Name: What are some tips for the best way to connect a REL Acoustics subwoofer high level? @RELAcoustics
Uploaded: 2024-10-23T08:17:00-05:00
Duration: 8 min 17 s
Description: What are some tips for the best way to connect a REL Acoustics subwoofer high level?

What are some tips for the best way to connect a REL Acoustics subwoofer high level?

REL Acoustics 2024-10-23 | What are some tips for the best way to connect a REL Acoustics subwoofer high level?

REL Acoustics No.32 Overview

REL Acoustics 2022-11-18 | This is John Hunter with REL. I have the distinct pleasure of introducing our No.32, just so that people understand our numerology, the 32 was conceived in the 32nd year from REL’s birth. The 32 has really big shoes to fill. Everything we've done in the seven years since we launched the No. 25 has informed all of our lesser products, so much so that we realized that there were a number of lessons that we'd learned in those, the development of all the antecedents to make this product that much better. This is the best we know how to make. There are models that we make that play just as loud, but when you get up into reference grade, what you're looking for is speed, purity, texture, delicacy, ability to die into the equivalent of black level shadows and video, right? The subtlety of the ability to, to do all the harmonic shadings, and it shows up in theater and film as well, by the way. So, the 15 inch driver for the Europeans out there, that's a 380 millimeter driver.
This has been rebalanced and extended from the 25. So, these are not duplicative drivers. This driver handles about 40% more maximum power, even though the wattage rating on the amplifier has not gone up. We have yet to find a big amp that is this supple, this fast, that handles that kind of super-fast, almost square wave like transients. Most big amps blur things a little bit, and it's really important to us that we not lose it in the electronics. The driver is quicker, it's a little bit more sensitive, although we're not claiming anything more. It's like a DB more sensitive and it has a richer, fuller, exceptionally deep base to it. So, where you'll hear the difference comparing this, for example, with our previous No. 25 is it is a bigger, richer, fuller voicing. It simply hangs on to the lows further down where the other one can start to fall. We're talking trace amounts below 23-24 hertz. This one is really steady. So, all of our References use pure carbon fibre for the driver materials, and we use them a little bit differently than most people do. It's really common to see carbon fibre. It looks beautiful when you do it, but doesn't sound great to use just a pure hemispherical mold. It’s one continuous weave of it. What we find more useful is to do two pieces. They are all in that hemispherical mold, but we have a large, very stiff center cap that's made of actually slightly thicker material that ties the integrity of the shape together, which is why we can play for hours and hours. We test our drivers for 24 hours continuous at the maximum the ample do when we're doing development just to make sure that these things can hold together for the long haul. And so we've got roughly 50-60% of the, of the diameter of the actual main cone as an overlay. And what that does is it stiffens, it toughens it, and it also quiets things. When you have that overlap of the glue bonds, it really quiets down the structure and that's one of the secrets to get the kind of texture and delicacy that we can get out of such a big concussive driver.
Now, these amps, these thousand watt amps, we've now sold over 6,000 of these over the last seven years in different models. They are as bulletproof as a thousand watt amp can be. We have two parametric, an A filter and a B filter. And it's really important to understand that when you don't want to be using it, you need tip and you're done. You leave it in the middle. Otherwise, any changes you make, you're actually changing the parametric continuing rather than being able to adjust gain or crossover points.

High Level Signal on the HT/1510 Predator using the Airship II

REL Acoustics 2022-11-13 | The below text is a transcription of the video.

Hey, John Hunter with REL here. Late in development of the 1510, we were just checking basic functionality with wireless and of course we put an HT-Air in there and it worked great, but the performance of the 1510 is so fast, so sudden, and so resolved it really resolves to quiet better than any of the previous models we’d ever heard - and it made us wonder what would happen if we partnered it with an Airship II. We did, and not a great surprise, it’s a match made in heaven, and it has the ability to transform the 1510 from being a piece that is really just expressly a 0.1 LFE monster into a full blown REL theatre reference piece.

What do I mean by that? Theatre is designed to have all of your channels actually reproduce full range. In a perfect world your left hertz surround speaker would be capable of 20 hertz. That’s absurd. 20 hertz flat speakers are massive, but the whole premise to REL HT/3D and to REL 3D is to expand your system into being essentially a semi-pro system. One that really can get down well into the 20’s, in this case right down to 20 hertz effortlessly. And so, the Airship allows you to combine both high level and 0.1 at the same time in the 1510. It’s an incredible upgrade.

REL Acoustics connectivity options, and why we offer a variety of inputs and outputs

REL Acoustics 2022-09-06 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

So for someone new to REL, taking a look at the back panel can be a little bit daunting. Let's admit it. You look back there. There's a million inputs controls. Gold plated connectors Speak On connectors for the high level. What is all this stuff for? And why do we have it?

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I'm gonna do one quick thing to make this easier for you to understand because the Serie S and our reference products have inputs and outputs. So right off the bat, simplify it. When you look at it, don't get sort of awe struck by the ins and the outs. This is effectively what you're dealing with. Right? You have a high level Speak On connection input. We'll come back to that in just a moment. You have an XLR 0.1 input and you have both stereo inputs.

So there's an extra one down here, but I'm doing it for simplicities sake, stereo, low level input and an RCA 0.1. That's really all there is to it.

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Now, why do we have these, let's walk through this. Our preferred method for connecting up for both music and theater doesn't exclude the use of 0.1, but our preferred mechanism for connecting up to your system is to connect to the speaker terminals on your main power amplifier. Why? We're not using a single watt of power over here.

We have a, in this case, an enormous 800 watt amplifier. Very few of you are using more than a hundred Watts at home.

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So what's going on here. We want to be able to bring forward the sonic signature. Not only that amplifier, whatever the processor is, the interconnect cables, the way that that particular source, whether it's Blueray or very high end digital front end, if it's two channel, all of those feed forward

into our REL, so that exactly what's being fed to your speakers is what we're feeding to the REL. It's the only way we can ensure that we exactly track the micro dynamics, the macrodynamic right the big stuff, the really delicate little stuff.

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That's all the delicate harmonics dieing away all of that needs to be built forward. We don't have the prior of capturing exactly the way that the rest of your system sounds. There are times when you can't. Some people make some very, very nice high quality powered, active, loud speaker. That have their own amplifier in many cases, in most cases they're wireless. Right? And so we can't come off of that speaker's amplifier, it's built in, it's intrinsic. There are no outputs on it.

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Why would there be it's built into the speaker. So that's why we include the stereo low level inputs. And then for 0.1, that's a pure theater function. LFE stands for low frequency effects. They're really the biggest most bombastic special effects in a movie.

There are two ways traditionally of bringing them in this would come in from your receiver or your AV processor. You're either coming in through XLR, which is a pro style connector and I wanna be clear, there's not an intrinsic qualitative difference between RCA and XLR. Almost everybody assumes that XLR connectors and the signal of being fed is somehow mysteriously better.

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It's a balanced version of the RCA and in some cases, Depending on how good and how committed the engineering team was of that receiver. It may in fact be better, particularly at noise rejection. So if you're having to run cables a very and I mean more than 40 feet, 60 feet and longer XLR makes a lot of sense, just from a pure functionality standpoint, it's quieter, it's got a positive form, positive and a negative phase positive going back.

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And so you've got this very robust signal. For most of us in a normal home, you're talking maybe 30 feet maximum, typically between your processor and your subwoofer. Is it really, really critical? No, but it's nice to have it as options. So we give you both, right and that's really it as far as the input connectivity goes, and I'll take this off. We then, because these are designed to be stackable into line arrays, a total of three.

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We give you inputs here. Outputs here ditto, input here, output here and right on down the line. So that's the duplication. It's not there to be needlessly obsessive, or to be confusing to you. We just need twice as many connectors to offer that facility of being able to jump up to the middle sub from a line array and from the middle to the highest.

Hope that answers your questions. It's why we do what we do, and it really is grounded in knowing what produces the best results in every combinations possible.

Factors to Consider When Adding or Upgrading the Subwoofer in your Audio System or Home Theater.

REL Acoustics 2022-08-30 | The first thing you really should do is go to REL.net and look up the subwoofer pairing tool. It's called subwoofer finder. Many of the speakers that you're probably looking at will already be there, but there'll be things that are close enough. If it's one of the more obscure brands, if you write into us and we love to get emails, but let me tell you what we're gonna ask of you, because it is an interactive process.

The first thing we're gonna ask you is about your room and it's not just what you think of as your room, understand that we want to know what the primary environment your speakers and you listening are gonna be in.

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But in many, many instances houses these days have open floor plans. So if you're fortunate enough to have a regular sealable, meaning close the doors and the room is sealed rectangular box of a room, God bless you. You're in the minority. Most instances, we start talking to somebody and the individual says, oh yeah, my basic room is 14 by 20 with 9 foot ceilings.

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Then you start talking more, well, that's the living room, but the living room is attached to and consistent with and open to the dining room, which gives onto the kitchen. And right behind the kitchen, there's a door that goes down a hallway that's 15 feet long. All of these are spaces that a REL has to drive. It's one acoustic mass.

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So we really need to know both the primary and the secondary connective tissue if you will. In my own home, I've got an open floor plan with a centrally mounted staircase with a bathroom underneath that

and it goes up it's like three stories high. And so each floor is about 1500 square feet and it all talks to each other. So, you know, when a customer calling up going, well, you know, my living room's roughly 22 by 17. That's one space, but that's not it. I've got a 10 foot opening to an entryway. I've got an eight foot opening into the dining room and then it just flows from there.

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That's a very, very difficult space to drive. So space, and if you can beg borrow or steal one of those little Bosch or similar laser range finders, just put it on one wall, zap that zap the length and then the others. If you're talking about secondary spaces, you can approximate them, but that's really useful.

Second thing we're gonna ask you is what are your electronics? Why do we need to know that? Well, first of all, we can spot stuff where you go, you are not gonna want to use that with those speakers for a variety of different reasons.

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Maybe you need far more power than that. Maybe you have a 500 watt amplifier and a pair of Klipschorns that, you know, virtually manufacture sound.

So we will be asking questions about your electronics, but more importantly, if you're gonna use one of our classic RELs that hook up traditionally through the high level connection, we're gonna want to know what that is and how to guide you towards doing it. There are different kind of, we call it topologies,

different kinds of amplifier designs that some of which don't even have a ground, which is really necessary for a REL to operate properly.

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So let's find out what those things are. And if you're in a state of flux and you're changing things, we can often give you insight into really good suggestions. That would make really nice natural pairings for that too. So those are just some of the things you'll need to know and of course, then we need to know what the speakers themselves are and where you plan to cite them. And what I do with anybody that I wind up interacting with directly, I require, I don't suggest, I require that you send me 360 degrees.

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Stand up from your listening position, photographs of the room. And if you will, it used to be much more common where you digitally stitch I'm not requiring you to stitch them, but just sort of take the picture, including your left speaker and perhaps the left wall.

You know, then move it over to approximately where that left off, then do the same over here. The same, the same. So I can see everything. I first started doing this about six or seven years ago when a fellow wrote in with a problem solving question.

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He couldn't understand why his left subwoofer was so loud and played so beautifully, but his right one just seemed to be lost.

And he gave me the room dimensions and everything seemed. And I finally asked him to send me a picture at the time, just to the front of his system. So I could see the speakers, the subwoofer where was it located? And I called him back and said, when were you gonna make mention the fact that there was a staircase going upstairs, just right at the landing where your right subwoofer was?

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And it went up three stories straight up above the subwoofer that didn't occur to you. One's under an eight foot ceiling and the other one goes 23 feet straight. Yeah, they're gonna be very, very different. So these are some of the context we can spot...

Wireless vs. Cable: The Reasons and Advantages for Each

REL Acoustics 2022-08-24 | So the question today is when do I opt for one of REL's awesome wireless systems. These are zero compression. They're very fast, very dynamic, natural sounding and when should I stay with hard wired. The simple version is intrinsically hardwired is better until you get to fairly long lengths. Now, the 10 meters that we supply, which is roughly 33 feet, for those of us who are not in the metric system, they work extremely well.

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There's not a lot of delay to them about two milliseconds, something like that total. So then the question becomes, when do I go to wireless? Is it a speed thing and the answer is sometimes, but a lot of this is based on practicality. Give you an. You have a home theater, let's say for just a moment that you've got a stereo pair of RELs and you have a center channel and a rear channel. This is a big 3d based system through REL 3d.

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So what would I do in a system like that? Well, generally speaking, the main subs, the left right mains are gonna be hard wired. I think that most people who are going to go to the extent to do left and stereo subs in a big theater like that, that can go back and forth between music and, home theater are gonna make the effort to get those connected up hardwired.

Maybe they'll use baseline blue to get the utmost, depends on what level you're doing it at, but let's go to the center channel. How does that connect up?

1:30

Well, the best way to do it in most cases is to simply take the existing. We give you this free, cut it down to length once you've figured out exactly where you're gonna put it.

So here's the drill. Let's say the center channel is here and the subwoofer is just below. It could be by the way, four or five feet left or right of center if the room is big enough. What you want to do is actually take this hardwired connection. Come off the back of the speaker, right? You want to take the two hots twist these hot colors are hot, right? The red and yellow are hot. Black is your ground.

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Twist these two together and connect these up to the hot connection. The plus on the back of your loud speaker, connect this one up to the black connector on the back of your loud speaker. And in most cases it's maybe a meter and a half, two meters at most typically, maybe it's three meters

if you've moved it left or right by say five or six feet, but it's right there. It's intrinsic. You don't have to do a lot of routing wiring, any special work and labor to get this to work.

2:30

Now, same system in the opposite right hand corner, you have, let's say, uh, a T/9x in the back rear corner and that's, what's connected up full range, right?

You've got really good surrounds. You've really thought about this. You know how to lay it out out of theater, things are set to large or full, and you've got that nine X back there with a 0.1 that's gonna need to be connected as well. And you start going well, this is getting to be a bit of a pain.

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You know, the equipment cabinet that houses all the electronics driving this is, is right over here behind some drapes and things in a closet behind the, the wall that my screen is mounted to. That's gonna be really expensive and painful to have somebody run cable. Say 40 feet to go all the way up behind it. You're gonna have baseboards you've gotta remove. So this can become a very expensive exercise.

3:30

Or you could have hooked up something like this. If it's a, if it's a big S or reference based system, you could have connected up this Airship II to just have the antenna on the back of this thing, sticking up and give it a shot straight back to the rear corner.

If it's a really crowded theater, if you're gonna really have 15 or 20 people in it, Mount the antenna, or mount the Airship transmitter up high in the dark and have it beam line of sight back over to the REL in the opposite corner where this will receive it, pick up the signal, excuse me, decode it and feed it directly into the sub, so some of these things are just real problem solvers.

