7 Crazy Subwoofers You Need To Know About!

if you look across just about every consumer industry you're gonna have some pretty crazy products right take automotive for example i'm sure some of you have heard about the bugatti chiron it's a three million dollar hyper car goes about 280 miles an hour has a 16 cylinder engine and makes 1500 horsepower now if that's not crazy i don't know what is well hi-fi is no stranger to crazy and one of my favorite categories in all hi-fi is subwoofers it's bass in this video i'm going to run through seven of the craziest subwoofers i could find tell you about the specs i'll give you some of my thoughts and um well we'll just have some fun real quick if you like this kind of content you want to see more please consider subscribing hit the thumbs up button and leave a comment below i love talking with you guys in the comments and uh that stuff definitely helps my channel out and your support is very much appreciated so thank you the first subwoofer that i'm going to talk about is the ascendo audio g50 and this is by far the single largest subwoofer i think on the planet um i'm not talking about consumer subs i'm talking about just subwoofer in general like commercial think about you know what's used on movie sets or in you know large concerts right there's nothing nothing that's bigger than this thing that i've seen that's a single driver subwoofer it's 50 inches right so 50 inch driver the enclosure itself is six foot tall now i'm just over saying i'm about six foot two so it's almost as tall as me which is insane they have to hand build driver because no one's going to mass produce a 50 inch woofer the woofer has a 14 inch voice coil and an 88 pound neodymium magnet now 88 pounds doesn't seem that much for a magnet right like some 18 and 21 inch subs have fairly heavy magnet motor structures but this is a neodymium magnet and for those of you who know neodymium magnets are far more powerful than their equivalent ferrite counterport of the same weight so you're getting a very very very powerful magnet and coupled to that magnet you've got a 6000 watt amplifier so all together you're looking at a subwoofer that per their claim is capable of moving as much air as 40 conventional 18 inch subwoofers now i don't know about you but that's a lot of bass that's a lot of air and when you think about the application for something like this this is really truly a infrasonic subsonic below the human threshold of hearing kind of device right this is going to rattle your innards it's going to kind of shake your windows and hopefully not destroy the foundation of your house or certainly if not that piss off your neighbors the frequency response is equally as crazy we're talking about something that can go from 100 hertz all the way down to 5 hertz and output 105 decibels at 5 hertz with 140 decibels of peak output for something like this obviously it's not going to come cheap and i was able to pull a price list and in euros this is 68 000 euros including uh vat so if you do the euro to us dollar conversion in in uh 20 21 you're looking at 78 000 now you can buy a lot of subs for 78 thousand dollars right so again if you want the ultimate baddest biggest single driver subwoofer this is kind of your only ticket and um that's probably part of the reason why the the price is so high as well as all the r d and just the cost of the labor materials but uh you know again if if you can afford it if you have the space i mean why not right why wouldn't you want to have a 50 in sub so there you have it 50 inch subwoofer ascendio audio sms g50 now on the other end of the spectrum aside from that sort of the largest we're going to look at the most expensive subwoofer and this has to be the yg acoustics invincible subwoofer this is the subwoofer for you powerball winners out there because it cost a hundred thousand dollars now what do you get for your hundred thousand dollars well you get two 21 inch billet core uh drivers that are arranged one on top of the other so they're firing towards each other to help remove vibrations or cancel out vibrations the cone itself is machined from a single 66 pound slab of aluminum resulting in a cone that only weighs about 14 ounces but it's incredibly incredibly strong the dual 21 inch drivers are coupled to a 6 000 watt amplifier it's in a sealed enclosure and it's about 70 inches tall so it's actually almost as tall as that sms g50 woofer but instead of a one single 50-inch woofer using 221s but again i i don't understand the the hundred thousand dollar price tag now i guess if you're buying some of the yg acoustic speakers and they make very very fine speakers and you're dropping you know 100 150 k on on a stereo pair and you know you've got a 80 000 front end what's another 100 grand for for your subwoofer right um look i haven't heard this thing i don't know anyone who has but i'm sure it sounds incredible i just i think the 100 000 uh you know price tag kind of throws me off a little bit but who knows right maybe it's just the most amazing sub in the world and you know that's why they named it the invincible um but you know you're going to get usable output down to 15 hertz probably better in room weighs 460 pounds and is easily one of the most ridiculous subwoofers i've ever heard of so next on our list is hardly a subwoofer at all it's it's a fan it's the eminent technology trw17 rotary sub now this subwoofer first came out around 2007 and i remember i remember when this thing came out um you know the trw stands for thigpen rotary woofer and it was designed by brewstigpen and the way it works is instead of using a traditional cone-based driver to produce a pressure wave it uses a fan to create positive pressure in the room itself and then it just oscillates how fast you're basically inflating and deflating the pressure in that room now you've got a fan connected to a motor and that motor is spinning at around 600 rpm continuously so when you get an incoming audio signal that signal is