Once you've heard of REL properly dialed in, it's really hard to go back ever again. I speak from personal knowledge. I've been around REL. Of course, I've been designing since 2005, but I had the privilege of working with Richard himself back in the day. And we started in 1994, and it was impactful, enough that I don't know that I've owned a system since 1994 that didn't have a minimum of two RELs in it. It just imprinted on me.
And for me, you know, I played lead guitar when I was a musician. I was not a bass player. I didn't care for conventional subwoofers.
Shock, they sound terrible, many of them. What I care about is the ability to produce a lifelike three-dimensional hologram that is a mirror of real life. When you hear real musicians on a real stage playing real instruments in a real defined space, it's addictive.
And I've never found anything that gives that impact, that dramatic take you there, and lets you feel the energy. You know, when you play live music on stage, there's a vibe that doesn't exist anywhere else on earth. And there is something about what RELs have always done.
I'm not taking credit for this just in the modern era. They've always done this. When you hear RELs dialed in properly in a system, they communicate the vibe, the energy, the fun.
You start feeling the actual beat of what's happening, and not just the beat that's the obvious one that's a kick drum, but you feel the beat of the musicians vibing off of each other. That's a really, really rare experience. And they have the ability to take the image from this compressed little constrained thing and just open it up.
It's like just breathing life and air into the soundstage, and you wind up with this very lifelike, very engaging experience. Look guys, life is experienced full range. Every note has subharmonics and harmonics.
We're used to talking about harmonics, how stuff that starts in the bottom rises, and that's 100% true. But it also goes down. So we're really used to hearing sound from virtually DC, from zero Hertz right on up to well beyond where our hearing stops, because we're used to also hearing the beat resonances that go on out maybe 30, 40, 50,000 cycles, 100,000 cycles.
It's just how we experience life. And when you truncate it, when you cut it off, and you don't allow it to go, most speakers in a real room, 40-ish Hertz is a good speaker. Believe me, it sounds like I'm discriminating against speakers. I'm not. 40 real in a room is quite impactful and impressive. And yet there's a whole other octave, I would argue, two below that.
That going down and extending actually below 20 Hertz even, is important to conveying vastness. When you hear a pipe organ in a huge cathedral, it takes time. Man, that note just doesn't hit like boom, and it's gone. They step on that pipe, it takes a moment for the pipe to fill with air. And then it goes rattling out across the entire, the roofline, down past the pilaster. It's a time-based event.
And you cannot pull that off out of a couple of six and a halves in a skinny box, unsupported out in the middle of the floor. That's just not how physics works. Life is experienced sort of, we see DC to light, right?
And when we don't do our best to get closer to DC, get into that 20 to 30 Hertz range, and ideally below even, it instantly lacks the relevance and the reality that we're used to hearing live music, or for that matter, special effects.
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