How much do you have to spend, to get a good Sub?


Would like to buy a new Sub Woofer. How much for a Good One and which Brand? For music only!
donplatt
"What's your budget? For music I'd go with a pair of sealed subs. You can get a pair of SVS SB12s for $1149 and free shipping. Tough to beat I'd think."

I have to agree with Soix on this one. The performance/$$$ ratio is very high with SVS.

Bill
Check out SVS SB-1000,at $499 it is a real bargain. They have a 45 day return and free shipping. They are a great company to deal with. I used that sub with Harbeth's with great results.
If the sub is for music only, then obviously quality is an important consideration.

The biggest hurdle to quality bass in most rooms is the room itself. It imposes a peak-and-dip pattern on the sub's output that you cannot avoid. You can move the sub and/or move the listening position and change the peak-and-dip pattern, but it will still be severe. You can equalize it and get it much flatter in one location, but in doing so, you've made things worse elsewhere because the peak-and-dip pattern changes dramatically as you change listening locations. That's not to say that improvements can't be made by these means, only that they do not address the inherent acoustic problem.

The approach I suggest, if possible, is to use two small subs instead of one big one. Two small subs spread far apart will each generate a different in-room peak-and-dip pattern, and the sum of these two dissimilar patterns will be significantly smoother than either one alone. Todd Welti of Harmon International wrote a paper on optimum symmetrical placement of multiple subwoofers:

Welti's paper -skip to page 28 for conclusions

Personally I prefer asymmetrical placement but the main thing is this to have multiple bass sources spread far apart. That will improve the bass smoothness at all locations within the room, not just at the listening position, and will make equalization more likely to be a global solution instead of just a local one. Two subs is twice as smooth in-room as one (and four subs is twice as smooth as two), and imo this offers a greater subjective improvement for music enjoyment than going with a single twice-the-price ubersub.

Duke
dealer/manufacturer
Not enough info for an informed decision. I would need to know your requirements, the room size,your loudspeakers, and current sub before I could make any kind of recommendation.
I'm in love with my new JL Audio F113. I actually got it off of this site for about a grand off retail. I paid around $2700.