It might come as a surprise that REL has never created a subwoofer purely for movies. Music or ‘music and movies’, yes, but not LFE alone. The £500 HT/1003 is REL’s first foray into pure-bred home cinema heroics.
SVS's heavy-duty SB-4000 subwoofer partners a large driver and 1,200W amp with intelligent operation. Ed Selley tries his hardest to ruffle its feathers
Commemorating 25 years of REL sub-bass systems in some style, the company's No.25 is a very special subwoofer and mad as a box of frogs. A really, really big box of frogs, too. Weighing in at a whopping 76kg, its width is close to 75cm, it's over 80cm deep including connectors poking out and it stands 54cm tall. And even if you have a large room to house it, you'll need a big wallet as well. The price? A cool £6,500.
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).
Bass is a vital part of the home cinema package. Hefty, heaving, humongous low-frequencies are guaranteed to add scale and impact to a surround sound experience, in a way that crystalline high frequencies or robust dialogue just don't. For some AV enthusiasts, their subwoofer is their favourite toy.
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.
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.
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.
The 212SE, the newest venture from sub-bass specialist REL, is a mighty quad-driver woofer capable of making profound, structure-borne seismic lows that will flow through walls and foundations. It probably isn't fit for semi-detached suburbia, unless – like me – you have The Best Neighbours Ever.
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.
REL makes superb active subwoofers in general and this one is so good, it is peer to at least one 15in model and other products nearly twice the price. In the S5, driver and amplifier engineering have created a new benchmark.