going to modulate the pitch of the blades kind of like you know when you stick your hand out the window of your car going down the highway and you kind of feel it move up and down that's effectively what this is doing now one of the reasons why the subwoofer so special is in how it allows you to overcome some of the inherent physical limitations of a traditional cone or pistonic kind of style subwoofer right air is fairly low density and you can even do this experiment right now take your hand go like this back and forth and you can barely feel it maybe you feel a little bit of wind but you're not really feeling a lot of resistance as if you you know stuck your hand in water and did the same thing now imagine your subwoofer cone is trying to move a lot of air well it has to work pretty hard or you're going to need a pretty large surface area to be able to move and couple air in in your room now with a rotary sub that's spinning at 600 rpm those blades feel a lot more resistant so it doesn't have to do quite as much work in order to get a lot of sound output to move air right because that's really what bass is all about and that's kind of the key principle at least one of the key principles behind how this rotary fan translates that into incredible incredible deep bass now you do need a you know a chamber to couple this it's kind of like an infinite baffle design and so for that you typically use a basement or an attic or side room or some other large air space and then on the other side you're feeding base back into the main listening room so what do you get with this well you get a frequency response from 1 hertz up to 30 hertz now it doesn't go above 30 hertz because there you start to lose efficiency so you are going to have to use a conventional subwoofer subwoofers to augment bass above 30 hertz which just sounds absurd but you know they claim 115 decibels of output from one hertz up to 20 hertz now that i don't i don't know any other subwoofer again a single subwoofer that can do that um sure if you have multiple subwoofers all around your room together they could probably do that or better it but for single subwoofer to do that and be hidden out of view i mean that that's pretty remarkable especially down at one hertz um it only needs 150 watt amp to drive it which is kind of cool uh you're not having to use a lot of power again because of just the way it works and it couples the air really efficiently price wise this thing back in the day was around thirteen thousand dollars but then when you add the amp the crossover the control unit the design of that chamber and all that stuff you're probably in like the low to mid 20 000 range so again it's not a cheap subwoofer not a cheap installation but you know you want some serious base performance you're gonna have to pay for it so that's really what you're getting with this trw 17 rotary subwoofer next up on the list is kind of an unusual subwoofer because it's really two in one but two subwoofers of different driver diameters uh it's the velodyne 1812 signature edition this is kind of the what the heck were they thinking subwoofer i actually owned one of their digital drive subwoofers it was a dd10 a 10 inch uh you know single uh driver subwoofer and a sealed enclosure servo control mechanism it was an incredible incredible subwoofer and they made them all the way up to an 18 inch size version the 1812 essentially takes a 12 inch digital drive subwoofer and an 18 inch version of that subwoofer and combines them into one enclosure all forward-facing they use the same servo control technology they use the same amplifier rather to 1250-watt amplifiers to create this monstrosity of a subwoofer and you know they rated it from 15 hertz to 20 hertz 120 hertz rather plus or minus 3 db and it was measured at 101 decibels down to 16 hertz so it had fairly strong output and you have to think about the reasoning behind why they did that well they assigned the 12-inch woofer the upper base frequencies and the lower woofer the deeper sub-base frequencies and they did it because of the efficiency with which each driver could manage those frequencies right it's better to ask the larger 18 inch woofer to reproduce 20 hertz than the smaller 12-inch woofer you're going to get less distortion it's going to you know be easier it's going to better match the resonant frequency of that driver and so that's kind of what they were trying to go after clean you know low distortion high output sound but the downside was that it cost 15 000 and for 15 grand you know you can get quite a lot of subwoofer elsewhere so i have to imagine that this sub didn't do that well in the market in fact i think it kind of tanked or at least it was it was just sort of a statement product that they put out there to you know get some media attention or what have you but again it just was a you know kind of a weird oddball sub and it was a bit expensive so you know it's not surprising that it probably didn't do that well in the market all right this next subwoofer is probably the strangest of all the subwoofers that i've ever seen and this is the tympani lat 700. now this subwoofer is effectively six seven inch cones that are connected and stacked in a array together balanced out by two motors on either end of that enclosure and in between each of these different cones there's air space for air to come in and move out they say that the lat 700 is equivalent to two conventional 12 inch subs and i looked in some of the reviews and you know it kind of was a little underwhelming i think that that was a bit of an exaggeration but nonetheless it's kind of a cool design so each of these six diaphragms is controlled and moved by three rods that are connected to one of the two motors now it's a push-pull configuration so they're either either moving towards or away from the next diaphragm so air is really pumped in and out of the vent that sits between the diaphragms because of that configuration and setup it's vibration free which is