REL Acoustics Airship II Overview

REL Acoustics 2022-08-22 | Learn more about REL Acoustics Airship II at rel.net/shop/accessories/airship-ii

Hey, John Hunter here. Listen, we have a new version of the Airship, the air ship too coming. Little bit about this, this retains all of the previous units functionality, so we have high level input with the Speakon here. We've got. a stereo pair of low level inputs. We've got an XLR input for 0.1. We've got RCA inputs for 0.1 as well. So what's the difference, same power supply.

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So we were developing some really, really super fast models, and we went to check, we always do this functionality using our wireless. Now we're really proud of our wireless. I will just say this. Most people who've looked into wireless, really sort of forensically find out that most of the wireless that goes with subwoofers is anything but edge of the art.

There's a lot to it, and our chief engineer, Justin really has incredible experience going all the way back to power, laser work. The guy knows everything to do with microwave wireless. He's really a godsend when it comes to this stuff.

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So we're doing functionality listening, and we can hear, I can hear a difference.

It's a problem. It hadn't previously been a problem. Suddenly it sounds slow, a little soft. What is going on? So we dug in and looked at everything. There was nothing that was different. We hadn't somehow made our product worse over the years what's going on? So we looked at, and the only spec that jumped out us at all was the noise function. On the main processor.

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So what we do, just a brief explanation of what we do with air ship is pretty incredible. We essentially import the entire front end, the section that steps high level down to low level from our units. That's actually reproduced here. So when you hook up high level here, we drop it in.

We do some very cool things where we get rid of all the out of phase components. Normally when you've got left and right signals, for example, a lot of it is in phase, but there are some aspects to it that are out of phase.

2:00

Well you can't send in phase and out of phase reliably wirelessly. So we strip out all the out of phase information. This is a much more sophisticated piece than people realize we did all of that. Hadn't changed anything, and yet what was happening was the actual noise that was in the core processor was affecting it. So we went out and studied and figured out we had a 96 DB signal noise ratio on the original that's pretty damn quiet and it seemed fatuous, but we went all right, look, the best one we can find is about 120 DB Texas instruments builds.

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When we listen to three different manufacturers and the Ti one was clearly the most natural sounding, the fastest, the most open, the most dynamic. So we put the 120 DB unit in and we were just completely unprepared for the fact that you could actually hear that it clearly is not just noise for what was happening here dynamically.

It couldn't have just been the fact that it was quieter in the background and all down to the fact that we were actually working just on high speed. We were always working on stuff in the background, high speed driver development, and we could finally hear the limits of the previous chip.

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So the Airship II, it retains all the functionalities of the previous one, you can still do high level and 0.1. All of those things still happen within the Airship II, we've just upgraded the core performance of it. So a brief note, what is the Airship II designed to partner with naturally? At its price it's probably not gonna be a perfect solution for things like T/xs, for example, and we make other solutions for that.

3:30

This is really about edge of the art wireless. So this is designed to pair with our reference models. It's designed to work with Serie S the 510, the 812, the Carbon Special, the 212/SX. Those are its natural partners, late in development of the 1510, we were just checking basic functionality with wireless and of course we put an HT Air in there, worked great, but the performance of the 1510 is so fast, so sudden and so resolved. It really resolves to quiet better than any of the previous models we'd ever heard. And it made us wonder what would happen if we partnered it with an Airship II, we did, and not a great surprise.

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It's a match made in heaven and it has the ability to transform the 1510, from being a piece that is really just expressly a 0.1 LFE monster into a full blown re theater reference piece.

The Importance of Stereo Pairs and Line Arrays for Home Theater

REL Acoustics 2022-08-11 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

The below text is a transcription of the video.

So let’s talk about the Predator in the context of these large theaters that are out there. First of all, strongly recommend stereo pairs of them. Why? 70% of all the sound coming off the front of the theater we all know comes from the center channel and we advocate strongly for center channel subs so why would I need stereo pairs?

What people don’t understand is the left, right main speakers are responsible for setting the vastness of scale up front. It’s a strange thing. If you shut off the main center channel. You’ll hear relatively little sound, but the sound that you’re hearing are all timing. They’re aural timing cues. They’re not loud necessarily relative to the accents coming out of the center channel speaker, which is kind of the obvious stuff.

It’s the dynamics is the vocal transitions and things, but scale is carried by your left, right mains and that’s why getting that right. Is clutch. Doing nothing more than that. Having a pair of these, having a good center channel sub. Setting your main system up front to full range if possible, large, if not, and then working the crossovers and things to properly blend these things together is a great start to it.

When you get to six packs, when you start going. Okay, well, you got really good bass. I got a pair of these 1510s. These predators are killing the room. Why would I ever need more? It isn’t that you’re going to wind up necessarily with more bass. Certainly can. Right? If you’re somebody that, you know, too much is not quite enough

that’s one other reason that six packs exist, but back here on planet earth, what this allows you to do is build up the height component. You know, how we accept as a real benefit and it is Doby Atmos, right? The whole premise to Doby Atmos is that we have the height component finally able to be built into a normal home theater where before you had to go to professional theater and the speakers on the side surrounds, you could see them with 20, 25 feet off the ground.

And that conferred height. Now we’re building them into our ceilings. We’re using special height speakers. That same thing happens with the line arrays. You get massive height of image and with a theater that’s perhaps a 100, $150,000 theater with a 30, $40,000 projector. It’s an absolute natural. If you haven’t experienced it, you have to safe this out.

It’s a remarkable experience.

Introducing the HT/1510 Subwoofer Designed to be a Beast for Home Theater While Remaining Musical.

REL Acoustics 2022-08-06 | The HT/1510 features a 15 inch Carbonglas driver that is both light and stiff that's being driven by a 1000 watt amplifier.

Learn more about REL Acoustics and the HT/1510 at rel.net/shop/powered-subwoofers/serie-ht/ht-1510-predator

When you should upgrade or add a REL Acoustics subwoofer to your audio system or home theater

REL Acoustics 2022-07-18 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

So today we're gonna help sort out why do you need a new subwoofer. When is the right time to do it? What are some of the thought processes? And it really boils down to three things. There's either a change in your system it's gotten better or you've had to make it smaller. There's a change in your system.

There's a change in the environment, or there's a change in you, meaning your expectations of what's going on in your system have expanded. And what you've been dealing with is no longer acceptable.

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So let's start with the first one change in the system. It's gonna be in both directions. I've helped talk guys through who are now 62 years old. He and his wife have moved from their big four bedroom, three bath house into the city. They're empty nesters now. They're gonna be retiring in the next few years. They're now in like an 800 square foot apartment.

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They had a REL 20 years ago that was, you know, half the size of this table and a big system that no longer suits their needs or their goals. They're gonna be doing a lot of travel. They want to go out and eat good food at night and be able to walk to it. So their life has compacted. I've heard exactly the opposite. You know, I had a little place when I was 30 in the city, got married. We've moved out to the burbs. Now I'm in long island, I've got four bedrooms, three baths. So whatever that change is, systems get much more sophisticated, not necessarily more expensive or not necessarily bigger, but they get faster.

1:30

Right. I spoke to a guy the other day. He had a 25 year old pair of big Vandersteens. He had just sold those and moved to a pair of Dynaudios, six and a half inch two ways that are fantastic.They're really, really good. They're very fast and articulate. He needed to actually get bass back and he needed to get something that was really quick and tuneful and would blend with the system.

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So those are the system changes that you need to be aware of. And those are really good prompts. If any of those things are resonating for you, it's time to talk really fast subwoofers with somebody. The environment itself changing.

We sort of touched on it. If your physical space has changed, you may all of a sudden need a subwoofer and you were maybe even thinking about it beforehand, but then you move into a larger room and you start envisioning the things that can happen in this room. And all of the thought processes start to jumble together.

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So always good, whenever you're doing anything with the system, really, really important to understand, not just what gear you have. You really want to be considering a partnering sub for, for what you're going to wind up with in the next year or two.

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You never want to spend, you know, anything, whatever it is, a thousand dollars, $5,000. You never want to spend any significant money on a subwoofer shooting at the last war. Right, you don't want to be solving last year's problem. You want to be anticipatory, have a plan, go out, do some listening, read a lot, but really figure out where it is that you wanna wind up. Right? If it's a pair of Wilson Sabrina, X's at 20 grand and they're not huge, but they sound fantastic.

Great. Know that we've got two or three, depending on how big the room is. We've got two or three different solutions for you on that score. So it's really important to be solving the problem that you're going to be living with over the next arc of your life.

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And then the last one, you know, what is going on with your expectations of a system? And this one happens all the time for people who've fall in love with really high quality reproduction. It's a journey. It's not one quick, oh, I did this and it's the perfect solution and I will cheerfully do this for the next 30 years. It's just not the way it works. It's a live sport. Your understanding of what matters evolves. Your ears will get better.

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I don't mean your hearing will improve when people talk about somebody with great ears, we're talking about listening acuity, that is a developable skill. So as you understand what to listen for and what real instruments sound like in real spaces, how the reproduction of the space and the instrument is really critical to you as all of those things.

evolve RELs become much more interesting. Yeah, they're great subwoofers. They, they make great bass. That's about one and a half percent of what we do. What we really do is transform systems from sort of static things that do the basics into things where music becomes alive.

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The venue that it's played in the time that it was recorded in. I have a phenomenal recording live at the village Vanguard by a jazz trombonist named JJ Johnson. It's one of the best live recordings I've ever heard in my life. And it's so raw. And one of the things that makes it so freaking good is you can hear th....

What is a ground and why is it important for the performance of an audio system?

REL Acoustics 2022-07-08 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

The ground as it relates to audio, as an audio term it' s important to realize that what we're really talking about here is a reference point. And why is that important? Audio, if we think of it as a series of sine waves has an upper half and a lower half, you should be seeing a graphic at about this point that shows that reciprocating.

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That black line down the middle is ground. Without ground and a really stable ground, that's perfect. You don't get perfect audio, it's really that simple. As we start expanding into the more sophisticated realms of things, it's super critical for digital. Digital requires a perfect ground, and then all kinds of isolation mechanisms to work off of that perfect ground. So in a simplest sense, what audio ground gives you is that stable perfect reference that music or film sound right revolves around.

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It's either going up or going down, up or down, and ground is the middle of the teeter totter, if you will. It goes up to the top half of the waveforms down to the bottom. And that's why it's so important to have a good stable reference ground. One of the things we work really hard on, on all of the the units that have high level input is a great ground. You'll notice that all of those have a real three prong connection. That's because often we're the only thing in the system that is really giving you a good ground.

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And in many cases, the way that we will teach you to connect them on other videos is to give your system a really good solid ground. Everything improves when you do that. So that's the importance of ground. It's really a critical component, if you will components the wrong term, but a really critical element in making great sound. If you don't have good ground. It's really hard to make good bass and if you can't make good bass you really can't have everything that pushes up from the bass on upward.

HT/1510 Line Arrays and How Line Arrays Also Benefit Home Theater Systems, Not Just 2 Channel

REL Acoustics 2022-06-30 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Hey, thanks for coming back. John Hunter with REL here. So, we have the new 1510 Predator here. And as you can see, we're looking at it in the context of what's sort of casually referred to as a six pack, but a line array. Why a line array for theater? It's been explained a number of times in different videos and blogs of mine and things.

Why we do it for two channel music systems. And in that instance, what that gives you is low sort of structural foundational bass on the floor. Right? You've got a big, huge surface for the longest wave to couple with it carries that into the room. Then you've got a mid-bass coupler, right. You've got the one that's in the middle.

Really isn't capable at that point of producing more, extremely low bass because of its decoupling from the floor, but gives you tremendous attack. And up here, you get all these beautiful spatial effects. The stuff that in a concert hall you can never reproduce when you get home, unless you've got a line array, this is a little different, this is theater.

So why are we doing it for here? Well, because a lot of the same physics attaches. If you're talking about putting together a state of the art theater system, one of the things that's really interesting and we just got back from a big trade show down in Florida. And demonstrated this, and you should have seen the slack jaws in the audience. When you don't get this right

what you wind up with is images that are up on the, we were using about a 14 foot. Screen that are up on screen. It doesn't track you actually aren't lofting up onto the screen. We did demonstrations where we literally took the top layer out and watched people's jaws drop as the full screen, which is about a, what, five foot by 13 foot screen.

It dropped down to the middle of the screen. As soon as we took the top layer out. When we took out the middle level, it literally dropped voices down to below the bottom edge of the screen and that's how we're used to hearing things, but it's not right. So right off the bat, just the height elevation, the ability to actually loft things up onto the screen is clutch.

Second thing. When you have 6,000 watt units driving six, 15 inch drivers, believe me, they’re effortlessly idling along.

So, one of the neatest things about the 1510 is this is believe it or not, even though it's a beast, it's the least expensive offering we have for six packs for line arrays. In the United States, these will sell for something just under $2,000 a piece. And that makes an entire six pack of these slightly less than $12,000.

And it is don't take it this wrong. It is a huge stonking bargain at $12,000 for what these do. They're so composed. It isn't that they're huge and dynamic. They do that in their sleep. One expects that out of a big theater sub. What's really remarkable about this piece is how composed, how quiet it can be, how devastating the differences, the dynamic range, right?

People think dynamics is just a synonym for playing really, really loud. It's not, it's the difference between quiet and loud. That is defined by dynamics and the 1510 the predator gets so quiet when it gets quiet, that when the inevitable huge transient happens, it's really shocking. It hits you, it, it hits your sinuses.

It's big, it's vivacious, it's dynamic. And yet it's pretty. And so, you've got this combination of sort of the beauty and beast, right? You've got these beautiful surfaces, gorgeous detailing. These are designed physically in the way that we worked out their ratios to harmonize with things like our T/x or Serie S line.

So, all of a sudden, we've got a system where everything within the REL world, that's in your room begins to harmonize. T/xs have a very similar kind of aspect ratio, even our references, which is where we derive these proportions from. All of these things work really beautifully in harmony with each other now.

So, for example, in a system like this, you probably have something like an S/812 as your center channel sub. And if we were to loft an 812 in here, you'd see the same thing, this nice narrow height aspect ratio, quite deep, wider than it is tall. All of these proportions start to mimic the beautiful finishes on these pick up and get repeated in things like the black S S/812.

Every part of this world that we're building comes together. Everything harmonizes.

