It was a dark and stormy night when the phone rang. Was it that brunette with the sensuous red lips that look like they could melt off at any moment? Perhaps she had finally come to her senses. Perhaps it was Ben just calling to shoot the bull with me. Oh well, the brunette will have to wait for later...
Usually when I talk with Ben, it is about some absurd new project he is working on, and hopefully that means I will get a chance to abuse a new product. In this case, he wasn't calling up to tell me about a new superwoofer or big amp, but rather a fairly stripped down subwoofer. I was intrigued, but not exactly thrilled at the opportunity. Regardless, I figured that he must have a trick up his sleeves.
A few days after the phone call, a plain brown box arrived with no markings on it. Inside was one of the more plain looking drivers I have ever seen. As you can tell from the pictures above, it certainly is no beauty, but it had no real drawbacks to its appearance. Plain and black, this made me all the more curious about it. A few things caught my eye immediately on the driver. It has a sealed pole vent, which can cause power handling to decrease, but also greatly increases BL. The concave dust cap gave it a smooth, almost professional look to the front. I have always found unlabeled drivers to be a good thing since it leaves no impressions on someone besides that which it makes through sound. The fairly narrow surround didn't leave very high expectations, but at the same time it didn't leave me thinking of the wasted cone area. Overall, fairly simple in its design.
I input the parameters of the speaker into WinISD and BB pro 6.0 and quickly decided on a 2 cube sealed box and a 3 cube ported box tuned to 33hz. The model I was testing being a single 4 ohm coil, my nine.1 was pushing a rated 450 watts. I fired it up in the sealed box and quickly formed two major impressions. This driver was not only very efficient, but played very low. Initial testing reminded me very much of a Shiva mk1. Just to verify that the specs were correct and that it wasn't simply the box design itself, I put it into a 1 cube sealed box and let it wang. More appropriate way to state this would be to say that it starved. This truly is not a small box sub by any definition of the word. It would make a decent mid bass in such an enclosure, but otherwise I have to highly suggest keeping it in 1.5 cubes at bare minimum sealed.
Back to the review. I put this driver through its paces on everything from electric blues to heavy metal, contemporary rock, and classical. The sound quality was shocking. It never once missed a kick drum on Probot's "Shake your blood" or hung too long on a hard drop such as in NIN's "Closer". Another good test track I like to use is the Wallflowers' "One Headlight" with its very precise rolling bass. This driver stayed sharp and clean no matter what I threw at it. Now I am fully aware that people may not put too much faith in my knowledge of low end bass (due to my love for 50hz tunings ) but this driver was impressive. I fed it my low end death track, Telarc's "Jurassic Lunch". This track features the vibrations of an on-coming T-Rex as well as a final roar to cap it all off. Featuring quite a bit of subsonic content, this track is instant death for my daily driver setups and makes most speakers scream for mercy. Surprisingly, the no label 12 didn't so much as cough at T-Rex's advance. This told me a few things. The suspension on this speaker was very well designed to reign it in and lock it down before it reached a hard mechanical limit. It also told me that the suspension was soft enough to allow a decent amount of throw as well. I would guesstimate that this driver has a bit more than an inch of total mechanical throw and utilizes every bit of it.
I then swapped it into the ported box to see how well it would maintain its composure in that enclosure. For output and varying freq ranges, Outkast's "Speakerboxx" and "The Love Below" can't be beat in my opinion. Big Boi's romantic ballad "I love the way you move" is another fun toasty coil track I like to abuse speakers with. To my shock, the no badge 12 handled itself without a problem. Once again, this driver was giving me chills in its similarity to the Shiva. It seemed to have a perfect suspension layout. I've found that motor design, while important, means nothing if the suspension is not properly matched to the motor's capabilities. "Ghetto Musick" has a very fast dropping bass kick which varies throughout the song, and just as in the sealed box, I found no overhang or blurring together of notes. "Roses" is another fantastic test track, which has a constantly changing bass note which rolls up and down throughout the song. This low buck driver kept up with every bit with the accuracy of drivers I have grown to love over the years. For comparative purposes, I like to bump up the levels of my mids, drop their crossovers and flip between them and the subs. My midrange/mid bass consists of 2 edi 6500 mids in each door being fed about 150-200 watts of old school USAmps power each. This provides me with reference quality low end, albeit at a slightly reduced output. The no badge 12 was every bit the equal to my mids.
One area I noticed a deficiency in this driver was in the area of power handling. As I mentioned before, it does not have a pole vent. After sessions of abuse, I would find the dust cap to be quite hot. After my initial beating, I kept a close eye on the temperature so as not to fry it before I could properly test it out. I spoke with Ben about this and he said that the full production version would most likely have additional venting in the basket to make up for this. With 450 underrated watts I feel confident that this driver can be killed by an uneducated person, but in the hands of a veteran audiophile I think it will survive for years. I did further testing with a new toy I picked up specifically for this test. I snagged a NIB 2001 model USAmps USA-200 pumping out an underrated 50 watts bridged at 4 ohms. Even with this power, I found that the no badge 12 was still utilizing quite a bit of its available throw.
After a couple of weeks in the truck, I decided to move it to my home theater. My home theater consists of a Harman Kardon avr 525 powering a DIY Vifa mtm center channel and a pair of very old but very nice Technics towers. My normal substage consists of a
partsexpress 250w plate amp powering an ED 12k.14 in the aforementioned 1 cube sealed box. My home theater room is about 15'x20' with normal 8' ceilings. Also, Yes, I am that guy who refuses to mount his plate amp because he swaps boxes out on a regular basis and has it sitting behind the fish tank....I put the sub back in the 1 cube box to see if perhaps the lower freq gain of the room (as compared to the 77hz fs of the truck) would make up for its apparent dislike of small enclosures. The results in the truck were backed up in the house as well. It simply does not like small sealed boxes at all. There are trade-offs to every driver, and Hoffman's Iron law says that if you have an efficient speaker that plays low, It simply will not work in small boxes.
I returned the sub to its beloved 2cube sealed box and placed it nearly in the middle of a wall, facing the opposite (farthest) wall. Not an ideal placement, but the corner is occupied by a large fish tank (as well as the plate amp of course). I found that given identical power, and in a box exactly 2x the size, I got identical output from the no name driver as I do from the 12k.14 flat cone driver. To verify this, I went so far as to place them side by side and run wires to my recliner so I could swap at will. My friends as well as myself were unable to pick one from the other reliably in blind testing. I also notice that even placed directly beside my television, I did not have problems with the screen changing colors or warping caused by the magnet. It is not shielded, but does seem to work very well near magnetic sensitive devices regardless.
For a little more fun, I decided to up the ante and place the sub in the 3 cube ported box. Many people would say that 33hz is too high for a proper home theater tuning, but it fit perfectly into my system and to my tastes for movie and daily use. This little bastard was absurd!