nice and you know it's designed for smaller really more mobile car audio applications you don't really see this used in home theater or two channel audio but it's really when you want a lot of bass in a small space now i don't think this thing was super successful there were a couple companies one of them alpine who took it and you know productize it even further they had a powered version of it with a 500 watt amp called the plv7 but you know from what i could tell it underperformed and it just didn't sell well they've since been discontinued and they're no longer available but you know i've got to give credit to timpani and alpine this is a really wild and wacky subwoofer and an interesting way of making base using these smaller drivers arrange in that sort of stacked configuration never seen anything like it so certainly deserves placement on my list the next step on the list is the paradigm signature reference sub 1 and sub 2. now those of you who saw my other review know that i have a paradigm sub 1 in my home theater room and it is a really cool and weird and quirky subwoofer it's got six eight inch woofers that are arranged in a wide configuration of sorts or spaced 120 degrees apart powered by a 1700 watt rms amplifier this thing gets down to 15 hertz and i can say just from personal experience it is probably the most powerful most ridiculous subwoofer i've ever owned and one of the most powerful subwoofers i've heard that's again a single subwoofer for you know home consumer use the bigger brother to this version the sub 2 used six 10 inch woofers that were all very very powerful and overbuilt had a 4500 watt amplifier and again extension down to nine hertz in room so really stand out performance for something that's relatively compact right these are it's around 20 inches by 20 inches all around and it's a fairly elegant design too something with a high waff factor right it's not some ugly black box or some massive refrigerator size thing it's it's a nice tidy neat compact little subwoofer just happens to have six uh six individual woofers with lots of cone radiating area to make copious amounts of deep bass um really really cool stuff and certainly deserves a place on this list now the last subwoofer or shall i say subwoofers that are that i'm going to talk about is the rail number 25 six stack the rail number 25 on its own is a pretty serious piece of equipment right we're talking about a 15 inch carbon fiber woofer um with four inches of peak to peak excursion and a thousand watt amp and this thing is seriously overbuilt really really heavy large subwoofer now take that but then add five more so you effectively have two stacks of or rather two line arrays of three subwoofers stacked on top of each other hence the six the six stack the six pack whatever you want to call it each of those rail number 25s which is their top of the line model cost 7 500 so all together you're looking at 45 grand for six of these things now you have to ask yourself why on earth would someone want to have six subwoofers in a two channel audio system just trying to blast your room with bass well no not quite you could certainly do that but the intent of this is really ultra low distortion effortless effortless bass and a much more three-dimensional perspective of how base information is rendered in your room and in in the system with your main speakers the way that they set this up is kind of interesting so they'll cross over the subwoofers at different frequencies depending on the position in that stack so the subwoofers at the bottom will reproduce the lowest bass notes and progressively get higher and higher as you move up the chain right so ultimately you have the top subwoofers that are crossed over higher than the ones in the bottom really really interesting stuff now for 45 grand i would expect that you're going to have john hunter you know personally set up your system to make sure it's dialed in properly because i would imagine dialing in this thing as a nightmare but if you get it right i mean that that's that's got to be a really awesome system and i i've seen several people uh who have this setup if or if not the number 25 other models in the rel lineup that are set up in the same you know six stack configuration so clearly there's something that they're doing right with that but again it's going to take up a lot of space in this case the number 25 six stack weighs about a thousand pounds altogether so it's no small feat but if you need to have the last word in base experience for your two channel setup this is certainly a very interesting way of getting there so there you have it those are seven of the craziest subwoofers i've ever heard of if you know of any subwoofers that deserve to be on this list that i didn't mention please leave a comment below i'd love to find out more about them um i just think stuff is so cool and so fascinating and what people are doing in this industry to make base um so you know like i said drop a note below and we'll talk about in the comments um coming down the pipeline i've got a bunch of really cool stuff i'll be reviewing some dax going forward i'm actually looking for a dac a dedicated standalone dac to work with my bottle head integrated tube amp i also acquired a new subwoofer yes number five uh of my subwoofers and uh we'll be reviewing that and there's a there's an interesting story behind that one too so that's coming soon and i'll be getting a little bit more into some diy stuff we've got a couple projects coming down the pipe for that too so there's a lot of stuff happening on this channel so i hope you all stick around subscribe if you haven't already and we'll see you in the next one cheers

Channel: Mark on Hifi

Views: 134,066

Rating: 4.8925118 out of 5

Keywords: subwoofer, home theater, bass, hifi, hifi audio, audiophiles, jl fathom, smsg50, velodyne, REL, YG Acoustics, paradigm subwoofer

Id: O9vG0l2vyRk

Length: 18min 44sec (1124 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021