Tiny Subwoofer Shootout | KEF KC62 vs SVS 3000 Micro

i'm impressed with this guy if you would have told me 15 years ago that you could get this type of bass from something this small something that has this much power i don't know if i would have believed you but after hearing it i'm a believer today we're going to be mostly talking about the kef kc 62 but i do have to compare it to this svs 3000 micro just because they came out around the same time and they're both very tiny subwoofers so if you haven't watched my unboxing video i did a little bit of a physical comparison between these two but if you haven't just basically you can see the size difference and you would think that this one is larger so it would be heavier okay all right so there's the svs 3000 micro and i'm not exaggerating here this is it's like a bowling ball scary heavy that's because this one's made out of aluminum this one's made out of wood as far as the build quality and the look i'm gonna have to give that to the kef although this is nearly twice as expensive as this so is it worth it we're gonna have to find out so looking on the back here you'll see the plate amp on both of these and they look pretty different because this one has dials and switches whereas the svs is mostly just buttons and a lot of the stuff that you can do using the svs app now this one they do have an app for it but you know i tried to look for one specifically for this but i think that you have to have a cap ls50 in order to use that app with this i think that the actual uh speaker controls this i might be wrong i haven't had that much time to play with this before i send it back that's one thing i really couldn't find i did search their manual and i didn't see that there was a specific app just for the sub whereas this svs has its own proprietary software just for the sub itself i kind of feel like these were built to be paired with the ls50s and other kef powered speakers because although you can use it with others if the app requires that kef ls50 then you know you're not really doing a lot of the stuff here although you can use it i really think that they designed it for their own kept stuff now i may be wrong like i'm saying i tried to look for the app i couldn't find it so correct me in the comments if i'm wrong the caf does have a zero to 180 degree phase shift it has a few different eq modes which we'll get into in a bit and a switch from manual control of the crossover or lfe which means that it's going to pass anything from 120 hertz down for most avrs that have that you just use lfe crossover can be adjusted manually as well as the volume now the one thing that i want to make sure to point out that i really like about this is that this has a high pass filter meaning you can choose to connect some external speakers external powered speakers or even an amplifier connected to some passive speakers and you can actually use this as a high pass meaning that this will receive all the frequencies below a certain frequency and it'll pass on the frequencies above that smoother response smoother crossover so that's what you want you want the subwoofer to take care of the lower frequencies and the other speakers to play all the frequencies above that you don't really want them doing the same frequencies at the same time because then you get a bump in the frequency response this one cannot do that by itself it does have a low pass meaning it won't receive certain frequencies above where you set it but what it can't do is it can't pass the higher frequencies onto an external speaker you're going to need an avr or an amplifier that has that built in what does that mean if you're a home theater enthusiast your avr probably can already do that so not a big deal but if you're in the two channel a lot of those don't have that capability this does and that's what i think is very cool i think that these are really targeted towards the two-channel listener that may not have that stuff built in one of the reasons why a lot of the two channel guys weren't in the subs because there wasn't a good way to integrate it yeah kef you guys are doing the right thing one thing you'll notice about these force-canceling drivers which are actually two drivers that are connected in the middle where the magnet is what you'll notice is the cabinet just doesn't move same thing with this one with the dual opposing drivers you kind of get the same effect also both of them do have inverted surrounds although this has a crazy design to it and i think that's to help control it when it's at max excursion the main spec that everybody was talking about was that this is supposed to hit down to 11 hertz with dual six and a half inch and supposed to hit 105 decibels what we found out and what i suspected was that it can't do both 105 decibels and 11 hertz i just found it misleading because it kind of sounded like it could do 11 hertz at 105 decibels which is not the case it's using something called dynamic eq which adjusts the bass response based on the volume so what i found out from my testing is that it can hit 105 decibels but that's around the 70 hertz range not 11. what i want to do is i want to see what their claim is of 11 hertz if that's true and their other claim of 105 decibels so let's find out alright so time to run