Hi, John Hunter with REL. Listen, we get asked a fair amount, and this is just by normal folks who are not really understanding what subwoofers do. “Why does your speaker only make deep bass?” And there's another whole set of questions, which is, “Why don't you guys make speakers?”, which we’re not going to get into. We've specialized in just sub-bass systems for 35 years.
So here's the thing, let me back it up at explaining what speakers struggle with. Their biggest enemy is your room, rooms work really hard to make your speakers sound terrible. And one of the hardest parts to understand is that when you see the specification on your speaker, when you go to the spec sheet at the end of the sales brochure and it tells you “This speaker, (little six and a half inch, two way) will go down to 40 Hz”. It might, if it were dropped down a very deep elevator shaft. But the reality is the room itself is by just very nature of the geometry of the room. And the placement of those speakers within that room often is destructive, right? It won't let the speaker do what innately can do, it won't allow you to get to that 40 Hz, which is very deep bass by the way. What most people don't realize, how deep 40 is, what you need is a specialized device with a fair amount of power on its own, and a driver. The actual element that makes the sound and the cabinet all designed to work in the system to produce sound well below 40 Hz. Why is that important and why is my speaker not able to do it? Take it for somebody who's been studying room acoustics for the last, I don't know, 50 years of my life the proximity to sidewalls, the proximity of the floor, the proximity to the ceiling, all of those things contribute to cancel bass energy in almost every position in the room. And so having something that can actually extend and carry out real life, real output into the deep bass is what subwoofers do. That's the simple version of it. Even a speaker that in theory can do deep bass, can go into the upper 20s or something, almost none of them can do it in real rooms. There are a few very expensive speakers that can, but it is not something that you'll commonly be able to find a pair of speakers under $5,000, for example, that will reliably produce deep bass into the 20 to 30 Hz region in a real room. And that's what subwoofers do. What we're doing is we're producing huge amounts of energy, which gives us the energy to lift the output in that very narrow frequency below 40 Hz, down to whatever the room will allow us to produce. And that is a huge difference in the real world performance. Not to mention all the special effects of that are needed for movies. All the big bangs, the most impactful scenes all require a huge amount of power to do that. And subwoofers typically deliver more than your main system can. That helps you get that energy, that extension down low where all the fun happens.
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