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Sep 27, 2024

The Truth About Speaker Bass:

You just bought a new pair of XYZ speakers and the owner’s manual claims they produce excellent bass. Why do you think that is? Because the specs say their -6dB point is at 34Hz. Naturally, you might think, "Why do I need a subwoofer when my new speakers go really low?" But here’s the catch – while those numbers may look promising, real-world performance often tells a different story. Even with speakers that claim deep bass, adding a subwoofer can dramatically enhance your listening experience, no matter the size of your speakers. Curious why? Let’s dive in. While your speakers may measure well, the real question is: how much output do they deliver at that frequency in a real room? The answer may surprise you. In many cases, the output isn’t enough to be convincing. Why is that? Speaker manufacturers compete, and some may feel pressured to make their specs look as good as possible. That said, the best manufacturers are also the most honest, and their performance specs reflect that. Take Bowers & Wilkins, for example. They list both frequency range and frequency response for their popular 702 S3 model. They claim a frequency range of 28Hz to 33kHz (best-case scenario), but their frequency response is 46Hz to 28kHz ± 3dB—real-world performance before the room starts to degrade the deep bass. We applaud Bowers for being transparent. Your room may also be a culprit, as they’re often acoustically destructive when it comes to bass. Bass frequencies are affected far more than midrange or high frequencies because their wavelengths are so long. For example, that 34Hz bass note we mentioned earlier is 33 feet long (10 meters). That's long enough for the wavelength to fold back over on itself in all but the largest music rooms, causing cancellation at various points. And, as luck would have it, the point of maximum cancellation is often right where you’re sitting. This is where a REL subwoofer steps in with a distinct advantage. Unlike speakers, our subwoofers come with powerful amplifiers and precisely engineered crossovers that let us focus all that energy right where your speakers fall short. A subwoofer doesn't just play lower—it fills in the deep, visceral bass that most speakers can't handle. That’s the secret many people don’t understand. We operate independently of the speaker’s position, with an amplifier producing plenty of power, allowing us to position the subwoofer for optimal results and focus energy where it benefits the speakers without making them sound boomy. Another factor at play is how consumers interpret speaker specs. When you see "34Hz at -6dB," it means the manufacturer is telling you upfront that the speaker's output is half as strong as it is just one octave higher. An octave is a numerical doubling, so at 68Hz, your speaker will be playing 50% louder than at 34Hz. That's enough to make a noticeable difference. In reality, it could be even worse due to the bass cancellation mentioned earlier. Now, let’s consider that same speaker paired with a properly matched REL subwoofer. Take the B&W 702 S3 again, which, according to REL’s Subwoofer Finder, pairs well with our T/9x model for small and medium-sized rooms or a pair of T/9x subs for larger rooms. For truly large spaces, we recommend stepping up to the S/510. Either subwoofer will deliver powerful bass into the 20-30Hz region (T/9x) or even deeper with the S/510. For reference, 30Hz feels like a mild earthquake. To wrap things up, your REL subwoofer can be positioned to deliver maximum deep bass, thanks to its powerful built-in amplifier and variable crossover. This lets you set the crossover point so precisely that you won’t detect the handoff between the REL and your speakers, as you might in lesser subs, And it will still produce deep, profound bass. By placing one or two RELs near a room boundary (where speakers can’t go) and leveraging our high-current amplifiers, we can concentrate energy into a narrow frequency range (26-52Hz in this case). This can result in a 10-12dB improvement in deep bass performance—more than twice the output of a typical real-world speaker. This is why almost ALL speakers, even large, well-designed floor-standing models, will benefit from a well-matched REL subwoofer. With a properly integrated REL subwoofer, your listening experience transforms. It’s not just about hearing the bass—it’s about feeling it. Whether it's the rumble of a movie soundtrack or the lowest notes of your favorite song, REL brings your audio system to life in ways that no standalone speaker can match. Thank you for reading our latest blog. We strive to provide content that’s both entertaining and educational. If you have questions or suggestions for future articles, reach out to us at contactus@rel.net. We value your input and will do our best to respond within a few days. With over 160 years of combined experience, we’re committed to making your audio experience exceptional. If you found value in this piece, please share it with friends who might benefit.

