Subwoofers

We seem to be in the middle of a faintly deranged arms race on the subwoofer front at the moment. The challenge of this contest is to see who can direct the largest amount of power at the largest spread of drivers in the smallest overall box (although a separate competition to design the biggest device going is also apparently underway). 

Here at HCC we rather liked REL’s Serie S subwoofers, even if it has involved repeatedly telling sub-editors that there isn’t an ‘s’ on the end of Serie. When the company announced a Super High Output overhaul of the S/5 and S/3 models we had questions. Could they be better than the original? Would the price remain competitive? Might REL find that lost ‘s’? The answer to the last is 'no', but I'm happy to reply in the affirmative to the first two. 

When it comes to bass, bigger is generally better. After all, hitting low frequencies at high output requires large drivers able to shift plenty of air, and said  drivers obviously need to be mounted in sizeable boxes. In an ideal world, we'd all have 18in woofers the size of a Smart car.

Eclipse is the audio side of Japanese automotive technology company Fujitsu Ten. As a speaker brand, it is famous for its egg-shaped single-driver models, the Time Domain series. The design of these premium speakers isn't just for show – its effect upon the internal physics is to reduce back wave disturbance. And a single full-range transducer has no passive crossover, nor tweeter, thus no distortion in that crucial part of our hearing. In these days of bat-frequency super-tweeters there are those who deride the ability of a single driver to reproduce the absolute top tones, saying they are not as bright as designs with separate HF drivers. But then you actually hear the Eclipse speakers and such discussion goes out of the window. It's hilarious to watch someone get their first Time Domain experience; the detail and accuracy literally boggles.

Applying cunning enclosure acoustics and profoundly muscular motors driving very rigid small diaphragms works a treat for most musical frequencies. But bass is different. It requires logarithmically more energy and power to move a thousand times more air than a mid-band/high-frequency transducer. Yet essentially, Eclipse’s approach to bass remains the same. It wants speed and it wants accuracy. 

As a company, SVS has taken the ‘no substitute for cubic capacity’ maxim and flogged it to death. Then flogged it a bit more. The PB-2000 subwoofer is at the affordable end of its portfolio but it is still a huge piece of kit. The PB classification denotes a ported model, so as well as a 12in forward-firing driver, there is a 4in port working on the same axis. Now, no 12in woofer is ever going to be tiny, but at 55cm deep and over 50cm high, the PB-2000 is a bit of a whopper.

Priced at £650, the SB-2000 is targeted at those eager to sample the delights of serious subwoofer technology without breaking the bank, or rearranging their furniture. A sealed design (SVS has a new ported woofer, too, the PB-2000), the American manufacturer claims it's 'compact'. I'd take that with a pinch of salt – it's not massive, but it's hardly dinky.