REL Acoustics HT/1510 Predator Product Overview

REL Acoustics 2022-06-14 | Learn more about the HT/1510 Predator at rel.net/shop/powered-subwoofers/serie-ht/ht-1510-predator

Hi, it's John Hunter, and we're here to discuss the HT/1510 better known as the predator. This is the mark two, essentially version of our predator and it's at beast. It is a full thousand Watts. Previous one was 800. We've upgraded the 15 inch driver, obviously to be able to handle that full thousand Watts and more. And the mission statement is this, this is our flagship home theater piece.
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This is capable of underpinning really, really large, substantial home theaters. Whether in singles multiples or in extreme cases, borrowing something from our ultra high end reference line, line arrays where three are stacked per side. We just got back from a big show in Florida, where we used that in a room that was essentially 50 by 70. We were in a full room and it just that the six pack destroyed the entire space.
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I have video of light sconces 20, 30 feet outside of the internal demo room rattling hard enough that the filaments were smacking against the glass of the tube. Incredible amounts of output. The driver as I mentioned is a full 15 inch unit. The basic cone structure of this we've kept costs reasonable by using fiberglass. Fiberglass is very, very light and it helps us have that reactive, that very fast tack and slam that you have to have for theater and then to keep it all together, we use a center cap that's made out of carbon fiber.
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It's a little more expensive to do that and actually a lot more expensive to do that, but by doing so, we're only using as much carbon fiber as we need to really stiffen and tie the driver together. So we get this really pistonic kind of attack to the sound. Keeps everything together too, because this driver center a tremendous amount of sort of torque and twisting motion when it's at full extent of its excursion.

The amplifier is a new version of the unit that we used in the 1508. It's a full thousand Watts. It's faster, it's bigger, it's got better current reserves. It's just a fantastic amplifier.
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It weighs a ton. This is a unit that actually has a full size power transformer, so even though it's a class D output stage, basic power supply is class AB.

For those of who don't know what a class AB is it's sort of a traditional amplifier with a big power transistor. And we find that that gives a certain amount of, of just extra hump when it's really gets going. These things just continue sailing through, and part of that is because the power supply is so massive on this piece.
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Here's the trick, right? Great driver, great cabinet. Where a lot of people lose it is they wind up making, having to make their speaker design, necessitates this. A massive cabinet. And what we wanted was something that gave you all of the benefits of a big driver, high performance amplifier, but in a very compact form.

So I stand about five 11. That gives you some sense of scale and you can see, this is just not that big of a piece. It's about 18 inches tall, maybe 21 inches wide. It's beautifully compact for a 15 inch this thing slides into all kinds of decor and we worked really hard on the fit and finish.
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We've got horizontal line graining that just pops. I can't say it any other way. It's just beautifully elegant and expensive looking. And we went to a 15 millimeter top. The entire piece is high gloss, just polished to perfection with a very subtle logo set into the top. It's a great piece of design work. So again, the 1510 predator is our theater piece.

This is the piece for really large power home theater. It's a unique piece also in that it sounds incredible in music.
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It'll afford some really interesting capabilities that we'll get into on future videos. As we start being able to bring REL theater reference, which is the ability to do both high level and 0.1 into this piece in the future. Again, the 15/ 10 predator is Re's flagship home of the inner peace.

What are some tips for the best way to connect a REL Acoustics subwoofer high level?

REL Acoustics 2022-06-03 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

When you get your new REL sub home, if it's not an HT model, if it's a TX and S a reference, you're going to see that it has this beautiful cable with a speakon on one end. This plugs in we'll come back to the speakon in a minute, and then you'll see three wires. Now, basic coding of life is that hot colors are hot.

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That would be the red and the yellow and black is ground. Right. We deliver them exactly like this. I just took the bag off this two minutes ago. And you can see that we've actually pre-stripped this. Now this is not connected to an RCA. Just want to make very, very clear. This is a high level connection. All right.

High level, meaning it's coming off the binding posts on the back of your power amplifier. The purpose of this whole thing is to give the REL the same input signal, meaning the entire chain of custody, right? Sources, cables all the way through preempt amp, all of that. That's what we need to feed through to the REL.

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So that it's dynamic and tonal signature is exactly what your speakers are being sent. We don't supply them with connectors. Why? Well, because five-way binding post vary so much. Some of them work brilliantly with bananas. Other ones work really well with spades. We don't know what you've got.

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We don't know how much space you have, but what we do know is if we supply it with 22 gauge, really high quality copper, pre stripped. Now we start the stripping and I'm going to show you. There's a real pro tip here, everybody that gets these the first time he asked him off. Now you got two inches of copper that wants to fray and split and short, be very careful.

You do not want to have dead shorts happening. I'm going to show you and we may have to cut away here. Oh, this one's nice and smooth. You want to pull this back about half the distance. So you can see this red piece is about two inches, about 50 millimeters long.

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We don't want to just pull that off. Want to leave that on. Why? Because what we're going to do is actually pull this over the connector and leave this on so that it remains an insulator. We're going to do this right now. I've just bent this into a little horseshoe, right? And I'm going to slip this over this connector right here. Just like this. We do this in the field all the time. Right, and then we snug this down really nice and tight.

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There we go. Now we have a perfect really tight connection here and it can't short to anything. So if I then go for example and put on, do the same exact thing with the yellow and connect this up to this hot connector over here and repeat the process, these can't short. This is just an insulator, works brilliantly.

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The other pro tip then is if your speaker cables are connected, for example spade, you would probably want to go with a banana for these. It's really important to understand you want to have a really good, solid, tight connection for your main speakers. If you're using spade, we recommend that when you go to connect the RELs up, you use a banana because that doesn't interfere with your primary connection. Conversely, this would be what I would do if the customer were using banana connectors for their speakers. That make sense?

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So go with this connection. When you've got bananas that are your primary speaker to amplifier connection and go with the inverse, go with bananas on this anytime that you're dealing with somebody who's already got spades that are mounted hard, really nicely clamped down tightly at the amplifier for example.

How would you recommend I connect speakers to my amplifier or receiver?

REL Acoustics 2022-05-06 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Hey there, we’re here to actually just do some really basic explanations. A lot of times when people get involved in audio, there’s just so much new information they’ve got to try and sort out. We’ve been doing this for a very long time and we just thought it would be useful for you guys to learn a little bit about binding posts, which are these connectors that are used to connect it both on amplifiers and speakers cable between those two. These are traditionally called, this is the most basic kind of all, this is called a five-way binding post. Covers a variety of different ways to connect it. Probably my least favorite is a bare wire. And the reason I say that is if you’re not careful with it, and especially at the beginning, you’re not going to feel as comfortable with all the nuances of connection.

It’s really possible because these, these holes that go through you can’t see the yet, but there’s actually a whole drilled through the screw mechanism here and it’s oriented to point right at the other connector. And if you have a wire that’s a little too long, or you have just a few strands that are sticking out you can do what’s called a dead short, and it’s called that because hot and ground will touch together.

When you do that, you can damage your amplifier. So unless you absolutely have to, some types of receivers, for example, have a sort of pin loaded or spring-loaded, hole that just opens up and that you kind of have to use a bare wire. But besides for that, I probably would stay away from it. All right, here we go.

I’m going to show you that one of the most common ways to connect. This is called a spade lug. Now we actually deliberately used ones that were relatively short. If you go online and really start looking at different high quality spade lugs, it’s called a spade lug because it sort of looks like the shape of a spade.

There are thousands, literally thousands of these and many of them have much bigger, more impressive looking metal. You’re thinking, what am I looking for here? Why? You don’t need to have massive amounts of metal for it to be a good spade lug. And in fact, what we’re finding is oftentimes things that have a really long tang here can have the same problem that the bare wire has.

Right? So if I were to put this in and, and, oftentimes that really is the most natural way to do it. These are very close together. We would wind up with the same resulting problem. If I have long tangs here and long fingers here. They go together and they would dead short. So not a bad idea to have them actually match up to the kind of connect we have.

There are other ones, it’s fine. It, for example, if this wasn’t even here. Right, and we were just dealing with right and left and you really wanted as much metal to metal contact, as possible. Great. I’ll show you how easy it is. These just slip right over the threaded barrel and we tighten it down.

When it gets there, really, and this is where amateurs don’t understand. Once it starts to feel tight, it’s only starting to, and as you can see, I’ve just made about four turns after it began to get tight. You really want to bear down with your fingers and get it really nice and snug. Otherwise, the first time you move the speaker or the amplifier it’ll, tend to fall out.

And you don’t want that cause you again, can wind up with a dead short. So here we go. I’m just doing the flat ground one now and off we go works well again, I’m already into resistance and I’m having to really fight through this to snug it down tightly. And there you go. That’s the spade. Now there’s a second kind.

Now I’m really just dealing with the two most common ones. It’s called a five-way because it can handle a bare wire, it can handle a banana, which we’ll get to in a moment, spade lug, dual banana, and a pin which is sort of a surrogate for bare wire. It’s a whole connector that just results in a tiny little gold pin.

I don’t recommend anything really, but these two, the banana and the spade are the most common out there. And they’re common because they make good, solid mechanical connections and mechanical electrical connections, so you can really trust what you’re getting into. The banana so-called because

somebody thought it was shaped like a banana. These literally just press in. I love these. These are off of parts express. That costs almost nothing, and what I love about these is they’ve got a very cool little feature here where the wire goes into the back of the barrel here, and you’ve got a little set screw and it just makes it so easy to attach

sort of a normal, a 14 gauge 16 gauge wire to this. You know, if you’re not spending thousands and thousands of dollars on state of the art cables, these are fantastic. Just undo this little set screw. It’s hard to make out here. We’ll show you in more detail in a second. We just backed that thing out....

Connecting a REL high level to your speakers instead of the amplifier & why its an upgrade

REL Acoustics 2022-04-14 | This is a great question, and before I jump into the answer, it'll be bisected a little bit. Here's the only caveat. If you have a high-end amplifier, a balanced differential amplifier, which is a very different way of generating the signal don't do this. A balanced differential amplifier doesn't have a traditional ground.

It has two hots, one going out one going in. Again, one's positive, one's negative in polarity, and you could do damage. However, with the other 85% of the world, which has all the conventional class AB amplifiers class D receivers, all of that is fine. So here's what you do. Why do we use high level? We use the high level connection because what we're trying to get out of it is the closest thing to what your speaker sees.

Right? So start with the source, whether you're streaming, whether you're using, you know, an old school CD player or CD transport like I do you've got the source, you've got those cables you've got in the case of a high-end system, perhaps preamp and amplifier. Maybe it's a receiver, but all of those things in the aggregate are what actually drives your speakers.

So now let's jump back to the question. So now what we've tried to do is give you everything that will precondition. When I say precondition, I mean the dynamic signature. A small, not great power supplied receiver may not have the big dynamics that big separates would have, right? So when you listen to exactly the same subwoofer on the system with big high, current monoblocks, and you listen to it on an inexpensive little $500 receiver, the thing you'll notice right away is whether there's a subwoofer there or not

there's so much more jump there's so much more dynamics to it. That's what we want to build forward. So let's take it to the next step. What is left, but for the speaker cable, right? So we've gone through all of that stuff, the preamplifier to the power amplifier and the speaker cable that runs to your speakers has its own effect, especially if you're talking about a high end system.

So I actually think it's a really clever way to do it and I'll explain the best way to do it is to actually wind up with stereo pairs of RELs. Because otherwise you've got a really tricky bit of wire extension. Think about this. You've got a speaker here, you've got a speaker here. All's going well. John says, hey you can hook up to the speakers and it's arguably an upgrade, right?

Because now we've inculcated the signature of the speaker wire. This is exactly what your speakers are seeing and receiving. So now we hook up our high-level cables to that one for the right one for the left. It all works great or it doesn't work great if you have, if you're trying to do it with a single sub you're now need to extend the wire

for whichever channel that is. If the REL is closest to your right speaker, great I get it. Then you'll need to run a wire 8, 10 feet over to your left speaker and run it up the stand and connect it that way if it's standing on the speaker. So it gets a little bit weird when you're trying to make. Single brow with a stereo pair of speakers and you're trying to do it, but yes, you absolutely can do it.

And it actually is a, is a form of an upgrade by doing so, because now you've got the entire system whatever's being fed. Your speakers is now absolutely what's being fed. So great question. Thank you. By the way, guys, um, either reach right into this. If you're watching this on YouTube or, uh, reach out to contact us@rel.net, if you have any questions we're here to serve, um, we, we try to make this really accessible and fun and answer all those questions that are kind of populated around that don't think there are any stupid questions that never are.

Why We Typically Recommend a Stereo Pair or Dual Subwoofers for Home Theater and 2 Channel Systems

REL Acoustics 2022-03-04 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

The text below is a transcription of the video.

We have sold a huge number of subwoofers in the last few years as stereo pairs and customers these days are often just coming in and sort of demanding stereo pairs, but they don't exactly know why. So let's sort of demythologize what stereo pairs are about, why it's a good idea, and also how you can start in many cases with a single and add one to wind up with a stereo pair down the road.

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What stereo pairs do is really interesting on a technical basis what they can do is really smooth out the evenness of response throughout the room. So when you have two sources that are making low bass, they tend to create peaks and valleys, but if you place them properly, you can smooth things out.

Now, the real reason, the sonic reason especially for two channel that you want to do stereo pairs is, is it allows each side of the room, so your speakers are actually operating in asymmetry whether, you know it or not. There are no even rooms on the planet. I'm reasonably convinced. I've probably worked in 1500 rooms.

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Some of them very expensive. None of them are symmetrical, meaning that the right speaker and, the left speaker are actually seeing completely different effects. When you set up your speakers, whether you know you're doing it, or you accidentally stumbled into it, that's what you wind up dealing with. You somehow over the span of a month or two or fiddling with it figuring out how to get your two speakers to work in a room where this half of the room is very different than this half of the room.

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When you go to do a single subwoofer, you don't have that benefit. What stereo pairs allow you to do is get this subwoofer perfectly locked up to that speaker. That subwoofer perfectly locked up to that and when you do that, the coolest thing on earth happens. The stereo image, which most people's stereo image if these are the two speakers. They tend to have a kind of a U shaped soundstage. The lead singer is right here. No problem. He sounds great. The drum kits back here, but it starts to get a little murkier. Things like floor toms kind of go bump as opposed to a real snap, you can hear it hit and it pops.

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These things all exists between the two speakers and back, the further back you get the darker it gets in effect within the recording. When you properly set up a pair, you get the outer two thirds of the sound stage. You literally open this up and people can't believe it because in many cases they've been using these speakers and one of those subwoofers for two and three years. They know what their system sounds like and when you get those things opened up and you get those outer two thirds to work it's kind of shocking.

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It's troubling at a lot of different levels and then you start to relax and go, my gosh, things are exactly where they should be. I can hear the clarity in the foreground. Here's the saxophone. You could hear you know, the bell of the saxophone rotating around its spotlit mic. Things are layered exactly where they should be and you just hear so much more intimacy and clarity and depth into the music. So that's the why. I want to stress this. You do not have to start, unless less you own balanced differential mono blocks, and if you don't know what those are, don't worry about it because you don't own them.

