Well with that i'll halfway agree with you. I cut the subs off at 40hz . Opening Poster asked for recommendations on these events though " Most of the music we do is adult contemporary, blues, jazz, folky stuff, but with the occasional college hip-hop show thrown in. " - The Phoenix subs are GREAT for these applications. And for those Hip Hop shows the Phoenix subs really are still going to shine, I can prove that, just come to visit ;0)
How do you "cut them off" at 40Hz. If you are talking about a highpass filter at 40Hz, then you need to look a bit closer at the ACTUAL filter shape. You will find that a 40Hz filter is already down quite a bit at 40Hz.
And just because the people are "happy" does not mean that the subs are doing what they are supposed to do.
I did a little dubstep tour about a year and a half ago-in which I provided a system that would go to 20hz without a problem-at the levels they requested.
On every date I got comments like "I KNEW those notes were in my music-I put them there-but have never heard them before" And this one from one of the artists "WOW-That was like a Religious experience-I have played on all kinds of systems-but have never heard/felt ANYTHING like that before" and so on. The promoter-who does mostly those types of shows was beyond himself with "the experience".
The really funny thing (to me anyway) was that I had always heard how loud Dubstep shows were. My opinion after the shows was that it was not so much the VOLUME they were looking for-but rather the deep bass (that went down to 20Hz and below). During one act, there were a lot of deep "sweeps". I was "kinda" running a dual sub setup (one set of subs from 30Hz and up and another going from 20hz to 50hz). At times he would sweep down and the meters on the amps going from 30Hz up would completely drop down to nothing-and the amps on the 20hz and up subs were going strong. So a cabinet that is 10dB down at 40hz is not going to get very loud with those deep notes.
The "standard" attempt to get that deep bass is to turn it up LOUD. But they never get the really deep bass. Yes it was kinda loud (but not what I would consider really loud)-but the physical sensation of the deep bass rattling through your body is what really turned them on.
For what it is worth-the system I brought had probably 10dB or more- of headroom left and I let the FOH mixer/control guy run it as hard as he wanted to-so that was not the limiting factor. He was very happy as well.
Once you have truly experienced that type of thing-it is really hard to go back. But if you have never heard/felt it-it is hard to describe.
But I don't want to get into an argument about whether or not your customers are happy with what you do-i'm glad they are. That is not the point. But I will argue that with music with signals that go that low-a sub that rolls off that much is not doing the music justice (as the artist intended). That is all I am saying.
