Blog
212/SX Video Overview
Watch as the Lead Designer walks through the features of the 212/SX
It’s John Hunter with REL here, and we’re here to introduce the 212/SX. This is a brilliant piece and it slots in somewhere in between our line arrays, where you have three individually controllable units, and just say a stereo pair of our medium chassis pieces. It’s a little bigger than that and provides so much room fill. It’s fantastic. What we’ve got here is 2 active 12 inch drivers, and we’ll get into the details in just a moment, being driven by a thousand watt amplifier.
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Of course, it has high level inputs that we’re famous for. It also has stereo low-level inputs, and .1 inputs just for high end home theater.
In addition to the two actives, there is a down firing passive, a very special one that was redesigned for this project, and a rear firing upper passive. It creates a huge volume of air being moved in the room and in multiple modes. The rear firing, the down firing and the forward firing all combine to drive a room very efficiently.
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We offer an optional wireless piece for this called the Airship that is used on our reference pieces as well. It’s a fantastic design. It uses 5.8 gig as its transmission ratio. It is intended really to be incredibly fast, very dynamic and have pretty good throw distances.
The drivers on the 212/SX are highly evolved from the original 212/SE what you can’t see behind this is that we’re using a network of carbon fiber blades to reinforce the back without adding virtually any mass.
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By the way, for those of you who are real technology wonks, it adds a massive 10 grams to each unit to do the carbon fiber blades. So very, very lightweight, and it has the effect of both stiffening and also quieting tremendously. So each of those active drivers has that.
For the down firing, we did a very special new design just for this model. It appears nowhere else. It is very quick, very supple and very, very stiff. So it’s quieter than the old one.
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You don’t have a sense that the piece is about to run away with itself ever and tremendous, tremendous concussion going down through the ground. So for big theater or really big scale music that core down firing passive is a big part of the success of the 212/SX.
Then the rear itself, which is an aluminum passive that has also been strengthened. So we have carbon fiber plates even on our passive on the rear. The net effect is it’s faster, it’s crisper, it’s tighter and much more extended in the low bass.
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So the amplifier in the 212/SX, technically the actual power amplifier section is exactly the same, that’s where everything starts to diverge. The filters are highly evolved from there, meaning the crossover, the limiters and the way those two interact are completely different.
They’re really learned off of things that we did on the No. 25 and have built forward into this piece. What it does is it winds up being much more extended. The extreme low bass is insane on this piece. The extreme low bass will go down well into the teens.
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So the cabinet was completely revised. When we sit down to do a design, we never just style things. The reason for this design was really driven by our understanding of how the air flow within this very specific cabinet works.
We worked extremely hard to get the airflow to be controlled and not overdrive the top one at the same time can improve the coupling of the bottom one and the net result is it just sounds so beautifully balanced. Now, when you hear this piece, it’s so crisp and all of one cloth. It’s a fantastic upgrade.
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We’ve got these side streaks that are now filled in on this piece that just breaks up the surface area a little bit. Really at this point, it becomes jewelry. These are beautiful, very, very hard to build single continuous extrusion rails. This is a massive 400 millimeter extrusion, very hard to build.
So the 212/SX has this unique position within our offerings. It is if you will, the most powerful, single chassis units that we offer, if you want something that. Puts out more output, and this is really important for very large scale theater for example, with two accurate drivers, two passives that drive the room in three or four different modes.