Mhn3773, I'm glad you found the info useful. What you're referring to in terms of the bass being "2 things" is probably direct and reflected sound. Actually to be completely accurate, it is much more than just "2 things". Because sound in an environment is bouncing all over the place, there is a lot of constructive and destructive interference. Constructive interference causes the amplitude of certain frequencies to increase and destructive interference does the opposite. When you have sound waves bouncing all over the place, it's hard to tell what frequencies will be enhanced and which ones will be attenuated. Actually the listener's position will also affect what is heard.
So to say that sound reflected off of the car or baffle would create "misaligned waves" is somewhat true, but I wouldn't really use that term. What is really happening is sound is going to reflect off of something somewhere and it's going to keep happening until there isn't enough energy in the air molecules to continue doing so. When you speak of a baffle, I'm assuming you're talking about mounting subs to a baffle board. All a baffle does is prevent the sound wave from the back of the speaker from interfering with the sound wave coming off of the front of the speaker. Since the front and back waves are 180 degrees out of phase, you would get a tremendous reduction in bass without a baffle for the sub to be mounted on. You can simulate this on a home stereo. Wire one of the speakers backwards compared to the other. Just do one speaker, not both. This will put one speaker out of phase with the other. Stand or sit in a position that is dead center in distance between the two. The bass will be really reduced and the soundstage will sound sort of spacy. If you move either direction toward one of the speakers, the bass should get a bit better. That's because, when you're right in the center the direct out of phase sound (especially in the bass) is getting to your ears at about the same time and being cancelled out right there. When you move to the sides, the phase cancellation isn't as complete because the sound from one speaker is arriving at your position at a different time from the other. "Misaligned waves" in and of itself are not necessarily bad - you're going to get them anyway because that's the nature of soundwaves. What you wnat to try to minimize is excessive destructive interference in the bass frequencies. By moving a sub toward the rear and facing them toward the back, you will typically get less destructive interference due to phase cancellation than if you place the subs somewhere else. This is not always the case, however, so experimentation is key.
If you have a subwoofer on a home stereo, you can try another experiment that will demonstrate phase cancellation. Put the subwoofer in a corner and play something with some decent bass. Now move around the room. You're going to find areas that have lots of bass, and some areas that don't. Now if you move the sub to a different place in the room, you'll find that the areas where there was good bass before will have changed. Same thing with a car. If you'll notice, this really has nothing to do with how far you are from the sub. You'll get good bass at certain places and inadequate bass in others and it really won't have anything to do with longer distances. You might hear a lot of bass in the furthest corner from where the sub is, but this is not really because it had "more time to develop" but rather because there is probably a standing wave from that corner to the other since they are parallel to each other.
Here's another link from one of the previous websites I gave you that might be helpful. Check out the Standing Waves and Interference sections in particular:
http://arts.ucsc.edu/EMS/Music/tech_background/TE-14/teces_14.html