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Balanced differential amplifiers is significantly different than a normal amp and those require stereo pairs right from the beginning. Some very strange things can happen if you try and take two completely different grounded amplifiers in their own chassis and connect them together.

Everybody else. You can start with a single there's nothing wrong with it. You'll get huge amounts of enjoyment out of something like these little T/5x's and run it and enjoy it for a year. Find out what it sounds like. Then add on the second one. Yeah, it'll take you 10 minutes to reconnect, but add on the second one. Retune each one, individually one sub at a time.

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Undo the, this one, come back over and do this one. Get it perfectly, made it to its mate, and then put them together. Do a little fine tuning. You'll just be shocked at the amount of clarity and improvement you get out of the entire system. Remember, we're not trying to get more bass. We're really trying to define clearer space and that's really the beauty of stereo. Several offers.

The Benefits of Setting Your Speakers to Large in Your Receiver or Processor & Why We Recommend It

REL Acoustics 2022-02-10 | Hi, John Hunter with REL here. We get a lot of questions about home theater setup and receiver settings this applies to the actual menus within your receiver. Some of the approaches that we use, which are quite different than the usual. A normal receiver comes set automatically to small. The delays are set to zero.

The gains per channel are set to zero and that's done to be as conservative as possible. Obviously, receiver manufacturers have to assume that a number of the people that are buying them are real rookies. They've never done this before, so they're trying to set you up for success. If you want the best performance, however, and it's a different way of going about it. What we do is we're adapting things from the actual professional transfer studio mode, where all five of the channels and a five, one are actually set to large to full range. This is a whole dialogue we're going to have with the receiver manufacturer shortly, but at the end of the day, the way that Dolby conceived of theater was from multiple channels that were individually controllable running full range. Their definition of full range is incomprehensibly difficult to do in the home. They expect 20 Hertz to 20,000 cycles, so full bandwidth at volume levels that are remarkable at 105 DB average, which means you're talking about peaks in excess of 115 DB.

That's allowed enough to hurt your ears, but the bottom line is if we can get all the channels as close to that golden mean as possible, we've got a chance to get what really is supposed to be heard coming out of the transfer studio. So, what we recommend is that you go to large on the speaker settings. Go into your audio video receiver, hit menu, go to set up, select speakers

and you're going to have a whole choice of things in front of you. Size is the first one you have to deal with and it will say small automatically right out of the gate. By setting it to large, you're expanding the range that the main speaker is supposed to be able to handle. Now, a lot of people go, gosh, aren't I going to blow my speakers up?

And the answer is, if you're an idiot, you can. I can assure you if you're determined enough, you can do it to speaker set to small too. So there's a certain amount of judgment that's required to play in this hobby. 99% of the people seem to have it because the exact same speakers that you use in your two channels set to full range, don't seem to get blown up all that often.

So, we trust our consumers. We trust our customers to have good judgment and know what they're doing and if it's simply too loud and you hear massive distortion, Prudent person would turn it down a little bit. The reason it's generally not an issue, and we've done this for 25 years, with six and a half inch, two way stand mounted speakers, right on up to the largest things.

Really small speakers probably should not be run at full. It's, just it's too much for them, but anything from your normal six and a half inch, two way works brilliantly. What we do is we ask you to set those to large. The REL then connects up high level and 0.1. I'll explain that in just a second. What the REL gives you is the ability to extend that speaker's envelope. Let's say a normal six and a half inch, two way that's well-designed can get down to somewhere around 50 cycles.

That's pretty deep. It's deeper than you'd think. It's around where the kick drum works, right, and the REL can then handle the octave or octave and half below that. And what that gives you is that Dolby golden mean of a speaker that's truly full range. Getting down into the twenties, even the very low thirties is a significant improvement on something that sort of dies off naturally at 50 Hertz.

That's all we're doing, we're advocating for what Dolby stood for, for years and years and years. There is however another signal that's needed, and that's the .1/LFE that's the RCA to RCA interconnect that plugs into the back of your receiver. It's marked .1/ LFE and cleverly ours is marked 0.1/LFE as well. When you do that, you have the best of both worlds, because you're able to have with a high level connection, a truly full range speaker.

And with the 0.1, those incredibly high intensity energy bursts that happen with special effects, especially in the military genre and science fiction stuff, which seems to be so much of the big colossus pictures you have both. You have a full range speaker now between your main speaker set to large and our subwoofer properly dialed in using the high level connection and when those suburb huge explosions happen, you also have a dedicated 0.1. In our case, our point ones have a separate gain control so you can get that perfect and your speaker blend perfect. So that's the reasoning for doing what we do.

How to clean a REL Acoustics Subwoofer as well as most speakers with a high gloss finish

REL Acoustics 2022-01-12 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Hey there, John Hunter with REL here, we're going to discuss actually how to properly clean subwoofers that are painted out in these beautiful high gloss lacquers. We see so much damage being done regrettably, often in Hi-Fi stores as well. The first rule is never dry polish anything that has a shiny finish.

Don't do it to your car. You will ruin the paint. Don't do it to our subwoofers. You will ruin the paint. Really simple materials just to do this basic cleaning. This is a microfiber cloth. I'm going to show you how to trim the edges to get rid of these nasty, sharp gouging edges. Now we're using Griot's garage calls it speed detailer.

We love the mother's stuff. We love the Meguiar’s. All these spray mist detailers are fantastic. They've got surfactants, they've got small amounts of synthetic waxes to leave a nice, shiny finish behind. But most importantly, it acts as a lubricant. So I've already trimmed off most of three of the edges

and most of this one. The reason I'm doing this is it's not like the cloth that they use, but the actual thread that they use to bind these edges on these borders to these cloths can really scratch things up. So we're just going to trim the last little bit and oh, these lovely things are like take a machete to your subwoofer.

It goes much faster if you want to destroy it they're awful so get rid of the tag first. And let's just cut this last little bit off. Get rid of those sharp edges they're often an acrylic based threat of some kind. It's like, could you not understand the purpose for a microfiber cloth? I mean, let me, let me be very clear

it's supposed to be soft and absorbent and do all these nice things. And these are, these are inexpensive cloths bought at a local auto parts supply store, nothing fancy at all. I'm going to just get a little bit on this one side, just so that we don't run the risk of getting anything dry and just a very quick light spray.

All right, this is it. Couldn't be simpler. We'll show you the side that's been done and the side that hasn't. When we get done here, we'll push in and you can see the results of this it's quite striking and it doesn't leave residue behind. Just really quickly rotating your cloth we turned . It inside out and finish up.

You know, we go into stores all the time. We're calling on them. We're helping them set things up and every morning those stores should be doing this to anything that's a piano lacquer. Not just our product, but also the high quality speakers. Often they got these beautifully styled and sculpted heads that are finished out in piano

lacquer. Look, take a little time, a little pride and get this right. It results in an absolutely beautiful product. And significantly you can do this over and over again. As long as you're using these basic tools, little high quality mist detailer, and a good microfiber cloth. Again, as I said, this is part of like a six pack that you can buy for about $10.

And as long as you cut off the edges they'll be perfectly adequate for the task. So one final tip. It happens to all of us at some point, you're going to be doing something you need to get over here and do this. And you accidentally dropped the cloth. At that point, stop put it into a laundry hamper, clean it, wipe it.

When we do cars, we just throw them away. You're never going to get the stuff that's embedded in these microfibers. There are literally billions of individual fibers in this. You're never going to get that stuff out of there. So as soon as you do it, just go, that's why they sell them in six packs. I'm reasonably certain, but if you know what you're doing, the moment that it drops on the ground it's completely unusable.

So that's it. If you own one of ours clean it properly, enjoy.

Should you buy a subwoofer from the same company that manufactured your speakers?

REL Acoustics 2021-12-30 | RELs are designed to be uniquely neutral, and pair with any system. Learn why buying the subwoofer from the company that produced your speakers isn't necessarily the right decision.

One of the questions that people find themselves asking when they go out to look for new equipment in the stores is if I'm buying and a complete set of speakers, shouldn't I just get the quote matching subwoofer from that manufacturer. And that the presumption is understandable. The brands are identical.

How could they not be the ideal match? And the answer to that question actually lies in the practical realities for many of these loudspeaker manufacturers. They are often working with diminished staff content, right? They used to have 15 full-time engineers. Over the years that's been whittled down to two or three.

And so what inevitably winds up happening, and I'm not making this up. This is directly from the CEO of one of the best Scandinavian speaker brands out there. And I asked him about it. He said, honestly, when we're in the field, we quietly recommend your products. So well, that's lovely, but why, why do you do that?

He said, honestly, our subwoofers. We do first the reference, right? So my very best engineers handle that and they spend maybe two years developing the new reference line. By the time that's done, the mid-level line has to be refreshed. So they're moving on to that. And in that line, there's five or six models.

So again, this is two years of very hard work going on. In the meantime, what winds up happening is somebody goes, um, our subwoofers are nine years old. We need to do something new. So the most junior engineer gets assigned to do the sub offers and it winds up not being a good fit. Now, there are some notable exceptions to that.

There are one or two companies that are actually really trying hard to do an occasional piece here and there. But as a general rule, having stuff that comes from the same manufacturer does not in fact confer what you think it does. The RELs are really designed from the get-go to be uniquely neutral. We're not favoring one brand over another.

The way that we design our filter sets the speed of our drivers, the way the cabinets are so inert and quiet means that we can pair up perfectly with virtually any speaker on the planet, depending on what is. We have solutions at every point, which is by the way, why we have lines at a certain price point, why we offer a T/5 a seven and a nine X, right.

That, that allows us to cover huge spread in speaker brands. That would be up to probably five to $7,000 a pair. Down to around a thousand dollars a pair. So that's a lovely spread there. The S's are designed to go with speakers in the two to 10,000, maybe even 12, $14,000 spread. And then as we get into our references, we get right on up to 120, $150,000, $200,000 a pair, depending on what you're doing, we can do six packs.

For example, we can do line arrays. So the solutions that we offer are uniquely neutral. They are not gender specific. They don't tend to favor one type of speaker over another. They're very easy to set up and they're really designed by the best we use exactly the same team of engineers and designers that we do for our big reference products on a little Tzero MKIII at a 10th the price that's really the, the explanation.

It comes down to the human factor, not the branding.

REL Acoustics Subwoofers - Designed to go beyond simply filling a room with deep and powerful bass

REL Acoustics 2021-12-06 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

We design subwoofers to go beyond simply filling the room with deep, powerful bass, although they perform that task quite magnificently. REL subwoofers elevate the performance of your speakers, supporting the bass and blending seamlessly into your system for a cleaner, fuller, more colorful sound, just as the artist intended.

How does a REL subwoofer add dimensionality and depth to a sound system?

REL Acoustics 2021-11-30 | Hey there, John Hunter with REL. Here, so a question arises, and it's how is it that subwoofers can produce so much dimensionality and spaciousness, particularly in high-quality two channel recordings, isn't space sort of conveyed by the main speakers.

0:30

Of course, it is in part. The simple answer is this, space the amount of time that year brain mechanism requires to decode larger distances happen as a function of bass and it's because the spaces themselves are tuned if you will to very, very long wavelengths. And that means very deep bass. So, for example, we were fortunate enough about six or seven years ago to tour Notre Dame in Paris.

1:00

And just walking into that space for first of all, it's just a little awe inspiring. It just is. If you haven't been there once it's opened back up to the public, you have to go. You walk in and with your eyes closed, you can tell you're walking into a vast physical space. Why? Because the ear brain is decoding. Just the sound of natural footsteps. You know, your boots on the ground send out a little mini concussion wave and it takes a certain amount of time to hit the ceiling, the walls, those beautiful stained glass windows, and return to your ears.

1:30

That time is your brain going, oh wow that was like 1.2 seconds. This is a really, really big space I'm in. Right? Deep bass produces extremely long wavelengths. I forget the exact number, but I believe a 32 Hertz note is somewhere in the 46-foot range. Alright, that's roughly 15 meters.

2:00

The amount of time it takes sound to travel 15 meters, 46 feet, and return to your ears is measurable. It's decodable. Your brain can tell the difference between that and something that happened very quickly. There's another part of it. So I'm going to get REL specific here. The way that we connect seamlessly with the main speakers is unique.

2:30

Not that other people aren't trying to do high level now, but we have all kinds of copycats trying to pile in, but the way that we do it is unique, and what it allows the ear to do and the brain to do is relax. When you get it right, and that requires crossing over significantly below the main speaker in order to have really a truly flat passover between main speakers and REL. When you do that right and you have a subwoofer going down, perhaps in the low twenties or in case of some of our big ones well below 20, it conveys a completely seamless, natural three-dimensional stage.

3:00

You're not aware of the location. So many theater-based subs it's two speakers and a sub there are 2 speakers during their business and occasionally there's a sound over there and your eye ear go, right there's the sub. If you, do it properly with a REL it's impossible to decode the location of it.

It just transforms your main speakers into truly full range devices. And again, it's that full range which we experience in everything we do naturally outside of listening to music.

3:30

On a recorded basis when you hear it done properly and you are able to get very close to 20 hertz, all of a sudden space is what opens up. And it's not just space because when you have that deep bass foundation underneath, you get complete restoration of all of the harmonics all the way up the next nine octaves. You just get these beautiful mathematically, correct. Because it's grounded, you get this beautiful set of rising harmonics that just restore it to the way your brain knows it happens in real life but can't when the speaker is truncated. Great question. Thank you.

Serie HT: Affordably Priced, Exceptionally Dynamic, Pure Home Theater Powered Subwoofers

REL Acoustics 2021-11-19 | Learn more about Serie HT at rel.net/product-category/serie-ht

Serie HT: designed specifically to answer the challenge of creating affordably priced, exceptionally dynamic, pure home theater powered subwoofers with the ideal combination of a lightweight, modern CarbonGlas™ drivers coupled to a powerful Class D amplifier that runs cool, producing extraordinary dynamics. Internally, we developed specially adapted home theater input filters that produce extremely flat bass down in the 20Hz range.

REL Acoustics Live Stream

REL Acoustics 2021-11-18 | ...

What is a multichannel home theater and how are Dolby 5.1 and 7.2 surround sound formats different?

REL Acoustics 2021-11-10 | Here's a question for people really getting into modern home theater for the first time in many years, or maybe the first time ever. The way most people begin is they wind up hooking up their television, maybe their set top box to their old receiver and maybe a pair of speakers, which by the way, is a great way to get started.

0:30

It really is. I'd so much rather see that, and we'll get into that in another video, but I'd so much rather see people repurpose and re utilize items they already have, and start to connect with how good television sound can than sort of devolving all the way down to the lowest common denominator and just going straight for the soundbar. There's so much more potential when you start dealing with proper speakers and decent placement. The next progression is to actually Dolby digital based system.