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Dec 07, 2023

Anyone can be an Audiophile

<> The below text is a transcription of the video. Audio files don't have special genetics. They don't have golden ears. They may well, however, have spent a lot longer than you did on developing their ability to hear into music. When somebody allegedly has great ears, we don't mean that they can somehow hear up to, you know, 30,000 kilohertz or something. Listening is listening acuity. It's a learned task. Like anything we do in life, the more you do it and the more you learn about a subject, the better you get at it. You know baseball and golf are probably the sports that respond most to technique. There are like 5,000 different touch points on technique that if you aspire to being a great baseball player or a great golfer, you have to get there. You get to a certain point and somebody goes, Hey, when you're trying to make that play or make that shot, you have to do this and go, oh gosh, and you practice it four or 500 times until you start getting comfortable with that. It's like that with listening. So everybody is an audio file. I want to be right upfront about it. There is nobody that cannot hear this stuff. There is no magic bean that you have to eat in order to get blessed with great ears. It's not that. So, what's a good tip for doing it? One of the things that's hardest for people is if they don't know how to listen to music, I think the easiest thing for people to do this has nothing to do with the sub base. You can have no real in the system at all. Start trying to listen to the different pieces. If you like rock or pop, whatever, just try and find the baseline. My son's been doing this. He's home from college and he's been listening to the baseline on great, you know, Motown songs and things and at first he couldn't hear it at all and I started, I would hum it for him. And suddenly, he was going, oh, okay. And now he can, we're in the car, we're driving along. Now he's picking out the baseline. Why the baseline? Often, it's the thing that on classic songs, made the song, there's usually some twist. It is so easy to pick out after just a few minutes and it gives you insight on a song. And once you start realizing, you can hear different parts, different voices, you can hear backup singers, it starts to really deepen your appreciation of the music versus just following along with the melody. Alright, try and go a little bit deeper. When you go into a stereo store, a few tips. If the speakers, and this is true of any speaker above about $400 or $500 a pair, if they're set up at like a meter and a half, four or five feet apart that's not a credible setup. Even a relatively small five and a quarter inch two-way is going to wind up being at least seven feet apart in order for the speakers to open up and not condense down on themselves. If you are in there and you're experiencing that they're set up very close together, pointed straight ahead, semi-close to the wall, and everything just sounds wooly. Get much closer to them. And I mean like within three to four feet of them, and you'll hear everything start to open up. You may have to get down your hands and knees and crawl up to it, but go up there and hear them open up. And for the first time, you'll actually start hearing what stereo is. Stereo is not two speakers squirting sound into each ear canal. It's the way that all of those that combine into a three-dimensional sound field. And so getting yourself closer will teach you a huge amount about what the speakers can do versus inep setup. Anyway, you guys can all do it. This is fun stuff. This is not difficult to hear. Just experiment, right? You want to have at a minimum an equilateral triangle. In most cases, most good modern speakers, the drivers we have these days are incredible. You probably want to be a little bit inside that. It's more like a 72, 75 degree angle instead of a 60 degree. It will open things up, you'll hear further into the sound stage. You'll start to understand that term of the sound stage and it just makes the whole thing open up and be really involving. It draws you into the experience. You can absolutely do this. This is not something that only the wealthy can have. In fact, I would say it's easier to get great sound out of a $2,000 to $5,000 system than it is to get great sound out of a $200,000 to $500,000 system here all the time. It shows that's hard to do, but a simple little system, even a little receiver, Yamaha makes some great receivers. Denon makes some great receivers, alright? Pair of inexpensive speakers start there. You know, once you get that mastered, add the matching sub. Once you get that mastered, get a better source. Everything you do to make the front end of it better will go all the way through your system and make the whole system better. So take your time. It's a lot of fun. And try and find somebody who does know what they're doing to coach you and mentor you. You know, oftentimes they're really good guys at stores that are older that've done this for 20-30 years, and they're usually really happy. Thank you for reading our latest blog. We strive to provide content that’s both entertaining and educational. If you have questions or suggestions for future articles, reach out to us at contactus@rel.net. We value your input and will do our best to respond within a few days. With over 160 years of combined experience, we’re committed to making your audio experience exceptional. If you found value in this piece, please share it with friends who might benefit.

