Subwoofer Reviews

I have a love-hate relationship with subwoofers. They tend to bring out my tweaky alter ego. Perhaps one of these sorry personae lives within you too: the perennially neurotic Mr. Hyde to your more obliging Dr. Jekyll. Hyde is the tense, never-satisfied fault-sniffer who zeroes in on sonic details that are perhaps slightly off, even when other people in the room are enjoying themselves.

With subwoofers, he's at his worst. Did you hear that?, he'll exclaim when he worries that a low bass note received too much emphasis. He nags and niggles that perhaps the integration between the main speakers and the subwoofer leaves a crater somewhere in the low-frequency band. He harps, not always believably, that he can hear where the subwoofer is, even though deep bass is supposed to be impossible to localize. Most of all, he barely lasts a song without getting twitchy about the sub's gain setting, imagining that he has to dial in exactly the right amount of deep-bass presence with each track.

I was fascinated by Herb Reichert's adventures with the KEF KC62 subwoofer, so I borrowed one. Beautifully engineered, contoured, and finished and chock-full of cutting-edge technology, it would be welcome in any room and easily integrated into any system. However, it struck me as not just small but miniaturized, like the meticulously functional samples made for the traveling salesmen of a century past. Since its two force-canceling 6.5" radiators were the same size as or smaller than the midrange drivers in my main speakers at the time, I had low expectations and returned it without comment. That was in 2021.

I asked for a pair of KEF KC92s in early 2024 in the hope that these two relatively small subs would improve my system. Like the KC62, the gloss white cube with radiused edges and white diaphragms is an aesthetic match to our redesigned room, and the KC92 ($1999.99) is chock-full of the same cutting-edge technology.

Piece of cake, thought I. All I needed to do to review Wilson Audio Specialties' smallest active subwoofer, the LōKē ($8950 each in standard finish), was describe how low a pair goes in my room and how cleanly they woof.

As I was soon to learn, though, there was a lot more to reviewing LōKēs than that. Why? Because a pair of LōKē subwoofers does more than reinforce the already deep bass extension of the Wilson Alexia V loudspeakers with which they are now paired in my system. Therein lies the tale.

Some contentious issues will not be resolved in my lifetime: vinyl vs digital, tubes vs solid state, subjective vs objective, streaming vs physical media.

Also, subwoofers vs no subwoofers in a stereo music system.

SVS's recently introduced SB-3000 is a compact powered subwoofer that's $600 cheaper, a few cubic inches smaller, and 37lb lighter than the model it replaces, the SVS SB13-Ultra. Its amplifier is less powerful (800W vs 1000W), but its rated frequency response extends lower: a stygian 18Hz, compared to the SB13-Ultra's merely stentorian 20Hz.

This review began when I ran into Gary Yacoubian, president of SVS, in a crowded hallway at Las Vegas's Venetian Hotel, during the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show. He smiled and introduced himself. "Larry, I enjoyed your review of our SB13-Ultra. If you liked that subwoofer, we have something coming soon that should really interest you. I can't say anything more now."

It was all so familiar. In "Music in the Round" in the January 2016 issue, Kal Rubinson praised JL Audio's latest subwoofer, the Fathom f113v2. He raved about its amplifier's higher power over the original f113, its beefier 13" woofer, its improved, 18-band Digital Automatic Room Optimization (DARO), and its significantly improved deep-bass response in-room.

It was familiar because the same thing had happened when Kal reviewed the original Fathom f113 in his May 2007 column. As he would again nine years later, he'd extolled the sub's high power, small size, built-in single-band Automatic Room Optimization (ARO) software, and "remarkably powerful and clean" deep bass. Those were also my reactions to the Fathom f113.