunch of tutos(VAC is all but intuitive) and probably fool around a good deal to find the ideal settings, sample rate, and delays(via buffer settings everywhere along the way).
 
 
 
 
 
-and the last option would be to do all that from one single source, and then dealing with the respective gains and possible high pass /low pass cross over in the analog domain with good old electrical components.

Haha thank you very much for this detailed reply. Being new to audio, i'm not familiar with most terms yet. So your post started getting more and more confusing as I read lmao.
 
Either way, let me try to answer as best I can.
 
How would you say a woofer improves the audio of open back headphones? The feeling of the bass? The Sound? 
 
Yes I have my Amp connected to the front 3.5mm. I don't have a DAC. However, realtek allows me to mirror what I am sending to my front device, into another device in the back. So I could essentially have two devices playing the same feed. The delay would come from the device itself. I assume i'd need an amp specifically for the woofer. But i'm sure a cheap $10-20 amp would suffice.
 
I lost you on that third paragraph XD
 
As i've been looking around I found something called a "Bass Shaker". I don't know how the experience of a Bass Shaker + Open-back headphones would compare with a Woofer + Open-back headphones.

 

[MindsMirror]

One of the advantages of using a subwoofer is that the speaker driver (in this case the headphone driver) doesn't have to try to produce those low frequencies which it is not good at doing. When a small driver tries to produce low frequencies it may end up producing a lot of distortion as well. To solve this problem you can use a crossover which takes the low frequencies out of the speaker signal and sends them to the sub signal instead. That's different than just duplicating the signal and sending the same thing to both. If you just duplicate it, the speaker will still receive the low frequencies where it was creating distortion. That's what castleofargh what suggesting with the VST plugins and VAC, using EQ plugins to remove the low frequencies from the signal that goes to the headphone.
 
A more straight forward but less flexible way to do that is to use an inline crossover like this.

 Harrison Labs FMOD Inline Crossover Pair 100 Hz Low Pass RCA

Stick one pair of low pass filters before the sub amp, and one pair of high pass filters before the headphone amp.
 
This might be more trouble than it's worth. Besides, using a subwoofer with your headphones will completely ruin two of the biggest advantages they had in the first place, which is not bothering other people with you music, and portability. I would consider it a fun thing to try if you already have a sub lying around you can use, but not a practical or every day solution for improving your sound.

 

[castleofargh]

what he said ^_^.
a crossover is when you separate the signal and send some frequencies one way, and some others the other way, just like most speakers do with the trebles to the tweeter and the lower frequencies to the bigger driver. to do that you have to low pass or high pass the signal. the names may seem confusing but they're dead simple, a low pass filter will let the low frequencies pass, and filters out the high frequencies.
the weird names I used in the second part are basically just software names, nothing special about that .
 
the bass shaker is a vibrator

so that your body can feel as if there was a subwoofer but without the loud low frequency for the neighbors.  it's trying to trick our brain into thinking that the vibrations is low frequency sound.
if you really don't have to be concerned with family and neighbors, then I'd personally go for the actual woofer. one of the things missing in headphones are that tactile low frequencies rumbling. so a real woofer certainly increases the feeling of real live sound. the only arguable part being that if you blast out loud sounds anyway, why not get actual speakers(possibly higher distortions than headphone, but you get an actual soundstage.
 
anyway whatever you decide to try, good luck.

 

[Bubblejuice]

  One of the advantages of using a subwoofer is that the speaker driver (in this case the headphone driver) doesn't have to try to produce those low frequencies which it is not good at doing. When a small driver tries to produce low frequencies it may end up producing a lot of distortion as well. To solve this problem you can use a crossover which takes the low frequencies out of the speaker signal and sends them to the sub signal instead. That's different than just duplicating the signal and sending the same thing to both. If you just duplicate it, the speaker will still receive the low frequencies where it was creating distortion. That's what castleofargh what suggesting with the VST plugins and VAC, using EQ plugins to remove the low frequencies from the signal that goes to the headphone.
 
A more straight forward but less flexible way to do that is to use an inline crossover like this.
Stick one pair of low pass filters before the sub amp, and one pair of high pass filters before the headphone amp.
 
This might be more trouble than it's worth. Besides, using a subwoofer with your headphones will completely ruin two of the biggest advantages they had in the first place, which is not bothering other people with you music, and portability. I would consider it a fun thing to try if you already have a sub lying around you can use, but not a practical or every day solution for improving your sound.

Ah ok Now I understand what he wrote haha. Thank you for the explanation!
 
Yeah, that's true. I was just curious to see if it would enhance any aspect of the music. Because I had the woofer laying around. But it ended up breaking recently anyways

 

[Bubblejuice]

  what he said ^_^.
a crossover is when you separate the signal and send some frequencies one way, and some others the other way, just like most speakers do with the trebles to the tweeter and the lower frequencies to the bigger driver. to do that you have to low pass or high pass the signal. the names may seem confusing but they're dead simple, a low pass filter will let the low frequencies pass, and filters out the high frequencies.
the weird names I used in the second part are basically just software names, nothing special about that .
 
the bass shaker is a vibrator

so that your body can feel as if there was a subwoofer but without the loud low frequency for the neighbors.  it's trying to trick our brain into thinking that the vibrations is low frequency sound.
if you really don't have to be concerned with family and neighbors, then I'd personally go for the actual woofer. one of the things missing in headphones are that tactile low frequencies rumbling. so a real woofer certainly increases the feeling of real live sound. the only arguable part being that if you blast out loud sounds anyway, why not get actual speakers(possibly higher distortions than headphone, but you get an actual soundstage.
 
anyway whatever you decide to try, good luck.

That makes a lot of sense! I make a small quick shaker out of my recently broken woofer today and, although cool for something like movies. It feels "fake" when listening to music
 
Thank you very much for your insight!
 
Maybe in the future if I find a used woofer second hand i'll try the crossover out. Just to see lol.