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.