Meet the new S/850: Designed to be heard and seen

So, let's jump right into the S/850. This is a mini beast. It's really pretty. Do not let that fool you. This thing hits like a sledgehammer. It's really potent, really powerful.

The former amplifier was a legitimate 1000-watt amplifier that we sleeved down to 800 watts. This is a 1250-watt amplifier that will do that, by the way, for about 15 minutes continuous into a load. That's an astounding thing to say — 1250 watts continuous that we sleeve down nominally to 850. But I want to be really clear, that's sort of a steady-state number. When there's a big peak, it's going to tap into that excess power and allow you to get those really big orchestral swells, huge things that are happening in movies on the .1/LFE.

So what that necessitated was a significant redesign of this driver. We spent seven months getting this driver right because we knew this was the key. If we get this right, there's so much that we can apply to things like the 212s and all that. So, this was seven months just on this driver. All told, we spent about two and a half years getting the complex of drivers that you see here to work perfectly.

This driver makes really careful use of carbon fibre. So, we're still using an aluminium cone, but we've taken about 20 grams of mass out of that moving portion and replaced it with carbon fibre that weighs next to nothing. And so that ability to delight and to go fast, right? Colin Chapman of Lotus said it best about 60 years ago. He said, "If you want to go fast, first add lightness."

And that's what we do every time. We look at how can we improve the mechanical aspect to it because we know we can throw more and more horsepower on the back end in the amplifier. That is not difficult these days. But how do we get it to be more textural? How do we get air reproduced more accurately? All this stuff that's the really hard part of doing subwoofers starts with a driver, and it just will never change. The physics of these things so swamp the electronics of it. It's really critical.

Once we got done with this — this will shock you — we had to go back and revisit the passive because we were running the passive literally into the basket and hearing the thing make metallic sounds we'd never heard before. That took another 12 generations of driver development to get the passive to keep up with the active and the amp.

And so all of these things have to work together as a whole. You know, we don't start these things with a clean sheet of paper and go, "Oh, well, we've never done a subwoofer before. Let's just see where we're going." We've already got a really high bar set with the current lines, the S/812s, for example. This had to be better in every way — and it is.

Even the input caps that we use, which in a normal S/812 are the reliable ones we've been using for years, we went and borrowed the big thin-film caps that we're using on the Reference and put them into this entire line. So they're faster and more open and more transparent.

That's just to share a little passion as to why these things are so special. The S/850 in many ways is the core of this line, which itself is the core of REL. So we start with the S/850, and we build up and we build down from there.

So let's talk about applicability. This is a subwoofer that is a big, powerful, grandeur subwoofer. This is good for medium, medium-large rooms, on up to — depending on how you do it with stereo pairs or eventually Line Arrays — really very large studios.

So the S/850 is something that's scalable. It ought not to be put into a particularly small room. From a medium-size room on up, this is a very comfortable subwoofer to place in a room. Stereo pairs are always better because they always allow you to tune the room more precisely.

And if you've got the budget over time, you now have the ability to do these in Line Arrays as well. These are big subs that have the modular ability to become giant — and do it all in sort of nice, bite-sized chunks because you're not being required to spend $30,000 or £30,000 right out of the gate.

The only way you can do it is in this way. So — modularity, enormous power, faster speed, the entire package. Start with a pair of them if you can, and then build from there if you're so inclined.