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Review 2 of 3
Price Paid:
$499.00
from Sound Advice Summary: Not a world class performing sub, but a very nice value for 500 bucks. When I originally hooked up the sub and performed a bsic smoke test (does it work) I was disappointed with its gruff raspy and boomy voice. I almost abandoned it right there. But I thought I'd see how close I could get the sub to tollerable.
I was quite surprised. I brough the volume up to about two thirds, took the sub out of direct mode and gave the cross over a chance at 85hz and set my receiver to 100hz and was pleased with the over all performance although it clearly was way more pressure than the rest of the system was generating. So then I level set the receiver and hand calibrated using a Radio shack SPL meter. ... OK, not so bad. Voices were still a little over done and some LFE that should be subtle wasn't but the big stuff, like Tom Hank's Tommy Gun in Road to Perdition were shockingly good and vivid.
So a tad more tweaking left me with two basic settings in the Subs memory. One for regular TV and one for movies. TV is just for TV where there is just too much noise making its way to the sub. The Movies setting worked quite well for digital sources with a defined LFE track as well as all of my music.
My recomendation is that its a good sub if you have the time and know how to tame it. Strengths: Adequate performer, very configurable. Weaknesses: Factory setting only illustrated how much tuning was needed. Only four settings for phase correction instead of variable phase correction. Relatively low power for a sub. Could benefit from twice the AMP. Similar Products Used: Polk Audio PSW 150
Paradigm Servo-15 (mack daddy Sub)
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