Discovering a Bose Acoustimass 5 Series II Subwoofer

[Music] hello friends in this video we're going to look at this bose acoustimass 5 series 2 subwoofer picked this up at the thrift store for 4.99 this i'm guessing is probably about 20 years old or so this is the kind of unit that you put in power directly from your power amplifier such as an av receiver like i've got back here and it includes its own crossover network that provides outputs for a more broad range speaker such as a base reflex speaker this has very large porthole large dimensions so this should be a good quality subwoofer that can go down to pretty low frequency let's look at the connections on the back to get an idea of how this would be used so here on the bottom we've got inputs which go to the av receiver output and then here we've got outputs from the subwoofer which go to your external speakers so i'm using these large iowa bookshelf speakers that i've used as kind of my lab speakers for now so the combined response of the speaker system is this subwoofer whatever frequency response is happening in the crossover here and then these speakers are going to receive the higher frequencies now this one is a three-way speaker that includes small tweeter mid-range and a woofer so this isn't nearly as low a frequency as what the subwoofer can provide and my experience with these has been that they kind of generally sound good except that they're lacking on the very low end and that's not surprising given their kind of compact size as a matter of fact i think the system that these speakers came from originally was supposed to have powered subwoofer speakers that go with it here's its twin so we're going to hook those up to the av receiver and see what it sounds like so i've got some music running from one of my royalty free favorites that i can use on youtube which is the mini vandals [Music] so here's a close-up of our two speakers [Music] here's our subwoofer one of our side speakers [Music] another side speaker back to the subwoofer so as i had suspected there's nothing wrong with this it works just fine and it's another thrift store bargain for just five dollars for comparison i pulled out this bose acoustic mask module i took this apart in a previous video and it turns out that's my most popular video of all so i recommend you look at that in that video and another one that was dedicated to various different types of subwoofers i went inside here one thing that strikes me having taken this apart i had to literally put it on the table saw to get it open or maybe i could have used a hand saw but this one screws in it so we can take that apart and see what's inside it well i took these six screws out and tried to pull this off and found out that it seems to be glued on there it kind of makes sense in a way of making this perfectly rigid and airtight so given that i'm not going to take it apart for this video but just as a guess what we have is some sort of passive crossover network consisting of capacitors and inductors identical one for the right and left channel so essentially these two are the same and then they're combined in some way to go out to the uh driver element that's inside here as a side note i found out this is dated 1990 right here as a copyright on the sticker so this is about 30 years old since then we've had active subwoofers take over and av receivers that put out a separate subwoofer line output and that's kind of the normal thing nowadays but this made sense in 1990 so this still makes sense today because you can hook up a normal stereo receiver to this hook up some small satellite speakers to it and get some overall decent sound using uh speakers like we've seen on my bookshelf hope you've enjoyed this video on our bose acoustic mask 5 series 2 subwoofer if you did please consider giving me a like and subscribe thanks for watching and bye bye you

Channel: Some Disassembly Required

Views: 68,549

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Id: h_7y-8Edo3k

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021