Which of Three Subs???

[bandit788]

After reading reviews, I am still not sure which of these three subs would give me the most bang for my little sub budget:

Velodyne DPS-10 $450.00
SVS PB10-ISD $429.00
HSU VTF-2 MK2 $499.00

They are comparably priced. The only one I have been able to audition was the velodyne (don't laugh) because circuit city is carrying them. They also had the DPS-12. They both sounded boomy and a little muddy, especially the DPS-12 when compared to the DPS-10. I spent awhile and listened to music and movies, played with the crossovers and what not. The lower I set the crossover the less muddy bass I got. I am new to HT, but my budget has gone mostly to the rest of my system (Rotel RSX-1056, B&W DM603 S3, LCR60 S3, and CCM-65 in ceilings). My room is approx. 15'X 20' has cathedral ceilings and is open to dining room, and partially to kitchen. 60% movies 40%music. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Shane
P.S. Really did not like the look of the cylinder subs

[Shane Martin]

I'd email SVS but there is a good comparison on HTF from a guy who bought the PB10ISD and owns a VTF2. His opinion was the SVS played deeper and was just as musical. The fact the SVS is cheaper makes it a no brainer.

Given how both have a decent return policy you could consider buying both and returning the one you don't like but I'm willing to bet they are nearly identical until you really start to crank it and also on deeper bass scenes. The Pb10 is supposed to play deep bass down to 18 or so which is amazing for a 10" driver.

I too heard the Velo and thought it was very muddy and very boomy. I made sure it was setup right too because I used to work at CC and know how poorly they setup their stuff.

[Bam!]

They also had the DPS-12. They both sounded boomy and a little muddy, especially the DPS-12 when compared to the DPS-10. I spent awhile and listened to music and movies, played with the crossovers and what not.
Shane
P.S. Really did not like the look of the cylinder subs

Too many factors to generalise in saying they were boomy.....

[pdr711]

I owned a vtf-2. Nice sub. I replaced it with the pb1 when it first came out. The svs played deeper and has a more solid sounding punch. I have never heard the Velodyne you are interested in.

Dan

[Andrew Pratt]

Adire's Dharma would also be high on my list of subs in that price range. The Rava is a little cheaper and a fine sub as well. Their Sadhara is a tube sub not unlike SVS's units only using a very nice driver that has very low distortion.

Another option that I'd strongly recomend is to contact Kyle at http://www.acoustic-visions.com/ and ask him what he can do for your budget. One of his 75 liter sealed designs with a Adire DLP12 should be inline with your budget and sound exceptionally good for music and very nice for HT applications as well.

[ThomasW]

That's a big room and none of those subs are going to get close to reference levels in it.

I suggest getting a sub with a 15" driver.

How are your wood working skills?

If they're even adequate, or if you have a friend with some woodworking skills, you can easily create a pretty amazing DIY sub for your $500 budget.

You'll get a sub that would cost $1000 or more.

[Chris D]

I'd also recommend the SVS based on my experience of their performance. Thomas is correct, though, in that any of those 3 subs won't give you the performance that you'll get with just a few hundred extra $$$. We all have budgets, so if that's what you're set on, more power to you. If you can stretch, though, you'll get a much better SVS model that will give you better performance now, as well as prevent you from needing any sort of upgrade anytime soon.

(I bought two of their PC-Ultra subs, and they're the last ones I hope to ever have to buy)

[bandit788]

Thanks for the input guys, after the cost of the Rotel gear I will surely not have the capacity to up the sub budget. I wish I could because I know that I will probably feel something lacking. I am leaning toward the SVS, even though the wife really likes the way the Velodyne looks. I just don't think I can sacrifice that much performance loss for looks.
Shane

[Andrew Pratt]

Shane then it sounds like DIY is the way you'll need to go. That doesn't have to mean you have to build it as you'd still get more bang for your buck having a local wood shop build a box for you vs buying a comercial product (Acoustic-Vision's might be close though)

[bandit788]

