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A thread for testing $2000-$2500ish subwoofers (1 Viewer)

Craig Chase

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No matter what speaker you use, it won't be flat out of the box. That's because the room has as much of an impact on the response as the speakers do. In theory, any sub capable of producing sound loud at all frequencies can be made flat through equalization .It's easier to pull things back be EQing subtractively than it is to boost dips.

I have a 12 inch Sunfire True Sub designed by Bob Carver. I don't think they make them any more, but Sunfires have huge power amplifiers that are designed to produce a lot of sound in a very small footprint. The way I calibrated my system was to listen to music that had descending bass patterns (Reiner's Marche Slav on Living Stereo is perfect for this) and calibrating the crossover by ear to try to balance all the notes as they descend. There is a Beatles song on the White Album that does the same thing, but right now I forget which song it is. When you EQ, you also need to balance the bass to the midrange and the treble, so you have to work the whole response at once in passes. The ear is more sensitive to imbalances at loud volumes and spikes need to be worked out progressively, so it's best to start at a low volume and work your way up. Relative volume of the six channels can make a huge difference too, so you are balancing two things that affect each other at once. That takes time and parallel parking to get right.

When I had the entire audible spectrum on each of the 6 channels the way I wanted it, (it took about 2 months of listening and adjusting to get there) I called in a friend who is a professional sound mixer. His job is to EQ concert and club sound systems. He ran tone sweeps and checked to see if my ballpark EQ was correct. I only have a 5 band parametric equalizer, so my ability to do notch filtering on very narrow imbalances is limited,. But he verified that with just a small 2-3dB adjustment in the upper mids, I was as close as I could possibly get with my current equipment.

The nice thing about subs is that the lowest octave is felt more than it is heard, so there's a lot more leeway there. The hardest thing to achieve is an even crossover at 80Hz from the mains to the sub and down to 40Hz. That's why I said before that the sub bass that shakes the walls is easy. The hard part is integrating the sub with the mains to make the bass smooth from top down.

Hope this helps.

Besides the Sunfire, what other subs have you calibrated? Do you have any response curves that show the lower limits of your subwoofer in your room?
 

bigshot

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We rough calibrated down to 20. The sub goes further I think, but below 40Hz, calibration isn't as important. The upper octave from 40 to 80 is much more important. I have 15 inch 7 way custom studio monitors from the 70s for my mains. I've never needed a sub before this. But I moved into a new house and made a theater room in a large room and it required a sub to fill it. So I only know the sunfire. I don't like to trade my way up. I tend to get the best to do the job from the start and use it until it dies.

A sub only covers two octaves out of 10. It is more important than the top octave of 10 to 20kHz, but it still isn't as important as the mids and upper mids.
 

Craig Chase

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We rough calibrated down to 20. The sub goes further I think, but below 40Hz, calibration isn't as important. The upper octave from 40 to 80 is much more important. I have 15 inch 7 way custom studio monitors from the 70s for my mains. I've never needed a sub before this. But I moved into a new house and made a theater room in a large room and it required a sub to fill it. So I only know the sunfire. I don't like to trade my way up. I tend to get the best to do the job from the start and use it until it dies.

A sub only covers two octaves out of 10. It is more important than the top octave of 10 to 20kHz, but it still isn't as important as the mids and upper mids.

You have not read the thread from the beginning, correct? I am not trying to be rude here, but telling the forum that you "rough calibrated down to 20 Hz" is pretty amusing. We currently have 8 subwoofers in our home calibrated to be linear to 17 Hz and below. Add into this the concept that you are using an unnamed custom studio monitor from the 70's.

Some of your points are valid, including that the octave from 40 to 80 Hz is more important. It's unlikely you are getting much of a response below 25 Hz - it's the nature of the True Subwoofer. I had a True subwoofer in the late 90's. It cannot hit 20 Hz with authority. John E. Johnson confirmed this in a test.

Embedded in this thread, and also in the $1000 thread started 18 months ago, is a response curve from each sub tested. The V-3601 is +/- 3.5 dB from 14 to 80 Hz at my listening position. That is a very linear response curve, and it excels at the mid bass (40 to 80 Hz), which has also been mentioned several times in this thread.
 

bigshot

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17Hz is below the threshold of human hearing. Hearing starts to fall in sensitivity in the first octave (20Hz to 40Hz). You can go ahead and calibrate down to 17Hz, but all you are doing is calibrating vibrations, not sound. The top octave of a subwoofer (40Hz to 80Hz) is MUCH more important to how good a subwoofer sounds than the bottom octave. And achieving an even crossover with the mains is even more important than that.

The tested response curve of a speaker is pretty much irrelevant, because the only place it will produce that particular response is an anechoic chamber. Most of us have living rooms, and the second you drop a speaker into a real world living room, all bets are off. Your living room is going to sound quite different than mine, even with the same speakers. That's why every speaker needs to be calibrated to correct for the affect of the room. If you are going to calibrate for the room, it's easy to smooth out small imbabalances in the speaker itself while you're at it. Speakers don't have to be perfect. Rooms are never perfect. Calibration has to fix all that.

