The manner in which bass frequencies behave make it one the most difficult challenges every audio designers have had to control with in the last few decades. With today's high-powered subwoofers, control over bass dispersion has never been so critical to audio installation. Such bass from these subwoofers can be overpowering, often resulting into a mix that is commonly described as dull and muddy, hence careful design of subwoofer arrays is a must. You can now eliminate the guess work with Community Professional Subwoofer Steering Simulation Software (S4).

S4 is what it describes it is, a subwoofer steering simulation software. S4 allows you to trial out various subwoofer array designs and be able to see or predict the behavior of such a design via simulation. While you might expect to see a standalone program like your usual simulation software, S4 is actually a macro-enabled Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that takes advantage of Excel's complex calculation algorithms. With S4, you can quickly acquire information regarding various setups to be able to create an optimal design for the space where you are about to make a sound system design.

Having an easy-to-use graphical interface, S4 provides a two-dimensional polar prediction for an array of LF point sources at any given frequency as well as frequency and phase response in front and behind the array. Basic and advanced setting modes allow users to set the calculation averaging bandwidth, polar degree resolution, polar amplitude resolution, array point of origin, and other parameters.

S4 is available in versions for MS Excel 2003 and MS Excel 2007 and newer versions. S4 is a free download so taking advantage of this free option frees you from making those "informed" guesses that often is used in designing arrays. Using S4 will definitely prevent you from sticking your head into that mud puddle of bass.