Subwoofers

I've reviewed a few high-end subwoofers recently, but this is a simple and affordable offering that is, in its own way, equally impressive.

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. 

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). 

JL Audio straddles both the AV and car audio markets, delivering deep bass thrills to those who seek them. On the home cinema side it is best known for its premium-priced, insanely potent Gotham and Fathom subwoofers. This offering, new to the UK and debuted at the Bristol Show, is the company's idea of an entry-level product, and is called Dominion.

If you managed to stay awake during physics classes at school, you might remember Newton's Third Law of Motion, which states – in essence – that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It's a principle of classical mechanics that's been embraced by speaker and subwoofer manufacturers, allowing them to engineer a force-cancelling design to reduce cabinet vibrations and increase the maximum output.

All speakers operate on the same basic principle of generating sound by physically moving air. The bigger the driver, the more air being shifted and the lower the frequencies. At the end of the day there's no replacement for displacement, so if you want big bass you need a big woofer.