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Somehow cant help but want my woofers separate - surely these are dealing with some of the mid-range that really wants to be split?



No.

Subwoofer deals with only the bass region.

Takes advantage of the fact that the human ear cannot detect directionality below a certain frequency.

Usually works a bit better actually, as the subwoofer is designed to handle the larger excursions required for the bass notes plus does not have to be trying to produce higher freqs such as the mids and also typically the subwoofer will have its own power amp. Many use dual voice coil technology such that the lows from both channels appear at the subwoofer cone.


--Mac



There's a reason why subwoofers work, and why humans can only detect directionality below a certain frequency and it's due to the simple physics of the wavelength of these frequencies.

One of the biggest directional cues our hearing system has is what's called the inter-aural time or phase difference. If you look at the wavelength of a 200 Hz wave, it's quite long, 67.8 inches at sea level, to be exact. That's 67.8 inches for the whole sine-wave. The distance between your ear-drums is only about 6 inches. So at any one time for a 200 Hz wave, your ears are experiencing the difference in time of only about 1/10 of the entire wavelength; undetectable. This percentage in time or phase difference gets smaller as the frequency gets lower. For a 100 Hz wave, it's 1/20th of the length along the 136 inch wave. For a 50 Hz wave, the phase difference is only about 2% of the entire length of the wave.

These very long wavelengths are also the reason that you should test the low frequency response of your speakers in the room. With almost any home setup, you will set up standing waves in the room, which will unnaturally color your overall low frequency listening experience.

I still believe that your best solution for practicing sax with your backing tracks is with headphones. Trying to use nearfield monitors as a small PA system; which is what you are trying to do; is not the intended purpose for nearfield monitoring systems.

Most of those nearfield monitors will not have the proper dispersion for the midrange and tweeters to give you an optimum listening position for sax practicing (assuming you stand) as well as sitting (assuming this is what you do while mixing). If the speakers are actually designed well as nearfields, you'll notice a rather large difference in mid/high frequency response depending on your ear height relative to the tweeter height.

See if you can get a store to let you take a set of these home and try this out yourself. Set the monitors so that the tweeters are at ear height for sitting. Then alternatively stand up and sit down while a track is playing. You'll see what I mean.

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