1:00

And the difference between that, for example, and a simple 2.1 system is just the number of channels you're using. So let's define this because people get a little weirded out, I think by the numbers, as soon as people see numbers and decimal points, there's, probably 70% of the population that freezes and goes, eh, uh, okay. I'm back in math class, relax. First of all, the easy part, the 0.1 simply refers to the subwoofer.

1:30

The number of channels and we'll get into a little bit more explanation what the channels do and what they're supposed to be doing is really quite simple. So the 5.1 or the 7.1 refers in its basic form to simply five speakers and one subwoofer. When you get to seven and seven is often indicated, actually as a 7.2. Often there are two subwoofers that become useful when you get up into that many channels. So let's quickly run through what five and seven are used for.

2:00

So in a basic 5.1 system, which is what really all film sound is still mastered in. The left channel front speaker, the right channel front speaker, the center channel speaker. We'll come back to that in just a moment. And then two surround speakers usually indicated as being at the rear of the room. So what do they do? The left and right main speaker. Kind of act as a unit. And what they're really responsible for doing is setting the scale, the size, the sense of largeness that's possible.

2:30

Not always doing it, just giving you the possibility to have very large scale. So when the camera lens pulls back, for example, and you're looking at a huge cityscape or something like that, the . Sounds that actually get added back into the, to the film soundtrack are there to convey that sense of vastness. And so if you pull back and you're in Wembley stadium, for example, and the bad guys running around with a sniper scope, you will hear Wembley stadium and that vastness in part begins with the left-right mains.

3:00

In fact, about 80% of the sound you will hear in most modern soundtracks emanates from the center channel. So a hot tip is do not skimp on the quality of your center channel. It's an enormous contributor to the quality of what you're going to be hearing. And the rear surrounds for those of you here who are musicians, the rear surrounds are almost like reverb.

3:30

The rear surrounds are there to produce the depth, the third dimension and place you inside the action. If space is happening behind you and space is happening in front of you, that places you in the middle of the . Three-dimensional aural reality. That tracks what's happening on screen. So that's what five one does. Seven one simply adds two more surround channels. This can be useful in rooms that are really long.

4:00

Although a hot tip, you will actually get much better performance out of five, one, and two additional surround speakers where you actually take, instead of having two speakers, just back over here, actually moving

two in a little bit and moving two further up and having all four of them act as just two channels. So it's a little confusing using seven speakers, but still using five one and getting each right and left pair to work brilliantly together. And that gives you a very big wraparound evelope. And really very easy to control with a just typical menu of a five one, try and keep these things simple.

You'll get a lot better performance out of keeping that the complexity out of it and the quality up.

Why REL Acoustics doesnt recommend using subwoofer isolation platforms

REL Acoustics 2021-10-26 | Hey there. It's John Hunter with REL back again. We get questions all the time for you folks. And one of the ones we got recently was why does REL, not recommend isolation platforms. Pretty simple. They, they do some things that are really questionable. We work very, very hard as a design team to get the height exactly right.

0:30

We, we work with different heights of feet. We experiment, we put them on elevators, we drop them down. We get it exactly right. So that the notes release perfectly. When you put it up, call it two inches on an isolation platform. You're decoupling the sub from the floor and in many instances, it's exactly the wrong thing to do.

I understand that there are times if you live in a for example, a small apartment, and you're trying to prevent bleed through from down below, you may need to do something extreme.

1:00

You may need to put down a foam pad or something, but as a general rule, isolating, putting it up on a platform will actually reduce the amount of deep bass increase the amount of upper bass.

And you'll wind up with a sound that's very light. People will write us and say well, it, it, it sounded, it sounded crisper and faster and that would be because it's no longer making bass. So just be very, very careful about these things. There are technical reasons that I have a hard time with isolation platforms as well.

1:30

When you isolate you're trapping the energy from getting out of the sub and into the floor and mechanically having it couple out into the room. Um, a lot of folks I think, are just used to tweaking. So when people buy a sub, they get playing with it. They love it. Now. Now they want to know what's the next step.

And, and, and the next step is almost never going to be an isolation platform. Probably the last place I would go would be looking to decouple this huge energy engine, right?

2:00

These things are massive amounts of movement, massive amounts of power required to produce these huge long wave fronts and putting it up on what amounts to a wobbly platform is exactly the opposite of where your thinking should be going.

So that's a little bit more in depth explanation. I'm sure most people want to know, but it gives you some background to it. As engineers. Our job is to get as much clean, deep bass into the room, physically propagating into the room as possible. And that's just not possible once you start putting them up on decoupling platforms.

Thanks for the question.

How to Setup and Dial in a Line Array of REL Acoustics Subwoofers

REL Acoustics 2021-09-28 | REL’s Chief Designer guides you step by step through his setup process to get the most out of a REL 6 pack.

Learn more about REL Acoustic Subwoofer Line Arrays at rel.net/rel-acoustics-subwoofer-line-arrays

4:36 Setting up and tuning the 2 bottom/anchor subwoofers

10:50 Setting up and tuning the 2 middle subwoofers

14:37 Setting up and tuning the 2 top subwoofers

17:59 Connecting all 6 subwoofers with line array connectors, RCA or XLR for LFE and stacking brackets

22:20 Fine tuning the line array with all 6 subwoofers connected.

27:20 Setting up and tuning the LFE signal if using the line area for home theater applications

Why Would You Want a Line Array?

Let’s explore the purpose to our Line Array approach because, let’s face it, if you haven’t heard one you might well think this is just about pure power and ludicrous mode output. While you wouldn’t be wrong about their potential for massive output the true reason for owning a REL Line Array has more to do with all the amazingly tactile qualities the highest end music and film sound systems aspire to.

The sound quality, visual presentation and sophisticated forms these deliver elevates merely very good systems to a whole different and better-in-every-way delivery of music and film sound.

What can be even more rewarding than buying a line array, is building one over time. By starting with just one or two RELs, and adding additional subwoofers as funds permit, you can better understand what each unit in the line array brings out in your system. You’ll be amazed at every step of the journey.

Until one experiences a REL Line Array it is hard to understand the profound leap from mundane to edge of the art these afford.

Comparing REL Acoustics T/9x and S/510 - Which Subwoofer is Right for You?

REL Acoustics 2021-09-20 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net
If you're interested in learning more about the T/9x or S/510.
S/510: rel.net/shop/powered-subwoofers/serie-s/s-510
T/9x: rel.net/shop/powered-subwoofers/serie-tx/t-9x

Why do we make the recommendations we make first of all, and why is it a problem if you start trying to break out of those and you're just looking at the dollars and cents of it and thinking about things like, well, I can get two for about the same price as one. Understand the very first thing you have to do when you're matching subs with speakers and this is so critical to getting your system to work properly is you have to get the speed.

0:30

If the sub isn't faster than your speaker, then it's holding up the parade and that's a terrible place to be. Those of us who've done this for years. That's the thing we hated the most about subwoofers as a category.

They were generally so slow and sloggy that yes, they made more bass, but at what cost to the system. So you had this sort of silly sounding thing that was like, boom happening after the tweet. Everything else in the music would come first and then there would be this drunk stumbling along and you had this huge loud deep bass.

1:00

We've gotten away from that. The RELs are all about speed. For example, a 510 is vastly quicker than even a T/9x and the 9/x's are so much faster than the old T/i's. So you can see the speed theme repeating as we get better we get faster. We also get deeper. We play louder. But the 510 has 500 Watts and that is a perfect filter that extends out and flattens the extremely deep bass. The 9/x can't do that. You can't do that with 300 Watts and ask it to do all these things.

1:30

So there's about a five or six Hertz difference between how deep a 510 can go down and how deep a T/9x can go down to give that some idea of where that sits in there. Three Hertz is an entire performance class jump. We're talking five Hertz, almost two performance class jumps going between a .9/x and a 510. That's huge. The amount of driven surface area, a 10 and a 12 versus a 10 and a 10 driven by 500 Watts versus 300 Watts. It's immense.

2:00

The kinds of speakers you can partner up with change completely. So what I suggest you do is take a look at what we recommend on the website.

If we've recommended it, that's the correct model. Go to our website, their headers up there, look underneath the tools and there'll be one for speaker partnering and go through that. Put your speakers in or one that's very similar to it. We don't put all the various brands there must be, you know, 2000 speaker brands out there these days.

2:30

But if it's a high quality, six and a half inch, double six in a medium-sized floorstander find something else that's very similar and plug that in, and you'll see if we recommend a 510, to 2 T/9x is not the same thing as one S/510. If we say the best piece is for a single 510
and if you have the budget or you get into a larger room, do a pair, do that. There's a huge jump off between those two. And we're really, really careful when we put those recommendations in senior staff have listened to them many times in many different kinds of rooms.

What does it take for a subwoofer to excel in both 2 channel and home theater?

REL Acoustics 2021-09-02 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

The sort of platonic ideal for subwoofers first is a subwoofer that can do dual duty. Handle music perfectly, and actually be a beast in theater also. We've gotten pretty good at this over the last 16 or 17 years of evolving the T range. This latest is the T/x and what makes it really . Special is its speed and attack in the bass.

So here's the middle of our range. This is an eight inch longer stroke than the original driver that is backed up by a 200 watt high current class, A/B amplifier, and what this entire range is about is allowing normal people to access sort of super bass.

0:30

We make very expensive units well above this, and they're really famous. These are by a huge margin, the best selling in our entire range and the reason for that is they're compact, they're beautiful, they're beautifully executed the weight, the substance, everything about these screams luxury.

1:00

And yet they can do both beautiful, elegant, even if you're just talking about chamber music, for example, in classical. Where you go, who would ever put a subwoofer with a string quartet?
I would right now, because you hear the hall, you hear the ambiance, everything takes on a set. It makes sense. Strings don't sound like they're strung with titanium. They're clearly playing this with gut bows. Everything matters and everything is full range in life and in music.

1:30

That's the part that we get, that a lot of people don't understand. Everything that we hear is completely broadband with 10 octaves plus of sound that we're just used to hearing all the time. An air compressor kicks on. We don't hear it and go, Hmm. I think I can hear some 37 Hertz sort of subharmonics in there. There's definitely a whole bunch of mid-range pink noise. We don't process it in that way, but our cilia in our ears are used to feeling that vibration and they know there's sub harmonic stuff going on there and it just lets you know, instantly, oh, that's the AC kicked on quietly in the back of the room.

2:00

Got it. Your brain is constantly processing these things. So for anything to work properly, you have to have full range. Talking about music, it's pretty obvious. What's less obvious is that if you're going to do theater brilliantly, you have to do music honestly. That's a really strange concept. Mostly when we're talking in theater, we're talking about how large the amps are, the 0.1 special effects and all that's great.

And all that's necessary, but in a two hour action movie, you're probably actually only hearing 0.1 lFE maybe 40 minutes out of that two hours.

2:30

So what about the rest of the movie? What about when the protagonists on screen are talking? Does their voice sound natural? Does the voice have correct resonance is it baritone. Yeah, but is he a baritone talking at the bottom of a 55 gallon oil drum?

3:00

That's not natural. Right? Or does it sound like a real natural male baritone talking with his female lead? And are they in a French restaurant? Can you hear the glasses? The space of the restaurant should be conveyed.

All of that is actually strangely enough, the job of the subwoofer. So we have to be able to do both and to do both. . We have unusual ways of connecting things and it all makes sense once you start to dial in, we are really well known for our high level connection.

3:30

In these days as a few more people and a few more people are starting to make speakers that are really good and active as well.

We make a great in fact, identical filter for the low level. So whether you come in high level, meaning coming off of the speaker, terminals on your amp or coming in low level off your pre-amp, you can get an incredible sound out of this. And by, by that, I mean, you can get a perfect blend between subwoofer and your main speaker. We just let the main speaker run full range. We can't think of any reason that we should be muddling around in the crossover theory.

4:00

The philosophy of a loudspeaker manufacturer. If you bought them, you probably fell in love with them. We are not there to mess with your speakers or your room. And then we also give you a completely separate input right here for just the 0.1 LFE.

And we even give you a completely separate gain control for that. So you can get the main system perfectly dialed in for music and for dialogue and movies. And then when those special effects come along, you can get that thing turned up as loud as your system can stand. Right, back it off just one click below that.

4:30

And you know, you can just rest easy. You don't have to be jumping around. There's no remote. You don't need one. You don't need to play around with it this way for music and that way for theater, it's an odd concept, but when you approach it naturally and it all begins to make sense, you realize that what these T/x's are doing is giving you the best of both worlds at amazingly reasonable prices.

The Road to REL Acoustics: Johns Pursuit of Perfection

REL Acoustics 2021-08-25 | REL Acoustics Lead Designer John Hunter takes you through his over 40 year long career in audio, and what drives his ongoing pursuit of perfection.

Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Why Do You Only Make Black and White Subwoofers?

REL Acoustics 2021-08-12 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Hi, John Hunter from REL here, we get asked occasionally, why is it you guys only make black and white. And, and to expand that we actually get asked, why do you guys make white woofers as well as black. We'll tackle that one in reverse order.

0:30

Unless you can say in all honesty that your walls are painted piano black lacquer, we make white woofers because they're all kinds of environments at home where what you're relating to is the off-white baseboards along the wall the beautiful, soft pastel tones of the wall paint or the plaster that you're going up against in an environment like that white can be really quite a nice relief.

The reason that so many people automatically buy black subwoofers is they train themselves to think that if my speakers are black, I need to do them in black.

1:00

Now there are all kinds of really good reasons to do a black subwoofer that really are kind of the exact inverse in terms of decor of the example

I just gave you where white was going to be a much better look. If you've got Tuscan tones, for example, beautiful dark ochres and browns forming a really rich sumptuous palette you don't want to have a white subwoofer. It's just too jarring. It's popping off against a very dark saturated background.

1:30

So plenty of reasons to go black, but start thinking of it as more your decision as a designer, how you want that room to look and feel right down to your choice of subwoofer color.And then it becomes very, very. simple your speakers may be 3, 4, 6 feet away, a couple of meters away from your subwoofer in a large room. So having them directly relate is much less important than having it actually fit aesthetically into the overall decor.

What are the differences between a speaker and a subwoofer?

REL Acoustics 2021-07-27 | So let's turn now to the differences between a conventional speaker and a subwoofer. And the context of that differentiation is important. There are people who, and many of them are pretty knowledgeable, but they're not necessarily thinking about the effects of the room and the placement of a speaker within a room and how damaging that can be to the potential excellent sound of a speaker. So we'll get into that a little bit.

0:30

So what occurs with a speaker is you have a variety of drivers typically, and they're running what I would describe as limited bandwidth, meaning that even a pretty good sized, very expensive speaker, because of the way that you need to place it to optimize all the different functions within a room, you're getting only a certain amount of bass extension in particular. You can with placement options and things, you can get a really well-placed image.