some measurements and see how this performs in our aw alright so right now what we're doing is i'm doing some compression testing to see when it starts limiting the output of this to save the drivers on this right now i'm doing some testing to see what those different switches and different options are on the back and how it affects the frequency response one thing i found interesting was that the switch for room actually gives you the most bass extension so something to note alright so i just got done doing some of the uh dynamic eq tests and you can definitely see that as you turn up the volume that the eq the frequency response starts to change it starts to give you a little bit less bass extension so i'm gonna have to go and see exactly where we're at at 85 decibels from two meters so i'm gonna have to do some corrections to kind of give an idea of where we're at so i can compare it with other subwoofers all right so just to be fair i'm going to be testing out the svs 3000 micro in the same conditions same spot same microphone same everything so we should have a fair test here to see how they perform against one another all right so right now i am taking a look at both of the measurements and i'm actually pretty surprised with what i'm seeing here um it's not what i expected and i'm glad that kef that you guys sent this out to me for review because this gives me a better idea of what's going on and it's actually better than i expected so this is a measurement from two meters away you can see that there's a dip but this is caused by my room but you can see this one here is the svs right the one that's lighting up in green there's a little bit more output here for well there's a lot more output here for the svs but as far as low frequency extension as far as how far it goes out you can see here that the uh the kef actually has more extension here right below 20 hertz at max volume so let's take a look at the max corrected response now one difference is that the svs does not change as you go up in volume so this is the max volume of the svs 3000 micro and you can see the response there and this is the maximum response of the kef and so what do we see here you can see that the 3000 micro stays much flatter at max volume you can see the other one has a peak the kef has a peak in purple so it has a peak and then it goes down but you also see that it still extends out further below 20 hertz at the max volume so if you were to just cut it off right here cut that off using dsp then you're actually getting more output with a kef because the svs starts dropping off sooner now how much that really matters in the real world it's hard to tell because you know this is not really great volumes 90 decibels uh i mean you'll be able to hear that but it's not really what you want as far as you know for a movie situation but for music i think this is going to be good enough so it's still what i expected meaning that the svs does have more output right you see that it does have more output at max at when it's at max volume um it has more low frequency extension up until 23 hertz where the svs falls off and the kef even though it has this huge huge dip here right it still extends a little bit further so what can you make of that that the caf the dynamic eq actually does work it does do a good job of extending the base frequency out and it's a cool technology i think that if the svs would have done that you would have seen that it would have had more output because it has dual eight inch drivers as opposed to dual six and a half's so real quick let's just take a look here um at the kef at lower volume so this one is at max volume and then as you see you know minus 10 db and minus 20 db they look the same because at minus 20 20 db is where you start uh hitting that limiter anyway so it doesn't matter those don't matter what you start seeing is minus 30 db though then you start seeing the difference in the frequency response you see that it starts to change it starts to flatten out minus 50 db so at lower volumes you see that the calf is flatter at the lowest volumes i mean this is pretty low listening but you see that you do get some bass extension i wasn't seeing that 11 hertz but that could have been my mic and so uh very interesting stuff here like i said i wasn't able to use an app or find an app for this but if there is i'm not sure that there's a peq setting where you can adjust this based on how it's performing in your room because if you can tell through my measurements how it performs two meters away is not the same as how it measures up close and so even though this is relatively flat depending on the listening volume it might perform totally different in your listening position and so peq can help with that parametric eq i don't know that this has that this does if you're a two two-channel listener and you just want to add some extra bass you don't have an avr or receiver that has any dsp or room correction i would recommend something like this because then you can use the high pass that's built into these but if you're setting up a small home theater or you have an avr i would recommend the svs because at half the price you can get two of these to one of these and put them on opposite side of the room you're gonna get more bass you're gonna get more