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May 02, 2024

A Festival of Bass

No matter what style of music you love, Summer is the time to keep an eye out for the best music festivals of the year. If you’re in the UK, check out Nocturne Live June 12-16 in Woodstock. No, the other Woodstock, which is pretty much what the Brits would say about our Woodstock. With Coachella and Stagecoach having already kicked off the music festival season out here on the West Coast, we thought it would be fun to revisit what makes live music and festival sound so enjoyable and how you can bring your system up to a level that truly brings the concert experience home. A brief note to those who can’t afford some of the kits mentioned below; enjoy it. Half the fun of owning a Ferrari is dreaming about owning one for 40 years. Same thing with great audio gear. If it’s not in your budget right now, keep working on it. Usually, when someone really wants something and makes owning that experience a goal, good things happen. At the end of this article, a link to Music Festival Wizard will be posted allowing you to look up music festivals near you and all over the world. Okay, without a doubt, the sonic takeaway from music festivals is the sound. Specifically the bass. There’s a visceral thing that happens when, I don’t know, 96 bass bins flying off of 8x40’ pole-mounted line arrays hit you like a sledgehammer. With a kick drum sound that compresses your chest, whether you want it to or not, it’s the bass that you’ll be talking about on the long drive home. It’s bass felt, not just heard that almost no home systems can capture. But some can. Nowadays, deep bass is easier than ever to afford. The same HT/1205 MKII at $899/£899 is surprisingly adept at music reproduction and crushes in-theatre applications. One of our best sellers, the T/9x similarly delivers a ton of smiles per mile. Any of our Serie S deliver deep bass that leaves our more affordable offerings in the rearview mirror. These and others in our repertoire will deliver satisfying deep bass and, if you can find a good YouTube video of a festival you attended, REL will help bring back some wonderful memories. RELTip™: For those of you who own an HT model, try running a stereo pair of RCA-RCA interconnects from the L-R preamp outputs on your AV receiver into two of the 4 RCA connectors on the rear panel. It will help you enhance the listening experience for music. And then there are those who really want to re-live the experience as though they were actually there again… No punches held back, the quality of bass reproduction I am going to describe doesn’t come cheap. If one seeks therarefied air, one needs to turn to military-grade bass hardware. Otherwise, those wonderful little 8” subs that are quick, tuneful, and affordable aren’t going to have you playing air drums along with Dave Grohl. Only a very few 10” based designs have the “it” to get one’s attention. For the real deal, we’re pretty much looking at 12” and larger and, even then, multiples of those drivers. Also, the vertical height one experiences live simply can’t be replicated by a sub sitting on the floor, hence items 2-4 below. Here’s our experience of how to reproduce true festival-playback levels of bass, for those who love live outdoor music festival sound: In our lineup, my first thought to deliver the “mostest for the leastest” would be a pair of 212/SXs. This pair would deliver 2 x 1,000-watt amps driving 4 active 12” drivers + 4 passives cannily placed and tuned to deliver massive grunt. 900 inches of surface area and a couple of thousand watts has a way of shredding air with violence that is positively un-gentlemanly. A 6-pack of S/812’s. A 6-pack of Carbon Specials. A 6-pack of any Reference model we’ve ever made. Let’s wrap this up. You can see there’s a recurring theme operating here. It takes lots of horsepower and lots of surface area; many large drivers, to deliver “you are there” live bass. It’s hard to comprehend that a pair of powerful 212/SXs could be a starter course, but in this company, it’s because that final detail missing from even otherwise fantastic systems is the ability to convey full height /full impact to the soundstage. The 212/SX’s rear-facing passive does a remarkable job of providing necessary elevation, but once the 6-packs are switched on it’s game, set, and match I’m afraid. We try to provide the finest value in our affordable models and we’re very proud of what they deliver for relatively affordable prices. And, we deliver no-holds-barred experiences akin to exotic supercars at the end of the scale. Whether you can afford a VW GTi or a Porsche GT-3RS, our goal is always the same; to deliver everything we know to you, within the limits of our engineering creativity and your budget. But whether flinging a GTi down a winding secondary road or running the Nurburgring , both your and goals and ours should remain identical. Finding fun and joy in the activity. If you love the experience of live music, less the 20-minute lines for a Porta Potty, REL delivers that experience and will help you revisit the feelings and thrill of your favorite music festival. Music Festival Wizard Thank you for reading our latest blog. We strive to provide content that’s both entertaining and educational. If you have questions or suggestions for future articles, reach out to us at contactus@rel.net. We value your input and will do our best to respond within a few days. With over 160 years of combined experience, we’re committed to making your audio experience exceptional. If you found value in this piece, please share it with friends who might benefit.

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