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Why You Need a Subwoofer

 

This text is a transcription of the video

So why add a subwoofer to your system? It’s a fair question. There are basically three things that it breaks down to, really basic things.

First of all, like many people, you may be looking at a subwoofer just to get bass in your theater. I would take it a step beyond that. I would say that if you don’t have a subwoofer in a theater, you’re not listening to theater. It’s just incapable of actually disclosing what theater is about.

Second thing, is it clearly reproduces the lower frequency instruments in music. What does that mean? Do I listen to pipe organ music? Yes, no, maybe not, but everything from the impact of kick drums in rock, the floor toms in jazz. All of those are better rendered and more explosive when you’re using a subwoofer underneath it.

And the third aspect is really quite simple. It allows you to overcome the really deleterious effects of bad rooms and almost everybody’s room is bad. So, if you’re chasing that one relax, we all have bad rooms. It’s just not possible for a well-designed speaker to reproduce what it’s theoretically capable of in almost any room out there.

So, to have the additional horsepower of a powered subwoofer with tons and tons of energy to throw at that issue really is transformative. When you hear what it does, it’s incredible. RELs do some other things that normal subwoofers don’t do. We work really hard to get this seamless handoff between sub and main speaker. People continuously write us and go, it’s incredible I cannot locate and in fact, I can’t tell there’s a subwoofer on in my system at all until I turn it off.

And then the second part of it is that what we do with our high level circuits really is transformative for theater. It’s something that you’ll have to experience for yourself, but it improves dialogue, intelligibility, delicacy, a bombast, everything. It becomes more alive.

It becomes more expressive. If it’s, if it’s a particularly sad, depressing portion of the movie you’ll cry. If it’s something that’s upbeat and dynamic, it will be that much more thrilling. So, there’s a whole philosophy to how we do it. We have other videos and you can go back and re watch those if you’d like to know more about it, but we approach things very differently and it winds up helping so much of every part of the way that you use your system.


July 14, 2020 - Posted in: Sound Insights, Videos