even bass because you're using two versus one also one thing to be very careful of is if you want to use these for movies the problem is that dynamic eq it's going to be tough to use an external odyssey type room eq because what is it set to the frequency response of this changes so when it does its calibration well it's going to be based on what volume these are set to which is around 85 decibels so the result is you may be eq'ing for a certain frequency that might not be the same frequency when you turn it up or when you turn it down now i was highly critical of the kef because of the way they marketed it 1100 it's 105 decibels but one thing i would say is i was pleasantly surprised not only by the build quality but also by the sound i mean i tested it here in a in a home theater i tested it out in my two channel living room setup and i can say that for my listening levels it added more than enough bass because i'm not listening really loud when people say you know you need 105 decibels or 100 you know all these high numbers think about it and do you really know what level you prefer to listen at maybe next time you're listening to music get a decibel meter and see about how loud you're listening to the music if it's not over 90 decibels well you know that these are probably going to be pretty good for you and that's the thing i don't know how many people know how loud they're actually listening to speakers the other thing to keep in mind is you do get some room gain when you put these in a corner so even though these are not going to get super loud it does help if you have them placed properly so just to give you an example i was comparing both of these in my living room situation where i have some elac unified reference speakers some floor standers and both of them added base where you think that you may not need it trust me when you add a sub it really fills out the bottom end actually makes the whole system sound just much better much fuller the speakers sound huge in comparison even though you're not adding that much size you're just adding these as far as distortion goes i feel like the limiter in the calf is a little bit better the svs when i did hit the limiter you could hear a slight bit of distortion before it backed it off whereas the calf kind of just didn't even let it happen i think that if you're a caf fan if you're in the two channel audio and you don't mind spending the money you already have your mind made up anyway you're gonna buy the kef if you have kef you want everything matching and that's fine i think you're gonna be happy with it but if you're like me and you're just looking for the best bang for your buck budget then i think two svs for the price of one of these it's kind of hard to argue with okay so just to be clear are you getting frequencies down to 20 hertz yes you are is it at levels that you want it depends on how loud you like to listen for me most levels that i like to listen to i think yeah it gets down to 20 hertz and i'm i would be happy with it at that volume for movies maybe not maybe not because you have these explosions and you want to get scared i don't know that these are going to scare you they're not going to shake the house they're not going to do all that but you'll be able to hear the sound will this kefka 62 outperform svs or monoprice sub monolith sub that's four times the size even though it's maybe half the price no no you can't beat physics those subs are going to hit deeper they're going to play louder with more authority 100 but they're also pretty huge pretty huge in comparison to these so i know other subwoofer guys have stuff that looks like refrigerators not everybody wants that that's my review of the kef kc62 if there's something i missed leave it in the comment below and i'll do my best to answer it anyway if you liked the video make sure to like subscribe ring the bell to be notified when i upload new videos take care bye-bye alright so here we are at the subwoofer leaderboard and i have the kc62 best under 2000 because these are about 1500 bucks and that's the only one there now best overall subwoofer that i've reviewed so keep in mind this is what i've reviewed i'm gonna have to put them and so this is going to be tough i can put it above the kc or sorry the svs 3000 micro because of the build quality because of the features the high pass and the base extension but the svs has a little bit more output usable output i can put it here and that would be fair i could put it under here and that would also be fair it just it really depends if you're looking for 2 channel i'm gonna put it this way if i'm gonna put it for a home theater i'd rather get two svs 3000 micros and uh call it a day so i'll leave it like this for now you can switch it up if you want you

Channel: Joe N Tell

Views: 105,827

Keywords: home audio, home theater, tiny subwoofer, tiny subwoofers, small subwoofer, small subwoofers, tiny subwoofer shootout, small subwoofer shootout, micro subwoofer, kef kc62, kef kc62 subwoofer, svs 3000 micro, kef kc62 vs svs 3000 micro, svs 3000 micro vs kef kc62, subwoofer, home theater subwoofer, audiophile, kef kc62 frequency response, kef kc62 11hz, kef kc62 105dB, svs 3000 micro frequency response

Id: XJ8wYC5QQf0

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021