Going off on a bit of a tangent (as usual):
It should not be forgotten that house curves are age-related.
If you have your ears tested regularly your will find as you grow older that you lose sensitivity to the bottom end as well as the top. (pardon?)
One man's meat is another's poison.
Even one higher frequency peak on a sub's in-room response will ruin any efforts to make a house curve work.
Whenever you hear "music lovers" saying they couldn't possibly live with a subwoofer in their system you can immediately tick off their "system room response has bad peaks" box.
A smoothly rising response to overcome the ear's natural falling response in the bass should actually sound more real. Many subwoofer owners prefer a house curve over a flat response to bring more "life" to the music.
The better the subwoofer the more tolerant one can be of steeper house curves. Simply because they do not introduce heavy harmonic distortion further up the frequency scale when pushed hard. This completely removes the need to constantly adjust your subwoofer to match the material being played.
The Thigpen fan subwoofer is an interesting case. As a contra-subwoofer it provides high levels at very low frequencies with low distortion. This is providing reality on a scale not seen before outside the auditorium, cathedral or any street in town. Ideally it should allow a house curve to further extend the main subwoofer's own house curve. Or in other words: A response curve to closely match the sensitivity of the ears of the owner
in their own AV room. The older you get the more IB drivers and/or fan subs you probably need just to enjoy the same
perceived response as the years that went before.