1:00

You can get, you know, highs to mids, mids, to lows, pretty well balanced and really focus up a big stage. And here's the problem, when you start talking about wavelengths that are multiple meters long, tens of feet long all of that goes out the window. What I mean by that is that the room itself is the single biggest enemy the people who build speakers and design speakers face. At some point you need more horsepower and you need things that are really developed, very precise things specifically to deal with bass frequencies.

1:30

And I'll say roughly 40 Hertz and down maybe 50 Hertz and down. An old friend of mine taught me something many, many years ago, and he said, John, I don't care how big the speaker is, I don't care how expensive it is. Every speaker above 50 Hertz is a small speaker. And what he meant by that was, and you look at these magnificent speakers, they can be 100, 200, $300,000.

2:00

But if you actually study what they're doing, ultimately, all the magic that occurs in those things is typically a six and a half inch two-way maybe a five and a quarter inch two-way that's capable of reproducing the spoken and sung language, the high frequencies, the air in a concert hall. That's all, the rest of the two meter tall behemoth, that weighs 600 pounds, you know, 250 kilos is just trying to deal with bass. And how they do that is entirely up to the person installing it in your home. And if they're an incredible artist, you may get good results.

2:30

The problem is is that the room itself can be so destructive to bass frequencies and unevenly you wind up with these huge peaks and valleys and you're going, oh my gosh, I just spent massive sums of money potentially on a very, very uneven sound. Subwoofers are designed with only one mission right. The other guys are trying to reproduce 20 to 20 kilohertz, which is a bit of a fool's errand when it comes to frequencies below 50 Hertz, nothing against them. They're brilliant.

3:00

But what, what you find with a great subwoofer is it's designed with massive amounts of horsepower. Typically far more than you would normally throw at the main speaker. Why? Because it takes a huge amount of current to both start and stop a really fast bass driver. Our smallest unit in the home theater specific range, for example, is 300 Watts and then they get powerful and they do that because they're asked to do so much. In theater, those .1 special effects are massive.

3:30

You can't cheat. You have to have huge amounts of power and you have to have drivers that can literally handle that power. And it's expressed fundamentally as stroke. So you have stroke being the ability for the driver to move in and out. So if you're talking about a driver that has to move two inches in and out, that takes huge amounts of power handling and it takes huge amounts of power. That cannot be replicated casually in an all-in-one box. Just doesn't work out very well.

4:00

Even at the ultimate levels where you start comparing what a great 100, 200, $300,000 speaker does. And you compare that to what we can execute with say a six pack of No. 25's . It's an entirely different level. We're able to actually get in, sublimate underneath it, and produce this really deep structural, foundational bass effortlessly. Get it tuned to exactly where it will blend perfectly with the main speaker such that you don't hear a REL Stack and a speaker.

4:30

You just hear a huge, huge, beautiful soundstage until you shut the RELs off. And then you go, oh okay there was a huge difference there. My God, put it back in. So those are some of the real differences. It comes down to power. It comes down to very specific filters. We won't get into too much detail about that, but the way that we cross ours out is a bit of an art form and it comes down to driver development.

Why REL Acoustics Stopped Offering Subwoofers in a Wood Finish

REL Acoustics 2021-07-16 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Often this is from long-term REL owners back 20, 25 years ago. We used to offer several different wood finishes. So we get asked all the time. Why don't you make wood anymore? The answer is really simple. We could get away with something in the late nineties that before and since has never been possible.

I don't know why, but for 10, 12 years, cherry was the wood the world over. That was the best arable would finish from about 1992 to probably 2005. And that was great. And there was a certain latitude within cherry. It could be a light, almost pinkish cherry. It could be a little darker. But everybody's sort of forgave and forgotten if it was off just a little bit in terms of hue and intensity, that was fine.

It's been a riot ever since. There is no world consensus on what kinds or, or types of words make sense. So for example, in Scandinavia they tend to run towards much cooler, whiter woods and white, not a great surprise. You get down into Southern Europe, Italy, Spain, you start getting some things like smoked oak really interesting a rich complicated look. That's a tiny subset of humanity that is doing that even within those countries. So, we can't do it. People go, yeah, but I own a pair of speakers and they're Rosewood. Surely Rosewood is something that has been seen as a luxury wood for hundreds of years. It has and the only problem is that there is really no working definition of Rosewood.

There are 20 major genus of Rosewood and they run the entire gamut from almost like a pink stained maple, very light, all the way to Santos palisander and that doesn't even take into account the way that different speaker manufacturers actually tint and color their role. Don't believe me, go look up Bowers and Wilkins Rosewood and put it right next to Monitor Audio's Rosewood, completely different tribes, completely different, or ostensibly originating from the same culture, right?

They're both British companies completely different. So we can't be in a position where we're being asked to make something that somebody has an idea. You have an idea of what Rosewood is and it's fabricated based on your own experience of your speakers in that room. We're delivering something that is a perfectly wonderful Rosewood that would class completely with your idea of it.

So that's one of the reasons that we've run into that situation where we just can't get into that business anymore.

REL Acoustics Subwoofers. Theres a REL for any room or application, because we only make subwoofers

REL Acoustics 2021-07-06 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Whether it’s a bedroom or a grand hall, a home theater or home office. There’s a REL that’s right for you. Because we only make subwoofers. That’s it. Nothing else. Nothing to steal our focus. We do only one thing in the pursuit of perfection, because we love sound and believe sound can move people more than any other sense.

What components make up a typical loudspeaker and how do you define a 2 or 3 way design?

REL Acoustics 2021-06-30 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Hi there, John Hunter with REL here, we're answering really basic questions that come up fairly frequently when we have new customers reaching out to us through email. The first one is very simple, what constitutes a loudspeaker? And it seems so obvious to people who've been doing this for years and years, but it's worth explaining to people and particularly why the different parts of a loudspeaker look so different.

0:30

I've got one right here. This is a really wonderful little inexpensive speaker from our friends at project over in Austria. I think literally they are $300 to $400 a pair. They're a huge bargain and the first thing that will strike you is this is a two way named after the two different drivers. The upper one is called a tweeter, and that thing is responsible for reproducing the high frequencies. This is really sort of a general do all.

1:00

More advanced speakers might have three speakers, a much larger woofer to handle the bass. This is more of a conventional mid-range size driver, but as you'll hear if you ever get a chance to listen to these it goes down pretty good into the bass. Well, to give you a range of the wavelengths that are involved with that. The size of the wave, a high frequency of 20,000 cycles is only about three quarters of an inch long. If you're on the metric system, that's 17 millimeters. Whereas the lowest bass note that we traditionally shoot for is 20 Hertz.

1:30

And at 20 Hertz, you're talking about a wavelength that's something on the order of 58, 60 feet long. So three quarters of an inch to about 60 feet, 17 millimeters to 17 meters. So in order to handle all of that huge change in length of frequency you need different kinds of drivers that are optimized for it. So again, tweeter, high frequencies, and generally speaking, the larger the driver, the deeper it will go.

2:00

A good way to think of a mid range is our voices are mid range. Human beings are incredibly attuned to mid range frequencies. It has everything to do with communication. It has to do with survival instincts. Can you hear somebody say something that makes you go left or right, and avoid a train for example? So we're really highly attuned to this and a simple way that a mentor taught me a long time ago, was it should be a little larger than your mouth at full extension.

2:30

And it gives you an idea of why that would be. So, the final element in there, speaker is something that's not seen. It's inside the cabinet. Typically it's incredibly important. It's called a crossover and the crossover is really responsible for things that make intuitive sense the moment you think about it.
If you were to try and take a tweeter or a high frequency driver that only can go down to on a very good day, maybe 700 Hertz you need something to eliminate the bass in mid range frequencies from coming through and destroying the tweeter.

3:00

So, we use a very simple component called a capacitor. Now capacitor quality vary enormously. You can buy perfectly credible capacitors in large quantities as a manufacturer for something on the order of 30 or 40 cents apiece. You can also get hand-built ones made in Germany that will cost you 700, $800 at retail. So it gets a little bit mysterious, but fundamentally what a capacitor's function is to prevent low-frequency from getting into a speaker driver that can only make a certain limited range of higher frequencies.

3:30

Conversely, you need a coil and it's literally what it sounds like. It's a wire that is spun around a core choke and the wire has to be coated with something called Litz coating in order to prevent it from bleeding through, so it actually turns it into a coil. And what that does is it suppresses the higher frequencies from getting down into like a woofer.

4:00

So, coil limits the highs while the capacitor limits the lows and when you have a mid range driver, you sort of need both, right? You need something to roll off the high frequencies, that's the coil, and you need something to block the lowest frequencies from getting through because that mid-range driver can only move so far and that's what expresses bass. So, you have to have two circuits in there, and then there are a whole different range of variations. Once you start throwing resistors into that and tuning things around this and that. And you have coils and caps and certain applications to highlight certain things.

4:30

But, but the bottom line is you need a network to separate those things out so each driver runs in its sweet spot.

Bring the Studio Home With REL The Worlds Most Awarded Subwoofer

REL Acoustics 2021-06-25 | Experience the fidelity, quality and passion of live music in the comfort of your home with REL.

Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

The Making of T/x - Follow 15 Years of Subwoofer Innovation That Created Serie T/x

REL Acoustics 2021-06-24 | Follow 15 years of subwoofer innovation that went into creating the new T/x Line as REL Acoustics Lead Designer John Hunter walks you through the lineage of the line, highlighting the advancements that came with every new generation.

Learn more about Serie T/x at rel.net/product-category/serie-tx

Introducing Serie T/x - Faster Drivers, Higher Output and Deeper Bass. The Best Just Got Better.

REL Acoustics 2021-06-22 | Learn more about REL Acoustics Serie T/x at rel.net/product-category/serie-tx

Introducing Serie T/x. Faster Drivers. Higher output. Deeper bass, yet still affordable & utterly reliable setting a new standard for performance at this price point. At REL, we do only one thing in our relentless pursuit of perfect sound, make the perfect subwoofer.

REL Acoustics T/5x Powered Subwoofer Overview

REL Acoustics 2021-06-18 | Learn more about T/5x at rel.net/shop/powered-subwoofers/serie-tx/t-5x

Hi, John Hunter with REL here. I'm our head designer, and we're here to introduce you to the T/5x. This is part of our new T/x range. This is baby bear. This is the entry-level into TX. Don't count it out just because it's a cute, diminutive little piece. It's really potent. I'll explain why. What we've got is a high current, 125 watt amplifier. All Watts are not created the same.

0:30

This is as though you were buying a 125 watt professional grade monoblock amp. Big power supplies, big transistors, lots of regulation, all the stuff nobody else wants to do. We have a down firing eight inch driver in the T/5x, and we do the down firing because a few things. First of all, it picks up instantly about three decibels, about 20% more output simply by having the floor.

It also provides a really good mechanism for forcing sound out throughout difficult rooms. So when you have a floor coupled buffer, it just allows the sound to sort of permeate effortlessly throughout the whole space works great.

1:00

The T/5x is an absolutely wonderful piece. It pairs with speakers between $1,000 to $3,000 in the U S maybe £800 to £2,500 in the UK. And we've upgraded every aspect of it compared with the T/i going forward. The T/5x uses a very high powered eight inch drive. As I mentioned before it's down firing. The T/x drivers were completely redesigned from the outgoing drivers. What we had to do was create something that was much more of a sports car suspension.

1:30

It's much stiffer. The surround is completely redesigned. It's a larger surround. It has more travel to it, more suppleness to it. So it's both quicker and stiffer. The spider, which is the hidden component to any driver is a pleaded role that goes and marries up to the back half of the voice coil and keeps that thing moving perfectly pistonicly at all times. We had to use completely new materials, new doping techniques to get this driver to work in these volumes.

2:00

And the net result is something that outputs about two decibels more than the outgoing one, not a huge amount, but the outgoing one played plenty loud to begin with. And more importantly, it's so much more articulate.

It's faster, it starts and stops on a dime. Things like echo decay patterns are much more evident on this, even with the down fire aspect of it. So we're really proud of this piece and the way that we've been able to evolve this design to take advantage of it. Larger cabinet volumes. 125 watt mono block that we use inside this as an amplifier. It’s an amazing piece for not a huge sum of money.

2:30

You get a high current class AB amplifier the full deal. Large power supplies. Large toroidal transformers. These heat sinks are not there for gifting. They're incredibly important to keep this thing regulated. We probably built somewhere north of 120,000 iterations of this model and it just keeps getting better and better. It has optional wireless that literally plugs in and snugs in here with a couple of lockables.

3:00

We have high level control. The high level input is responsible for connecting up to your power amplifier and we derive no power from it. Let me assure you, people go that's magic. It's true. We take the signal, the Sonic signal from your receiver, from your amplifier, and we use it to essentially preconditioned this piece.

So whatever you're using is how we would want to sound. The reason we want to sound that way is we're not there to sound different than your main system. If your speakers and amplifiers sound a certain way, this needs to sound exactly that way.

3:30

So we have that high level connection built into this piece, even though it's a very reasonably priced piece, we have the same fast 8 millisecond filters that we use in the more expensive models. This is an enormous amount of quality for a very, very reasonable sum. So, the cabinet is made with the same care that our bigger models are made with everything that goes into our bigger ones goes into this. So, for example, we use real musical instrument style bracing.

4:00

These braces are interlocking. They have finger joints where they pass over each other. They're deeply inset into the MDF. And they're made out of much stiffer material than the MDF itself. So they work the way the bracing should work. You need something stiff, breaking up the modes of something soft. The things you don't see, we do. The paint on these is incredible.

It's five coats, double coated. What I mean by that is our sprayers are taught to spray horizontally and then immediately after that vertically, all the entire cabinet, that's one.

4:30

So it effectively becomes 10 coats. We claim five, and what that gives us is incredibly flat mirror like finishes. Everything that you see that looks like aluminum is....

REL Acoustics T/7x Powered Subwoofer Overview

REL Acoustics 2021-06-08 | Learn more about T/7x at rel.net/shop/powered-subwoofers/serie-tx/t-7x

Hi, I'm John Hunter. I'm the head designer for REL. We're here to introduce you to not only the new T/x range, but specifically this the 7/x falls between the T/9x and the T/5x. Think of mama bear perfect here, and what we are using is an active 8 inch driver, and down firing 10 inch passive.

0:30

The passive gives you that extremely low floor rumble. The active gives you the quick agile tuneful stuff that we need in bass to be accurate and musically relevant. It's driven by a 200 watt amplifier with completely new limiters. And the limiters allow us to extract about 40 to 50 Watts more on peaks and very loud passages than the outgoing that used exactly the same model amplifier. So, we're getting more from the same kit as we get better as designers and engineers. This is where many people have their very first experience with REL.