The true sub was rated by the manufacturer down to 15Hz, but as I said before, that really doesn't add up to a hill of beans. The difference between 17Hz and 25Hz is only a little more than three musical notes, two of which are outside the range of human hearing. People worry too much about sound they can't hear, and not enough about the sound they can. The crossover with the mains is the most important thing to get right, after that the top octave is important, and the last octave a notch of importance below that. The least important range to have calibrated is the stuff you can't even hear. You just don't want spikes down there interfering with the resonant frequency of the walls in your house.

Play a really good recording of Bach organ works or Saint Saens' Organ Symphony or Tchaikovsky's Marche Slav and see how good your subwoofer performs with that. It will tell you a lot more than dinosaur foot stomps, because music has to sound natural and balanced. Thumps and wallops just have to be loud.
 
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Craig Chase

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17Hz is below the threshold of human hearing. Hearing starts to fall in sensitivity in the first octave (20Hz to 40Hz). You can go ahead and calibrate down to 17Hz, but all you are doing is calibrating vibrations, not sound. The top octave of a subwoofer (40Hz to 80Hz) is MUCH more important to how good a subwoofer sounds than the bottom octave. And achieving an even crossover with the mains is even more important than that.

The tested response curve of a speaker is pretty much irrelevant, because the only place it will produce that particular response is an anechoic chamber. Most of us have living rooms, and the second you drop a speaker into a real world living room, all bets are off. Your living room is going to sound quite different than mine, even with the same speakers. That's why every speaker needs to be calibrated to correct for the affect of the room. If you are going to calibrate for the room, it's easy to smooth out small imbabalances in the speaker itself while you're at it. Speakers don't have to be perfect. Rooms are never perfect. Calibration has to fix all that.

The true sub was rated by the manufacturer down to 15Hz, but as I said before, that really doesn't add up to a hill of beans. The difference between 17Hz and 25Hz is only a little more than three musical notes, two of which are outside the range of human hearing. People worry too much about sound they can't hear, and not enough about the sound they can. The crossover with the mains is the most important thing to get right, after that the top octave is important, and the last octave a notch of importance below that. The least important range to have calibrated is the stuff you can't even hear. You just don't want spikes down there interfering with the resonant frequency of the walls in your house.

Play a really good recording of Bach organ works or Saint Saens' Organ Symphony or Tchaikovsky's Marche Slav and see how good your subwoofer performs with that. It will tell you a lot more than dinosaur foot stomps, because music has to sound natural and balanced. Thumps and wallops just have to be loud.


I see the time for continued efforts to be nice are going to be a waste of time.

You, Stephen, are so far off in your assessment of what is actually occurring in this thread that it's almost scary.

Allow an example:

I post this: ""Embedded in this thread, and also in the $1000 thread started 18 months ago, is a response curve from each sub tested. The V-3601 is +/- 3.5 dB from 14 to 80 Hz at my listening position.""

And you respond with this: ""The tested response curve of a speaker is pretty much irrelevant, because the only place it will produce that particular response is an anechoic chamber. Most of us have living rooms, and the second you drop a speaker into a real world living room, all bets are off.""

My listening position is not in an "anechoic chamber". It is in a real room. If you bothered to read actual text rather than making up a narrative to suit whatever your agenda is, you would have read how systems are calibrated here. I love good discussion about a subwoofer's performance, but yours is not a good discussion. Yours is a monologue about your limited experience with a mediocre subwoofer. Every subwoofer tested here has been calibrated to be within a +/- 3 to 4 dB window across its bandwidth (measured at the listening position in room), which starts at the 80 Hz crossover (with allowances for the fact that the crossover is not a brick wall, but rather a slope) and descends to the lowest frequency that it can present in a linear manner.

Let's get to your point about "pipe organs". I have several discs with pipe organs, including discs from Hsu Research. A 32 foot pipe organ has a fundamental frequency of 16 Hz, as does the fundamental of a tuba. The largest pipe organs have a fundamental of 8 Hz. To reproduce this (8 Hz) requires multiple drivers of a large size and excursion in either a sealed or infinite baffle configuration. Some people DO find joy in bass below 20 Hz. If you don't, that's fine.

Reproducing movie sound tracks is often more difficult than is reproducing music tracks, and many movie tracks have a lot of music in them. The dinosaur growl (note - it's not a foot stomp) from Jurassic World is a tough task for a subwoofer to reproduce. If you don't like it, again, that's fine. I suggest you respect that a lot of people DO respect the ability of a subwoofer to reproduce ALL information - from both movies and music.

As bass descends below 30 Hz, we hear it less and feel it more. Here is an excellent article about music and bass reproduction:

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue55/bass.htm

My purpose in this thread is to help demonstrate to people real world solutions in terms of getting excellent bass in one's system. Today's technology (also discussed in this and the previous $1000 subwoofer thread) makes getting excellent bass IN ONE's ROOM more attainable than ever.
 
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Mike Frezon

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Let's keep cool heads, everyone. Differences of opinion are fine.

