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Best Way to Improve Your System
How RELs Add Value
The below text is a transcription of the video.
So, I’ve been asked, what’s the single greatest improvement you can make to a system? And I’m talking about everything from a decent, well-balanced beginner system right on up to the top. I’m going to tell you this straight up: there is nothing in our industry that will do more for your system than the appropriate REL added to an otherwise good system. It is not close.
I say this because there are so many people who, after they’ve done five generations of cable improvements, after they’ve done three pre-amps, after they’ve been through five DACs, and after they’ve changed their streamers three times, finally get around to going, “Wow, adding a REL was the single biggest improvement I’ve ever made in my system.” And the sad thing is, it could have been that all along. So why would that be? I’ll just touch on a couple of obvious points, but they’re not necessarily obvious to audiophiles, so it’s worth saying.
Now, the thing that is most affected by room and the thing that is most missing from every—even very good system is deep bass. When your bass falls off too quickly… the way I interpret myself is if you take the -6 dB point, if you take the point that we all agree feels and sounds like level is down 50%, when you have that happen at, say, 40 Hz instead of 20 Hz, it’s a big problem.
You drop that thing from 40 to 20,000 cycles, and you have a line that looks like this: it is upward tilting, right? As soon as you can pull that down into the twenties—20 would be great, but honestly, 24, 25, 26 Hz is all the same in terms of its incredible impact on the balance of the system—all of a sudden, everything goes into balance. Suddenly, you’re hearing full range. Suddenly, you’re hearing deep, profound tonics that we hear in real life. We’re used to hearing these things; that’s how life is experienced. And when you’re chopping it off essentially an octave higher, you lose all of that, and you start to pitch shift. It’s a very strange thing.
Almost 100% of the high-end systems I’ve heard that don’t have really high-quality subs underneath them are all high-frequency biased. Everything’s a little thin; everything’s a little jangly. You start doing crazy things, like if you’re an analog guy, you start fiddling with VTA on every record. Are you kidding me? That’s insanity! And you’re doing it because the system is so critical, because it’s all high-frequency dominant because of the absence of deep bass.
So think of a subwoofer, a great sub like a REL, as the ability to actually balance your system for the first time. And you know what happens when you get it right? Your shoulders drop about an inch when you’re listening, because you’re no longer hearing stridency. You’re not hearing that sharp, edgy emphasis on the upper midrange, the high frequencies jangling. Everything balances out.
We’re fond of saying that RELs—I believe—are unique in this regard. Almost all good subs will give you that bottom octave or bottom octave and a half. But there’s something very different about how we do everything we do that gives you all ten octaves restored. It’s got everything to do with our high-level inputs and all those things. But bottom line is, for whatever budget you’re on, the most important thing you could do to actually make a dramatic improvement—and it’s not a Band-Aid, it’s an actual improvement—is all the stuff that you think you’re going to get from cables, or that you think you’re going to get from a slightly better speaker. It’s all there starting at the bottom.
Build a house from the foundation up. Don’t sit there and change, you know, the color on your window shutters and think that you’re making a hugely better home. Start at the bottom, build a foundation right, and it will absolutely impact in a very positive way everything above it.