1:00

It's incredibly critical to us that you get so much for so little. Everything is tremendous on this piece. We even offer, for the entire range, an optional wireless system called arrow, and it literally plugs in the back. Couldn't be easier to use. It doesn't require you to go download an app from the apple store or from Google. It's literally plug in, snap, a couple of switches and you're done. We're really proud of the T/x range and this is right there in the middle of it, doing everything you would want a sub to do. So, every time I start a project I start with the drivers. Mentors have taught me over the years that if we don't get the drivers perfect. Not good, perfect.

1:30

You'll be chasing your tail all through the project. This is a very long stroke, 8 inch active driver. It's very light. We use a special version of pressed pulp for an incredibly lightweight cone and we stiffen it with a very thin, we're talking five grams of mass for the dust cap stiffener here in the center. The center caps are critical to not only the stiffness, but also how it damps the main cone. We don't want echoes to keep rippling, false echoes, to keep rippling across the cone.

2:00

So, it's incredibly important to us that we wind up with a composite that's very quiet and very pistonic. We had to engineer a completely new suspension to this because the outgoing model was a little soft for using a larger cabinet volume. What we've got here is less back pressure and a bigger cabinet. And what that does is it allows us to use much different suspensions. And at this point, we're moving from say a well-tuned family sedan over to something much more like a sports car racing suspension on this piece.

2:30

It's much stiffer. The spider does a better job of keeping very long travel concentric. So, your voice coil is moving back and forth even further than on the last generation. We had to do the same kinds of things to the passive radiator. Passive honestly, took me longer to get right than the active. So, we worked on every little facet of the drivers. The net result is they are faster, louder, and they have more excursion for the same amount of power. They're just more efficient in every mechanical sense of the word and they sound better as a result.

3:00

So, our amplifiers are incredibly important, obviously they produce the power, but more importantly, they're also responsible for controlling the drivers. It does us no good if a driver has excursion outward and loses the plot because the amplifier doesn't have a stiff high current power supply. This is a real 200 watt mono block power amplifier. I stress that because there's a. It's been kind of a numerical inflation of numbers in the subwoofer came over the last 10 years.

3:30

And while power is a good thing, and more power is an even better thing. It's got to be really high-quality power. We also have our famous high-level connection. The high level of connection is responsible for actually taking the signal off of your main power amplifier. So, if you've got a receiver, the two channels that are feeding off to your left and right main speakers. We take that and without borrowing any power from it at all, we take that into our piece, and it allows us to sound exactly like your speakers.

4:00

It's really, really important to understand this. It's critical that whatever you have, if you have a medium-priced receiver that's great. No problem. Your whole system sounds like that and that will condition this.

REL are justly known for our cabinets and how beautiful they are. We use a different spray technique than most people. So, we use a double coat. When we go to sand and spray, each coat has one first, perfectly horizontally, and then immediately after that's done you turn the spray gun, and you shoot vertically.

4:30

What that does is it evens out the spray pattern and you get incredibly flat consistent layers of paint. And at the end, it's what allows us to then buff them out by hand and create this beautiful mirror like finish on these....

When could 1 subwoofer be better than buying a pair of RELs?

REL Acoustics 2021-06-05 | A pair is almost always better, but in certain situations 1 can be great, and you can always add a second down the road.

Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Hi, John Hunter with REL here, and we get this question in a variety of different ways. I'm going to turn this one around a little bit. So, we often get asked about stereo pairs and they're fantastic. If you get it just right. If you properly matched the sub with the speakers in and really set everything up right, it's fantastic.

0:30

It's really special with these modern RELs that are so fast, but there are times when you're better off with one than two. Why? If, for example, you want really big prodigious home theater bass, and you're sitting there going, gosh. I wonder if I should do a pair of say S/812s or should I just do a single 212/SX? I mean, they're kind of the same budget. I just don't know which way to go? If you want big and when you want big, you want big.

1:00

A 212/SX will play astoundingly loud and drive huge amounts of sound everywhere in anything but the largest theaters. So that's a classic example. You go, well, this is what it was made for. The 212/SX is made to be that Herculean big experience. Don't mistake two S/812s for one 212/SX. They're very different things. Does that make sense?

1:30

So there, we're not talking about the finest industry reproduction. We're talking about something that can do stereo just beautifully, but really can make incredible amounts of air movement that really sells big, special effects in theater.

Same thing goes on. If you need a 510, you need a 510, two of these will not add up to a 510. If that's the speaker match that is called for, if we set it on our website, that's the right thing. If you need to come back in two years and buy the partnering S/510, so you finally have the stereo pair. Great. It's one of the most beautiful things about stereo pairs.

2:00

You don't have to do them all at once. In many cases, you can do it at that time. And then you have a whole nother wonderful experience a year or two from now as you get the second one. Finally go, oh my gosh, those guys are right. That's quite a bit better.

REL Acoustics T/9x Powered Subwoofer Overview

REL Acoustics 2021-05-27 | Learn more about T/9x at rel.net/shop/powered-subwoofers/serie-tx/t-9x

Hi, my name is John Hunter. I'm REL's head designer. We're here to introduce you to our new T/x range, which we're very, very proud of. The T/x falls below S and Reference. And because of that, this is an extremely important range to us. This is where many people have their first experience of REL. So, it's really important to us that you have a fantastic experience. The T/9x, which we're looking at here is the flagship of this range. And even though it's the flagship, as you'll see, it's pretty compact. This is not a huge cabinet.

0:30

It's driven by a 300 watt amplifier and dual 10 inch drivers. The one you see here on the front is active and has extremely long stroke.

And on every inward stroke, it drives a down firing passive radiator on the bottom. And the point of the passive is to fill out the lowest frequencies that sort of creep along the floor. T/9x is a brilliant piece. We'll walk you through some of the specifics right now. The 10 inch drivers used on the T/x took months to pull together.

1:00

The reason for this is simple. We're trying to get more dynamics out of this. These needed to be faster on the one hand. Great, but they also had to be able to handle more power, more about that in a moment, and they have more stroke. Why? Because we're dealing with a desire to get deeper bass, more output, and in order to do that we had to completely retune the suspension.

So, what we have here is a very high power and very high, current 300 watt amplifier. This is a class A/B design, a class A/B is a classic amplifier with large transformers designed to output tons of current. And why is current important?

1:30

Think of voltage as something that will get a driver started current is that which will stop it and keep it under control. We prefer power supply designs that are really high current, because it's important to us to have that start, stop control. What's significant about this we're using, by the way, exactly the same amplifier that we were with some revisions in the old models. The reason we use these is they are dead nuts bulletproof. We have hundreds of thousands of these in production and almost none of them fail. So reliability is incredibly important to me. It just, it can't be any other way.

2:00

So, we wouldn't casually move away from this. What we're able to do though, as we've learned through doing the reference models, through doing two almost three generations of Serie S, we've gotten very, very good at titrating the last little bit of power in our limiters. So, with the ability to get all the power out we're probably legitimately delivering about 60 Watts more to the driver on big peaks with this version now with the new limiters that we've developed versus the previous model. So one of the things REL is really famous for is our high level connections. This connects right here and we supply actually a 10 meter cable, which for those of us who don't know metric it's about 33 feet.

2:30

What that allows us to do is connect up to your power amplifier, the same thing that is driving your main loudspeakers. We connect up to that. We take no power. I want to be very clear about that. We simply use that as a preconditioning signal to feed into our big 300 watt amplifier. And what that allows you to do is have a perfect seamless blend when you get it right.

3:00

It's exactly the same signal your speakers are receiving, and it allows us to do a perfect, seamless blend of our sub with your speakers. When you do it properly, when you crossover properly, you cannot hear where one stops and the other begins. It's just a perfect handoff and to get that right, our filter network up here is incredibly quick. Eight milliseconds, which I would guess is as fast as anything, maybe faster than anything else out there, except our reference units which are four millisecond.

3:30

So very quick, very fluid. The musicianship that comes through is incredible and that's critical to us and it's critical in home theater. If I could just say that going back 15 years, 16 years ago, one of the things I was committed to doing when we purchased REL was taking a category that was back then brutally ugly and really making them something that people could feel proud to have in their home. With these latest ones, I dare say, we've really taken it to an entirely new level.

4:00

So, in conclusion, the REL T/9x is the flagship, and It's an unusual flagship in that it's really big, powerful, and very, very fast, but we've managed to slim it down to give it the appearance of something that's really a medium, very comfortably medium-sized chassis.

It's not big, it's not blousy. It's really quite tight and crisp. Given that these lovely radii that are almost a neoclassic form these days brilliantly finished and five coats of hand rub black lacquer. Everything that you see here, feel on this as authentic. It's fast, it really...

Comparing REL Acoustics T/5x and Tzero MKIII - Which Subwoofer is Right for me?

REL Acoustics 2021-05-20 | Learn more about T/5x at rel.net/shop/powered-subwoofers/serie-tx/t-5x and the Tzero MKIII at rel.net/shop/powered-subwoofers/serie-t/tzero-mkiii

Hi, John Hunter from REL here. We get this question far too often, so we thought we'd answer it for you. We got the baby of the line, the Tzero MKIII, and the question is, how does this compare up and how do I make that decision between that and the T/5x. Very different pieces, even though they're both relatively compact. So how best to think of these? A Tzero is a phenomenal piece for things like studies, libraries, relatively small rooms.

0:30

And if that's what you've got, fantastic because we've got you taken care of. When you move up to a 5/x you're talking about something that can fill sort of an average suburban living room. Something along the lines of a 14 by 18 foot living room or even larger. Where I live, which is an open floor plan and it seems to fill even that space. I mean, gosh, you must have thick end of 1200 square feet on that floor and it's all communicative and yet it works just fine.

1:00

So, this is a much bigger, more serious piece that fills much larger spaces. It also works with different kinds of speakers. You're really better off with the Tzero pairing that up with relatively small speakers. Why? A six and a half inch, even when designed to really do deep bass will go up and reach better with a small speaker. So there are all kinds of speakers that use four, four and a half inch mid woofers and a tweeter that doesn't go deep enough, really to connect up with something like a 5/x.

1:30

So this one will go literally up, pretty clean nature, to about 55 or 60 Hertz. That's very different than a 5/x, which wants to see a crossover somewhere probably in the 40, 45 Hertz region. And so, strokes for folks, right? You have something designed for smaller rooms designed to really perfectly couple with much smaller speakers that themselves don't go down and produce much of any real bass. And you have a 5/x, which is a really proper state of the art subwoofer designed for smaller and medium-sized spaces.

2:00

In terms of the speakers that would partner with. This piece works well with speakers up to probably the two to $3,000 range. Here, you're probably best left at a thousand dollars and below in terms of having it mate properly. That is a broad assertion, filled with all kinds of gaps. What we don't want people doing is, is buying this because they're looking at a little tiny thumbnail on our website or whatever and imagining the two of these are kind of sort of very similar because thumbnails don't allow you to see the size. So we've made it a point that you can actually see both of them side by side and realize just how much more substantial this piece is.

Why do larger subwoofers typically produce more output and deeper bass?

REL Acoustics 2021-05-13 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

So this is a really simplistic, creation. Why do large physical volume subwoofers or for that matter, let’s link it to driver size tend to produce deeper bass. When you go to reproduce deep bass, and I’m going to define deep bass as let’s call it below 40 Hertz.

0:30

To give you an idea that we’re getting down into an area where there may be a dozen instruments in the entire world that their entire tonic range operates between say 20 Hertz and 40 Hertz.

Hertz, by the way is number of cycles per second. Mid ranges tend to be up in the hundreds to low thousands, high frequencies go from a few thousand on up to 20,000. Middle bass tends to be pitched around 60 Hertz. Just trying to give you guys a frame of reference for what you’re listening for when you hear it.

1:00

So, a kick drum is typically pitched between 48 and 55 Hertz to give you an idea, and most people think that’s low bass. Low bass actually exists below that. So, starting at about 40 Hertz and down, you’re, you’re really talking now about low bass, and the range from 20 to 30 Hertz and below 20 is where it gets very, very, very difficult and typically fairly expensive.

1:30

The advantage you have with just greater surface area, a 12 inch versus an eight inch. You’re talking about something on the order of two and a half times as much actual circular surface area. There are really only two ways to motions, right? You either have size or you have stroke. It’s either moving in and out a great deal and there are limits to how much that can do, but in and out movement.

And then the size of the driver itself. What people don’t understand is the smaller the cabinet, the more restrictive the air spring is.

2:00

I’m talking only are sealed box designs now. So, when you have a small type cabinet, the louder you are playing it, and typically it takes louder at lower frequencies for it to maintain its sense of loudness relative to the music. That’s just a function of our ears. They drop off in efficiency at very low frequencies. So, you are now fighting on the out stroke. You’ve got this huge room, you’ve got a room that’s a couple of thousand feet, 10,000 cubic feet. In the case of a small, say one foot and smaller sub as you stroke back and forth the out stroke, no problem.

2:30

You’re loading into 2000 to 8,000 cubic feet. The in stroke, you’re loading into a cubic foot or less, and that becomes an increasingly stiff resistance on it. So, you’ve just got to kind of balance those things out. And you’ve got to balance that out against your main speakers. If your main speakers themselves are really high quality, main speakers that go down into the 40 Hertz range or below, you’re going to have to have a really serious subwoofer.

3:00

Meaning it’s going to have state-of-the-art drivers, state-of-the-art amplifiers, and a cabinet large enough to take advantage of those of those things. There’s just no way around it. So some of this will come about naturally, as you start to define the needs of your system.

We’ve sort of made our name over the last 30 years building really, really high quality, small to medium sized subwoofers for the most part. At the moment, I believe we have 10 different models and seven of them would be described as medium or smaller.

3:30

We only have three up in our reference range. The 212, G1, and the No. 25 that are truly large subwoofers. Everything else is really scaled to fit into someone’s idea of a normally sized living room. Everybody has different definitions of that, but that’s the basic relationship between size, output and how deep it can go. You just, at some point, get into limitations of how much or how little cabinet volume you have available to yourself.

4:00

You know we’ve got different tricks for coaxing more out. If you have a relatively small space and you throw tons of power at it, like we just did with a range of ours, we can essentially force the driver to act a little bit better. But you really want to stay within sort of the natural relationships of driver size, stroke and cabinet volume to keep it all in balance.

REL Acoustics Wireless Subwoofer Setup Tips and Best Practices

REL Acoustics 2021-05-03 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Hi, John Hunter with REL here, and we're going to address the really thorny issue of wireless in your home. Understand you may have 30, 40, or 50 devices these days that are hooked up. Wirelessly, right off the bat, you come in from the street and you've got some kind of a wireless modem that is then sent through a WIFI system then wirelessly ships it all over the place.