We just want to avoid getting personal when expressing those differences. :thumbsup:

:D
 

bigshot

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I don't know what I said to make him mad. It's probably not me. Some time in the sunshine might help. I'll refrain from replying to him.
 

Technosponge

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Still impatiently waiting for next boomer box to arrive. The SVS PB16 ULTRA has me very intrigued. I have demoed it numerous times and it's spectacular. But the only thing close to it in terms of output in the room was the SB 13. Really no comparison. The Klipsch 15 was very good but not in the same league of LF output. The treated room with all SVS ULTRA series running in 7.1 with the PB16 was outstanding.
 

Craig Chase

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Still impatiently waiting for next boomer box to arrive. The SVS PB16 ULTRA has me very intrigued. I have demoed it numerous times and it's spectacular. But the only thing close to it in terms of output in the room was the SB 13. Really no comparison. The Klipsch 15 was very good but not in the same league of LF output. The treated room with all SVS ULTRA series running in 7.1 with the PB16 was outstanding.

We have the Klipsch sub here, and for the size and price, it was outclassed by both the Rythmik and Hsu, and even the much smaller Axiom sub delivered an overall better bass experience.

The V3601 is well beyond even a pair of the Klipsch subs - it's not even close.

We should be seeing an SVS SB-16 here in the next two weeks. :)
 

Technosponge

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I intend on demoing the sealed SB-16 this week. Hopefully in same room with an A/B comparison. Non of these will be done with any room correction and the setup I prefer is two 2.1 with Martin Logan Motion 60XT. Throw on Bob James "Obsession" and sit back.
 

Craig Chase

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I intend on demoing the sealed SB-16 this week. Hopefully in same room with an A/B comparison. Non of these will be done with any room correction and the setup I prefer is two 2.1 with Martin Logan Motion 60XT. Throw on Bob James "Obsession" and sit back.

That will be a lot of fun ! Enjoy! Speaking of the SB16 .... It will be interesting to play with the smart phone app. That may be a review all on its own.
 

theJman

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The app works quite well actually. Not sure it warrants an entire review though; it's fun to play around with, but once you get the PB16 dialed in you might not use it much any more. My guess is you're gonna like that sub.
 

jamb0

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I've ordered V3601 a month ago.
Waiting for it like a banana man :banana:

Too bad, that there is no independent tests made, vs. JTR 218HT and JTR Cap 1400.

I've tried to read AVS forum, but most of them just fanboys of their current subwoofer manufacturer..
 

Craig Chase

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I have dropped Jeff Permanian (owner of JTR) a note to see if he would like a Captivator 1400 put into this test. It's $1899 plus shipping, so about the same delivered price as a V3601.

It would be fun to test it against the PSA unit.
 

theJman

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I have dropped Jeff Permanian (owner of JTR) a note to see if he would like a Captivator 1400 put into this test. It's $1899 plus shipping, so about the same delivered price as a V3601.

It would be fun to test it against the PSA unit.

I hope you're able to make that happen, because my guess is you'll be mighty impressed. I had a Cap1400 while doing the review of the 118HT, so I know first hand what it can do. AAMOF, my personal reference sub is an S1.
 

Dave Upton

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I hope you're able to make that happen, because my guess is you'll be mighty impressed. I had a Cap1400 while doing the review of the 118HT, so I know first hand what it can do. AAMOF, my personal reference sub is an S1.
JTR subs are great, no question. It's probably number 2 on my list. My reference is the Seaton SubMersive HPi+ - though it's a bit pricier than the S1. I run a pair of the Seaton's in my theater, and I can't see myself upgrading subs for a very long time.
 

Craig Chase

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The next subwoofer looks like it will arrive next week. I have not heard back from Jeff. He could be pretty busy - I have seen posts where guys mention he is "off line" for a couple of weeks getting products ready, so stay tuned.

Subwoofers and "fanboys" have always been an interesting study. It seems more common than not that most anyone who has subwoofers that cost more than, say, $2000 think HIS subwoofer package is the best available.

On certain other forums, it's almost comical.
 

Craig Chase

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The SVS SB-16 Ultra has arrived. The only down side is I am leaving for a 5 day conference first thing in the morning, so it won't be set up until next Wednesday.

Things will pick up a bit after that, as we will have 3 excellent subwoofers to discuss. As of this writing, I can be definitive in stating that both the Power Sound Audio V3601 and the Axiom EP800 are amazingly good subwoofers. The Power Sound is more powerful, the Axiom a bit deeper and more articulate.

Both excel at doing everything a subwoofer should do - I have done some extensive music listening over the past two weeks, and will be updating that next week as well.

If I had to put either subwoofer up against a competitor available in a traditional audio store, the Axiom would be more than competitive with a JL Fathom 212, while the Power Sound would be matched against a James Loudspeaker EMB21. All one needs to do is look up the pricing on the JL and James subs to get a feel for the value of the PSA and Axiom units.

On paper, the first sub that comes to mind against the SB-16 Ultra is a Velodyne DD-18+ ...
 

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