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T/9x Red Product Overview
Exclusivity Meets Excellence
The below text is a transcription of the video.
Hey, thanks for joining us. This is John Hunter with Rel. We’re with the Serie T_9x in red. This is a beautiful, true Italian red. You can imagine the car company whose name ends in an ‘I’ that this would be from and it’s absolute exquisite. What we’ve got, however, is an upgraded version of the T_9x. So we went through and adjusted some of the parameters in the driver, went to a carbon fiber center cap that really stiffens things and lightens things. It’s actually about a db. And a half more efficient. It goes a little bit deeper and it hits a little harder. So it’s a performance upgrade this time. And the beautiful finish. The entire ethos of this is museum quality art. It is absolutely gorgeous from the five coats of chrome on this thing to get it to be so deep.
On the top batch, we have this beautiful carbon fiber bezel around it. The paint work is exquisite, the feet are fantastic. The details, you’ll just love them. They’re full chrome plated and there’s the softest little light gray crown only at the bottom. Very subtle. The 9x in red is going to cost a little bit more than the standard 9x, but that’s partly because of the quality and cost of the paint. The paint costs us about $600 a gallon. It’s just enormously expensive to do this well. And then the driver itself is about 25% more expensive than a standard T_9x. So what we have is a 10 inch active driver with a down firing 10 down here underneath the bottom of the cabinet where you can’t see it. They do very different things. This gives you the fast attack, the mid base, the concussion, the speed, the slam, and the decay patterns.
The down firing gives you the lowest, deepest base, what we call floor crawl, right? It’s just sort of ripples across the entire surface of your floor. And in this one, you get both attack and the body, the release of the note through the floor. On the back of this, we have a 300 watt class AB amplifier. We’ve been using these now for almost 20 years. There’s just something about this AMP family we love. It’s ultra-reliable. They’re repairable, they are bulletproof. We’ve got customers that have been running them since the original T’s in 2007 without fault. It’s just such a great composite product and we’ve been updating and upgrading those amplifiers as we do generational updates. And so they not exactly the same, they just keep getting better and better. So 300 watts, dual 10 inches, and then this just gorgeous sexy cabinet. That really is something very special for the people who would like for their furniture and their coder mods to all make sense in their house.
So let’s dive into this 10 inch driver a little bit. This is really special. It’s something that as we dove into it, as we started to do this project, the whole design team felt that the visual strength and aggression of this project was enough that we needed it to actually deliver more. Also, it had to be higher performance. It had to be more than a standard T_9x, which itself is a pretty competent subwoofer, right? So what we did with this one was looked at two different places, three, including the amplifier and just rejected that cause It would’ve driven the price up to go up to say, a 500 watt amp. And the place that we could get the most improvement was to improve the active driver, which shouldn’t really be a huge surprise. This is where we wound up using a six inch pure carbon fiber center cap.
And the importance of center caps in our designs. People used to refer to them as dust caps 50 years ago. A center cap is designed to hold the entire structural integrity of the cone intact. And that’s super important when you’re driving a driver hard. So the louder it goes, the more important the center cap becomes. We use carbon fiber because it dropped literally two and a half grams off the moving surface of the cone, which made it quicker, lighter. We actually got more output and it goes down a little bit deeper. Once we realized that we had more to work with, we actually retune the suspension a little bit, made sort of the shock absorbers a little stiffer, right? The suspension pieces in it, a little stiffer. So it’s more like a sports car in the sense it’s very reactive and it stops and starts even quicker than the T_9x driver does.
It’s a great piece. Responds beautifully, can handle far more than the 300 watts we’re throwing at it. But you always have to get a balance between the amplifier’s power when it runs out and the driver, and you never want to have the driver less than the amp. So these are some of the journey points that we went into with the 9x red. How do we make these pieces better? Back here at the business end of the subwoofer, we’ve got a classic T/9x full panel…. Please email or click subtitles or transcribe button to read the additional transcription.
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