I've been a huge fan of
Audioholics' Bassaholic rank, ever since I've heard about it.
It's explained in more details on
Audioholics.com, but I'll give you a quick summary.
Who created this protocol/rank?
Approx 10 years ago,
Gene DellaSala (of Audioholics) (member
@Gene DellaSala), along with
Ed Mullen (of SVSound),
Paul Apollonio and
Josh Ricci developed this protocol.
What is it?
Explanation from website:
How did Audioholics classify a room size?
Explanation from website:
Is the reference level of a subwoofer the same as the reference level that Audioholics' Bassaholic refers to?
No...here's the explanation from website:
Here's the classification of room sizes:
Explanation from website:
To calculate it, just take your Height (ft) * Width (ft) * Depth (ft) of your room size, with all doors/closets/windows closed.
If you room is oddly shaped, then add all volume dimensions.
If your room opens to the rest of the house, with no doors, then you broke the internet and have an infinite loop problem.
For Metric Users:
Let's convert to metric as well (where 1 ft^3 = 0.0283168 m^3).
How is the Bassaholic rank calculated?
**You don't have to do this, as I did it for you. This is simply the explanation**
Explanation from website:
Since all of my data is in 2m Peak SPL, I simply added +6 db to my shown values to calculate the Bassaholic Rank.
You won't see these columns, since they're hidden (and they don't provide you with anything useful, until we calculate the actual rank).
So, we have the new dB values and categorize them according to the room size
Explanation from website:
This information can be also represented by this table.
View attachment 114016
Gene informed that each frequency 25hz and (31.5 to 63hz) should be checked against this criteria, so 25hz,31.5hz,40hz,50hz,63hz.
Based on all the information, I created my conditional formulas (disclosed below):
Small:
=IF(AND(25hz<103,31.5hz<109), "Small", "")
Small/Medium:
=IF(OR(AND(25hz<103,31.5hz>=109), AND(25hz>=103,31.5hz<109)), "Small/Medium", "")
Medium:
=IF((AND(25hz>=103,31.5hz>=109,40hz>=109,50hz>=109,63hz>=109)), "Medium", "")
Large:
=IF((AND(25hz>=109,31.5hz>=115,40hz>=115,50hz>=115,63hz>=115)), "Large", "")
Extreme:
=IF((AND(25hz>=117,31.5hz>=123,40hz>=123,50hz>=123,63hz>=123)), "Extreme", "")
A few observations:
1. My success rate of calculating Bassaholic rank is about 82% with the actual Bassaholic rank. Meaning 18% of my calculated rank didn't match the actual rank. Where it failed, the discrepancy was almost minor (within +-1dB). Which leads me to believe a human approach was used for the final rank's decision.
2. In a few rare cases...the formula would fail to calculate both small or medium rank. When I looked at it, it was mostly because sometimes a value of 25hz or 31.5hz was above/below the threshold values. To take this into account, I created a Small/Medium category. So you know that this subwoofer is between the two room sizes.
3. Since I was matching each frequency (25hz,31.5hz,40hz,5hz0,63hz) against the threshold values, this wouldn't work for the Small room, since higher frequencies than 31.5hz (in other words, 40hz,5hz0,63hz) would always be above 109 db. To make it work, I shorted the code (I've shown above) to just look at 25hz and 31.5hz.
Here's actual vs calculated rank (using Audioholic's CEA-2010-A data, of course):
Having calculated the Audioholic's Bassaholic room rank, now gives you a good idea on the capability of a subwoofer to hit reference levels for a given room size.
I'd like to thank Audioholics for coming up with such a useful protocol.
I've added this information to the spreadsheet, tab "Bassaholic".