OK, this is really from the “oh whatever” department. If the title of this post puts you off, then you might not want to waste your time reading.
I bought a new subwoofer for the studio to pair with my Dynaudio bm-5a monitors. The Dynaudios are great monitors, but they don’t have the best bass extension. I have been looking for something inexpensive, but something that is NOT like the home theater subs out there.
The whole story… I bought a Sony wm-40 a few years back. This is a home theater subwoofer that was a known quantity among the home theater crowd for being an affordable and decent sounding choice. I bought it, stuffed it full of polyfill, and set it up. Really not bad at all… it seems to match OK with my Polk RM-7600 mains. It’s not too boomy, and it works OK with music.
But… the more I’ve listened to it critically, the more I realize it really is slow. For music with a promiment kick drum, the kick happens late relative to the higher frequencies. This is something I’ve heard in a lot of home theater subs.
The great majority of home theater subs are ported, because porting a cabinet allows you to increase the bass output for the same amount of power. I recently read an article about how porting affects music in the time domain… and it’s not that pretty.
So when it came to evaluate subwoofers for my studio, one thing that was important to me was a closed cabinet, regardless of how much that cost in efficiency. But it also seemed there weren’t that many affordable closed subs..
I discovered the Tapco SW-10 online. My dealer didn’t have it, but I thought it was worth a shot without listening because it’s really cheap. It arrived today.
The first thing I did was hook it up to the living room system, and… it’s significantly tighter then the Sony, but it’s also right on time. There’s no more lag in the low end that I heard with the Sony. More a/b comparisons showed the same thing.
In the studio, it seemed to match well with the Dynaudios. I didn’t have to do too much in the way of tweaking, it was actually pretty easy to get it close by ear. I will be running some pink noise through it to calibrate it some time in the near future too, but it blended fairly well straight up. Luckily it sounded great in the place I put it, because I don’t have a ton of options for placement.
It’s great to have that lower octave! However the other thing I noticed was the Dynaudios seemed to become a touch clearer, which makes sense since they are being crossed over by the subwoofer now and don’t have to extend as deeply.
Anyway, all in all it was a good exercise, and a worthwhile experiment. The best part is I didn’t spend any cash on the sub, thanks to some Amazon gift certificates I’ve had hanging around for a while.