Thanks Andrew, I think I will contact Kyle at visions and see what they can do for my budget. I feel certain that I will have to compromise in some aspect. To get the extension and power of the SVS, yet the fit and finish of the Velodyne I would probably be spending a substantial amount on finishing and upgraded electronics. BTW, I think that might be the price concept behind Velodyne's mass-market DPS series. It sure caught my wife's eye when we looked at subs in several stores. It seems to have a beautiful finish, with nifty electronics and led display on the top; yet they must have used the money for power and performance to give you these things.
They are not idiots, they understand the wife factor. I can see them now during R&D/Marketing, "Hey let's make this sub beautiful, and look really cool. Some novice will come in with his wife (A.K.A. Me!!!) and he will think it sounds O.K., and his wife will be like buy it honey, it will look really good (compared to the other black monster cubes that you are making me incorporate into my master design) next to the new sectional I am custom ordering".

Shane

[nparrotta]

Outlaws LFM-1?

Hi:

New to the site and find it informative. I am going through a similar evaluation and have a pretty large room - 16 W x 30 L x 7.5 H. I've been reading a lot about Outlaws LFM-1 sub - it's a 12" and you can get two for under $1,000....it's gotten some pretty good reviews. One retails for $579. I'm considering ordering one to try out to see how I like it.

Good luck and let us know what you end up going with.

-nick

[bandit788]

Nparrotta,
If you do order one, please post your findings here for all of us in the same situation to see.
Shane

[BobbyDS]

HI Bandit

If you can spend a little more you should take a look at the B&W PV1 (aka Pressure Vessel One). Its absolutely unique in the way its built. There are two 8 inch drivers, opposite facing, mounted to each other inside a heavy metal sphere.

There is absolutely no resonance and they are incredibly fast - I chose them to go with a set of Maggies. They are not outrageously expensive, but quite reasonable.

[BobbyDS]

oh - another thing

Oh, and I nearly forgot. Just in case you think it won't move much air - thats TWO 8 inch drivers, its got a 500 watt amp, and moves a lot of air and has strong response all the way to 18 hz.

It breaks all the rules.

[Andrew Pratt]

It breaks all the rules.

Hoffman's Iron law can never be broken. It sounds like a nice little sub but I'd be very surprised if its really flat down to 18 hz. That's not to say its not a good subwoofer or that it blends well with your maggies just that remaining flat to 18 is very hard to do with such small drivers.

[Bent]

In the seismic's case I would imagine they are trading size for output and doing some active eq to get it that low. We can't ignore Hoffman's law, but we can pretend it doesn't exist and let our marketing companies sing all the praises in the world about "the emporors new clothes".

[ThomasW]

There is absolutely no resonance and they are incredibly fast - I chose them to go with a set of Maggies. They are not outrageously expensive, but quite reasonable.

They certainly are cool looking. MSRP: $1500 ........ :wink:



However they're don't rewrite the laws of physics. Everything on the planet has a resonance.

Also a 'fast' woofer would be a tweeter. There's no such thing a a slow or fast woofer, that just pseudoscience invented by the marketing departments. Acceleration is important for woofers not 'speed'.

I was going to wite the 'why' of this but instead I'll just post this explaination from Mark Seaton.

Let's first clarify acceleration in terms of a common subwoofer. For a direct radiator which has an acoustically small radiator at less than 1/4 wavelength, flat amplitude response is had through constant acceleration per a given output level. In short, increasing or decreasing a cone's acceleration increases or decreases the LEVEL, not the frequency. Now before someone starts to nit-pick, when we say constant, the magnitude is constant, but obviously alternating in direction. IOW, if we plot the acceleration of a subwoofer with respect to time, we see something resembling a square wave. How often the acceleration changes direction is the frequency of operation. Current through the voice coil produces the force, which results in the acceleration. Now, since the direction of the acceleration must change, the current much change. The limiting factor to how fast current can change in a voice coil is the inductance. So if we wanted to make a real statement of what speaker was "faster" we might point to the one with lower inductance. Notice that since acceleration is constant over the increment, the longer the cone accelerates, the further it must move, which explains the need for 4x the excursion and displacement for every halving of the reproduced frequency.

The problem is not in understanding how the driver works, but rather with the terms we commonly use to describe our perceptions. The descriptor "fast" is by far the worst of these offenders. Many people attribute different characteristics to this one word, and it is far too vague a descriptor to communicate the different percieved qualities of a speaker or subwoofer.

