Subwoofer THIS
The subwoofer has an interesting role in high-end audio.
I’ve been thinking about these beast ever since we started our new high-end audio subwoofers page in the Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy
It is both loathed and reviled and cheered and loved with abandon.
PRO
1. If your system is not flat to 20 Hz, then your system sucks. It is just for leettle boys.
[Of course, at 100 dB, a subwoofer flat to 20 Hz… oh, excuse me, it says 15 Hz on the spec sheet, would have to be registered as a weapon of mass destruction. It would be hard to walk across the floor of most homes but at least the mice would finally give up and go live somewhere else :-).]
2. Subwoofers are cool and should indeed be registered as WMD
3. It is too expensive to buy a full-range speaker that goes this low
CON
1. The crossover in your subwoofer is necessarily not as deft as that in your much-more-expensive speakers, and in any case it is different, so the overall sonic quality of your playback suffers.
2. Most real music does not go down to 20 Hz. In fact most modern music is heard through JBL-like speaker systems and the satisfying bass we hear on those systems is way above 20Hz.
3. Subwoofers take up space
Most people buy subs for home theater, pairing them with small speakers that only go down to 100Hz or so. They NEED to use subs to get any bass at all. I’ve heard Magnepan systems designed like this that were excellent – small Magnepan wall-hanging speakers and a REL sub.
Us? We’ll stick with full-range speakers that go down MOSTLY to 20… uh…. 25… uh … Hz. It works for us at this time.
Subs are just not a necessity for us.
However, having heard the Acapella ION Plasma tweeter again here for almost a year now – I think super tweeters might indeed be a necessity. 🙂
[Having a hard time convincing Neli of this… but there is just so much more Presence and Life when the high frequencies are fully fleshed out… Then again there are the same pesky CONs #1 and #3]
In the end, it is this argument [and not the “You ain’t no manly man without a sub” argument :-)]:
How can it be “high fidelity” if your system can’t reproduce all of the frequencies?
I confess. We don’t use a subwoofer. And this question annoys me.
