biswa@medea.BERKELEY.EDU (Biswa Ranjan Ghosh) (10/30/85)
I also bought the Cerwin Vega subwoofer from DAK, about a year ago. I use it to augment a pair of ADS L420's left over from my first college stereo. The ADS L420's have very inadequate bass, and the subwoofer helps alot. However, it isn't anything to brag about. The bass is uneven, and a little boomy. A pair of regular speakers with 10" woofers seems to do just as well, maybe better. As someone else had predicted, the subwoofer uses simple 6 dB slope filters for both the low-pass and high-pass sections. The high-pass section for the satellite speakers has a series capacitor of 125 ufd. That gives a corner frequency of 160 Hz (assuming the satellite speaker has 8 ohms impedance), but the info sheet supplied with the subwoofer lists 110 Hz. That's not right. To make things worse, my satellite speakers have 6 ohms nominal impedance, so that pushes the corner frequency up to 200 Hz! The inductor for the low-pass section is unmarked, so I don't know what the corner frequency is for the woofer. In any case, seems to me that there may be a gap in the frequency response, where neither the woofer nor the satellite speaker is producing enough output. (The low-pass section also has a series cap of 1000 ufd. to block components below 20 Hz. First time I ever saw a 1000 ufd. cap that's non-polarized.) For its price, this beast is O.K., and I don't have the space for floor- standing speakers. So what the heck, I'm satisfied. I plan on fiddling around with the crossover - bring the crossover frequency down and use higher slope filters. If any of you other owners of this speaker have done any modifications, I'd be interested in hearing about them. Biswa Ghosh