Review written by 'SwitchBlase and ChrisC'

SwitchBlade:

So as not to clutter the 10" thread I thought it best to start a sepparate thread for those of us with the 12" sub to review.

So far I've only tried it in a sealed box getting about 400W RMS, the box was 1.5cuft and only just fit in my MR2. Video of box being made: here (2.1MB DivX format) In the car:

was very impressed with how loud and low the sub managed to go, surprised me a lot there. Musically I wasn't too impressed, it handles long deep basslines very well but struggled to control faster bass changes resulting in a slightly muddy sound. Saying that it was slightly expected being a budget sub. One other thing I noticed was a mild buzzing noise to the bass, it wasn't a vibration in the car or anything mechanical with the sub that I could make out but it seemed to have some slight buzz to it that I don't get from my COMP8s at similar volumes. No doubt it was accentuated being 2 feet from my ear but it's something I'll listen for when building the other test boxes.

Build quality wise the sub looks and feels very well put together and sturdy. It also looks the part whichever way round you mount it on the box.

Tests to come are a smaller sealed box and a ported box as and when I've built them.

ChrisC

Out of the box the sub certainly looks the part, as others have commented, this sub certainly does not appear to be a £100 sub. The last sub I owned (a maystar) cost me around the same and the looks and build quality were appalling in comparison. I think this sub would look excellent either mounted normally or inverted, the arse of it certainly does look the part.

I thought it was quite a nice touch for the wire terminals, allen key screw with an allen key supplied.


A nice view of its arse, I thought it looked rather nice!


Again, I'm not sure what the red dot on the front of the sub was for but here's a side on pic of the sub with the red dot visible.


I fitted the sub into a sealed box (1.5cuft) as per vibes recommendations which sat quite nicely into my boot.


Upon powering the sub up I was quite surprised at how much bass power the sub could take.

We gave it various tests including 6Hz, 10Hz, 20Hz and 30Hz test tones. There was quite a lot of movement and the sub didn't seem to show any signs of distress due to the abuse we were giving it and believe me, we were giving it a fair bit of abuse.

Comparing the sub to my ID MAX would be unfair as the ID MAX is worth 4x as much but the power that this "budget" sub seemed very impressive.

I tested the sub on varied music from queen through to hard house and drum and bass. The sub managed to keep up most of the time to the faster beats and only in a few places sounded confused / muddy. On the bass tracks some notes did start to merge but that could have been the box or it could be the fact that i'm used to a +£400 sub.

I did notice that there wasn't much excursion but then again that wasn't one of the things that I was expecting.

I'm happy to say that I gave the sub well over its rated power and it has survived.

The sub will be tested in a ported enclosure as stated in another post and hopefully we can get some wobbly bass out of it.

All in all I was very surprised in a few ways with this sub, the build quality and looks of such a "cheap" sub and the ammount of power that I could give it without it showing any real signs of distress. If i was after a budget sub I wouldnt hesitate in purchasing one of these.

In my small car it provided adequate bass off relatively little power, and provided quite a lot more off more power.