If we actually start to consider different speed or time related qualities of reproduced and observed sound, there are at least 4 different characteristics to consider.

The first is the visual which confuses us the most is when we see a woofer dancing in and out. We tend to correlate this action with that of a car starting and stopping. From the above explanation we see this is not the same case, and is a red herring which many audiophiles have wastefully chased.

There is of course then the perception of a precussive instrument, which we can look at through a spectrum analyzer and observe the significant high frequency content which is required to create such a sound. Here we should correct FrantzM's assertion about the Fourier Transform. The Fourier Transform can be used to examine any point in time, where a series transforms appropriately spaced in time will display the duration and decay of the various frequency components. Our perception of such precussive sounds depends upon the relationship and relative level of the higher frequency components which differentiate such sounds. It is after all the harmonic structure which allows us to differentiate the sound of different instruments playing a common note.

It is not only the relative level of the high frequency components which are important, but also the decay of the various components with which we identify. It may be of interest to note that high speech inteligibility requires the capability to modulate the magnitude of various frequency bands over a given window of time. A reduction in the required modulation capability in total, or the capability over a time period reduces inteligibility. We are indeed sensitive to changes in arrival times and we see a very significant focus on these characteristics in professional sound reinforcement systems, particularly the good examples (there are many more bad examples). The question of decay is a compound matter of both loudspeaker operation as well as room acoustics. So far as a subwoofer is concerned, this is a matter of damping and resonances, which are tied to the parameters of the driver and their effect in a given enclosure. A peak in the frequency response will almost certainly correspond to a longer decay. The confusing part is that many parameters are dependent on eachother, making sweeping statements and generalizations rarely correct. The final result is still dependent on the entire subwoofer system of driver, enclosure design, amplifier, and possibly EQ or processing.

Finally, there is also a factor of when the sound actually is produced, which is quantified as group delay. A measurement of phase is in fact another way of looking at group delay, but instead with a purpose of describing how two sources producing the same frequency will sum together. Group delay is the time which a signal is delayed relative to its input to the system, in this case, a subwoofer. Quite often this is not a constant number, but rather a changing number. An acoustically small direct radiator as described earlier has the characteristic of increasing group delay with lowering frequency as is defined by a 90 degree phase shift observed in the flat operating range of the device. Different designs will have significantly different group delay figures. Some believe such differences to be inaudible, others dissagree. It might be interesting to note that electrostatics and efficient horns can have a constant group delay, or zero phase angle through their operating range, along with a few exotic wide band drivers.

I'd say that's enough for one post, but it is not intended so much to answer questions, but rather to get us asking the right ones!

Cheers,
__________________
Mark Seaton
Sound Physics Labs / ServoDrive

[bandit788]

Thanks for the info on the B & W (aka. sphere), that thing looks so sweet. I don't know about 18 hz, but I do know I am still stuck. I still need to call Acoustic Visions, but man, me and the wife did some of that "pull your hair out, day after Thanksgiving" shopping. It was great, I got to sit in traffic and at least listen to music, NOT!!! Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells. Any way, we went by Circuit City to pick up one of those Logitech MX1000 SUPER HIGH SPEED, DOWNLOADING, PROGRAMMING, IT WILL EVEN SURF THE NET FOR YOU mouse’s that I saw Bing Fung going crazy over (the mouse is for my brother, he is a computer geek, he rocks, my own I.T. guy, and if he does not like the mouse I can always say some guy named Bing suggested it, hehe), and my wife was like hey don't you want to go listen to that sub that you drug me in here last week to hear. I could not believe it, so I caved in and went to listen to the DPS-12 again, and it sounded better today!!!!!! Yeah, is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? I watched some of the movie drum line, and I am rookie, and if I ever heard real bass I would probably laugh at the DPS-12, but I have never had a sub, and man the feel of the 12in. Kind of made me, well never mind, O.K. HaPpY!!! There I said it.
Damn you Circuit City!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Shane

P.S. Go HSU, SVS or whatever. I am just going to buy a bass drum, I can play that.