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Understand that that is a huge radio station. At its at its most basic level everything that's wireless at some point devolves into being nothing more than a very, very fancy FM radio. So understand that when you have a big WIFI transmitting unit and it's any workload, most this, or even the, the, the, the ones that are so-called repeaters, most of them mean stays or what's called a mesh network.

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Most of them, if it's receiving, let's say you put one in your upstairs and that's supposed to be feeding the six or seven rooms upstairs so your kids can be working on it. That is both a receiver and a transmitter. Hence, it's putting out noise pollution. The main one, if it's anywhere near our transmitter is a huge source of noise pollution.

First of all, understand that you, and any physically large bulky object are impediments to good clean WIFI or wireless transmission. Not because you're some huge, massive human being, but because we're 97 plus percent water. Water is a really effective shield for RF. Not good.

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So, what do we want to do if we're going to be in a room that’s a publicly used room. Maybe it's just your family most of the time, but you know, eight, 10 times a year, maybe you have parties or guests over for a dinner party. Get it up. Assume that you're working with line of sight. You're not, it's a very broad broadcast beam, but get it up and over the height of most people. It will help ensure that when you do have that occasional dinner party, you're still able to get that beam past most people's bodies and have it get out to your REL.

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There's a working minimum. You want to keep a minimum of three feet between any high-quality transmitter. Now you may be saying, well, hang on. I don't have this problem with any other stuff. Why am I suddenly having a problem with your system? You know, my WIFI works. I got eight devices in the same room and the answer is really simple.

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Wi-Fi and all the rest of that clutter has the luxury of making handshakes, electronic handshakes constantly and re verifying. Saying, hey, how are you doing? Who are you? Oh, I see your, this, uh, transmitter made by Netgear. Got it. Nice to meet you. I'm over here doing this thing and they're doing this and that's great. And the only problem with that is in music we're doing this right now.

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So, all of that handshaking and re-verifying and resubmitting, the connection that works great for wifi. You just missed two bars of music. I'm sorry. It's all over. That's the problem. So how do we do what we do? And we're not the only ones beginning to build these wireless systems, but any good musically based wireless system is going to be able to handle everything in real time. With zero compression, digital loves to be compressed and if it's just data, it's a wonderful tool. You take huge bunches of information and you crush it down into this tiny, neat little ball.

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You can toss it wirelessly wherever you want and when it gets there, you just expand it, open up this thing and there's your life lovely, but we can't do it with real time music.

We're hardwired with almost no latency between an amplifier and a loudspeaker on this channel. We're hard wired to that. REL. No problem. We're wired to this left channel speaker and oh boy, we're wireless to the left channel sub because whatever reason. Maybe it's a tile floor and we didn't want to have a cable dressed across it. Whatever, we have to be able to be as fast as that copper wire.

What RCA cable should I get and what qualities are important when picking an LFE cable?

REL Acoustics 2021-03-29 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

First thing is high quality connectors. The connectors themselves are super critical. The length that you can run an RCA. Remember that we're talking about relatively low voltages here. I would say on a practical basis I probably wouldn't run an LFE that was an RCA based longer than about 30 feet.

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After that, I would switch over to XLR. XLR connectors are wonderful. They, they are big stable locking connectors. These particular ones are from our friends at Cardas that were kind enough to loan us these to us. With an XLR, you get these things in everything clicks and locks in place, and they're really good.

They also have two different hot conductors. So you're able to send a more robust signal with a dedicated ground. It keeps everything very, very quiet. You know in studios, I run these things 2 to 300 feet without losses.

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So if you’re in a really big theater, one of these things where you're going to be having multiple theater seats and everything including a popcorn maker built in I would encourage you to switch over to XLRs.

It really is more appropriate. For most of us, 30 feet is a pretty good, long distance. These will work fine. One thing that this doesn't have that I like to see on the cables we recommend is an additional outboard ground. Not because this doesn't have a ground. Typically the shield, this outer barrel carries the ground and the hot goes through the center pin.

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With an additional ground wire it just lets you get rid of potential ground loops. So what's a ground loop? A ground loop is just when you have multiple grounds in the system. And believe me, if you're talking about a typical audio video receiver, there might be two or 300 ground points that exist.They’re so complicated internally, and so it's nice to have that extra little insurance policy. When you do a search for a wire look for one with an additional or external ground wire.

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Not a big deal. If the cables that you already have don't have it. You can absolutely go down to or just order online some inexpensive 16 or 18 gauge cable. A wire, not even a cable, just wire, and have a separate ground run just parallel to this. Heck, just take some, some blue painter's tape and tape it around this thing, and it can just mimic the flow you already have. And that allows you to connect up to, for example, a chassis ground.

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One of our favorite receivers the Marantz has all these beautiful copper clad screws on the back. The neat thing about those is they're all grounding points. So if you have a little bit of noise, you're going, gosh, how do I get rid of that hum? You can just tap to that. Tap to a screw on the back of your REL or just touch the, the LFE barrel, the ground barrel on the LFE input and potentially get rid of it. So those are just some of the basics.

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I'm not going to get into the Sonics of trying to assess you know, some of the three or 400 different LFE cables out there sonically, but these are the things we look for. Good high-quality connectors, good shields. Shields tend to minimize the amount of noise and hum that can get into a cable, and then an external ground wire or drain wire.

What is room pressurization and how does it affect the performance of your sound system?

REL Acoustics 2021-03-11 | Let's address the issue of room pressurization. We get customers who don't know what that means at all, and we get people who are extremely knowledgeable and extremely sensitive to it and worried. It comes at us in a bunch of different ways. If I get subwoofer X of yours, am I going to be over subwoofering my system or my room?

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So let's first of all define the room pressurization issue and it's a really important one and it really relates to your main system and what a great subwoofer can do to help that issue. So, most of the time, whether conscious or not and a lot of times, it's unconscious on our part. We have a tendency to turn a song up or a system up to the point when we love this thing.

Oh, I want to hear this. You turn it up to the point, whether you know it or not, to the point that the room actually pressurizes.

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Most of us stop there. There there's that last 2 to 3% who, you know, if a little bit's good, a whole bunch more has gotta be better. And there's no help for them. But when you talk about room pressurization, in natural events, when you hear natural music occurring in a real space, there is a natural pressurization that occurs, and the interesting thing is it can be at very low volume.

Why? I'm going to take a symphonic orchestra just to give you an ultimate example.

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You can have something like a very quiet peace and the timpani just barely taps it with his mallet and you get this pretty explosive sound relative. Why? Because the contrast is massive. And also, it's a pretty large physical structure that's being excited.

A concert bass drum, gosh, those things are three and a half feet in diameter. They got two skins. It's the equivalent of about, you know, three 18 inch drivers happening at the same time.

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So, it doesn't take a lot, and they have concert halls that are designed to project this out into the audience.

At home some of the things you have to worry about and deal with every day. Open floor plan houses. You know, the kitchen gives on to the, the dining room, the dining room bleeds into the living room. Suddenly you're trying to excite 8 to 10,000 cubic feet of airspace. So that takes larger subwoofers.

Second thing, stereo pairs matter, just generically.

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They are intrinsically better and sort of more pistonic. We can really get the three-dimensional stage popping alive, easier and more smoothly through the room when done properly. Stereo pairs help pressurize. Now I'm going to talk about the other end of the curve.

And this is something that people almost never talk about. There's a tendency in subwoofers, there's this dialogue about how loud it can play and how hard it hits and how much room pressure you get out of it.

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That's great and we do that pretty well, but the part that nobody really understands is especially late at night or with soft pieces of music, how quietly you can listen when you have a great sub.

Especially when connected up high level, that really blends seamlessly with your main speaker, because you can hear room pressurization even at relatively low volumes when the system is adapted properly. It allows you to listen to a much broader variety of music at the levels that they would be listened to, and it allows you to listen at times when perhaps you wouldn't be able to.

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For, for many young families, you know, by 8:30 over and out, you can't play the system because to have it be fun, you have to turn it up so loud. All of a sudden you don't, you can be playing at a moderate volume or even a very low volume, and you'll still get that body that richness, that warmth, which is the result of great room pressurization.

What Size Subwoofer Will Pair Best With My Speakers?

REL Acoustics 2021-01-29 | Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

We get it in a variety of different ways. How big a sub do I need? How big a sub do I need for my room? Do I need a 12 inch? Really what people are talking about is trying to match the scale of the performance of the sub to the scale of their system and their room. So a bunch of factors pop up here.

When we start talking about that some of it is just pure, dumb, common sense. Right, we're looking at it going, okay sir, you've got an eight by 10 foot room maybe a 15 inch sub is not right for that space. Then we got into actually matching with the main speakers. So, understand this fact, smaller subwoofers tend to be quicker and they also tend to have greater reach up.

So, there's a natural inclination to run a small piece with very small speakers. Let's say we've got a pair of nice little speakers that run out of gas completely. They're gone, they're done by 60, 70 Hertz, which is not particularly deep. Would you try and put it with a really powerful, say a 12-inch design that really is fantastic from 20 to 40 Hertz, 45 Hertz. And then as it starts to get up into higher frequencies, it itself is rolling off. So, you've got two different curves going on here. The main speaker is dying away up high, and the subwoofer is really good down low and then it also dies off at some point.

You may have a half octave gap, so it's extremely important you understand small subs for small speakers. That is a generalization, but a pretty good one. So, let's say you get into the intermediate, which is where we get a lot of this crossover. You have a good pair from a well-respected speaker brand, let's say it's a relatively modest floor stander. Sells for a couple of thousand.

It’s got maybe a couple of six and a half inch drivers and a tweeter, 30 inches tall. Now we're getting into this crossover area, right? Is it right with a 10 inch or 12 inch? I'm making huge generalizations when I say this, and the answer is both may work just fine. It starts to get into your objectives.

Be honest with yourself. Are you somebody who really values super, super dynamic loud home theater performance, having a little extra isn't the end of the world. We make sure all of our subs and I want to emphasize this for our home theater subs. A lot of audio files cringe when they hear the term home theater subs, because they're so used to hearing big, soggy, slow, heavy sounding pieces.

We don't do that. Everything we build is quick. So when you start looking for example, at our 10 inch version or our 12 inch version, both of those will work in terms of speed and immediacy really well. It really starts to get down into personal preference. I can tell you that there is in general, a correlation between physical size and how deep something will go and in general how loud it will go.

So, when you look at one of our little babies, a Tzero MKIII, It's about a 10 inch cube. It's not going to play anywhere near as loud as say an HT/1003, which is roughly double that size. Great question. Thank you.

REL Acoustics Subwoofer Cabinet Design & Why its Critical for Performance

REL Acoustics 2020-12-23 | Learn about the attention to detail that goes into REL Acoustics cabinet construction, and how bracing plays an essential role in quieting vibrational modes.

Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Cabinet Bracing is a particularly esoteric part of loudspeaker design. I wound up working in a music store back when I was around 16, 17 years old and I was fortunate enough to work with someone, which was kind of unusual at the time, who was truly a luthier. This guy was an astounding guitar builder.

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I just had a lot of questions and I think he sensed that I was legitimately interested so he taught me a lot about bracing technique, and I use it to this day in everything we do at REL because if you don't get it right what you wind up with is a resonant drum. The cabinet itself is the single biggest detriment to what the driver and amplifier are trying to do if you don't get it right.

And by the way, what is a brace? So a cabinet you all know is a six sided piece that has a driver bolted into it. Sometimes it's firing forward. Sometimes it's firing down and the cabinet itself, as I said, sounds like a drum.

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If you were to knock on it with your hand, you'd hear it. It's important that we get rid of that signature. If we don't, it's going to just shadow everything that you put through it. So, we start with high density fiber board on our least expensive pieces. When you step up to our middle ranges, we move up into plywoods.

We use actual laminated woods and when you get up to our reference grade stuff, we're using laminated hardwoods that are pressure impregnated with epoxy. It's an enormously expensive way to do it, but it results in much better quieting.

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So with the bracing, what you wind up with is breaking up every one of the primary modes. If the side panel is X by X it has a certain signature. You listen to it, you tune for that. Same with the top panels, same with the other side panel and in some cases, we even go so far as to brace the front and rear panels. But what I can tell you is that it is immediately and evidently obvious.

What Makes a REL Acoustics Subwoofer Different? Lead Designer Explains What Sets the Company Apart.

REL Acoustics 2020-12-21 | Join REL's Lead Designer and discover the features that set REL's home theater subwoofers apart from the competition.

Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net

Hi, John Hunter with REL here. Let me walk you through a little bit about what makes REL different as a super subwoofer supplier and the things that make us unique. The way we approach this entire endeavor is completely different than anybody else in the world of subwoofers. First of all, what's really difficult to do is to get a subwoofer to seamlessly blend with your existing speakers.

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To sort of chameleon-like adapt to it and simply extend the low frequencies down in a way that's natural, holistic and allows you to hear the entire universe of that recording in a way you've never experienced before.

How does that relate to home theater? All of it, all of it translates over to home theater. Here's the problem with home theater sound, in many cases, the special effects you're hearing you've never, if you're very lucky, never experienced before. In many cases you’ve never heard the sound of a two 23 round going by your ear, but in the movies, we get to hear that effect.

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You get to start with that big, fast crack as the gas comes out of the barrel and then you hear the zip as it goes by your ear. The concussion of a bullet exploding out the end of a gun barrel is unbelievable. And if we get it exactly right, it makes you duck.

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All of those things happen when we get music right that's the funny thing. Why? Because all of the sounds we're used to hearing in real life have their basis in this kind of organic naturalness by doing what we do. You ground all of the movie in naturalness so that when the special effects happen, they're startling.

So, let's talk in specifics about some of the things that make our approach to subwoofers very different than anybody else's. Right off the bat this connector, which is different than you're used to seeing, most subwoofers of course just plug in with an RCA into one of these.

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We also offer something, it's not unique other people are starting to copy us, it's called a high level input. A high level input actually takes this plug connected up back to your main amplifier, to the exact same terminals that feed your loudspeakers. Why? Because that is the signal that your ears ultimately are going to hear.

That's what's actually presenting the signal to the speakers and we derive that. And it's the only way to get it as complete and natural as possible. There are plenty of engineers that will argue that the only way to do it is to use these little RCAs.

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We offer those too, and that's fine. And if that's how you'd like to do it, you can do that, but it costs nothing to listen does it. And if you do it our way, we can guarantee you that you'll hear immediately a great deal more naturalness to the presentation of the entire system. So, starting with how we connect going through our filters, going into the amplifiers. Our amplifiers typically are not multi thousand watt behemoths.

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Boy, when I read some of our competitors stuff I’m like, oh my goodness, why does that person need a 3,500 watt amplifier? Pretty simple, there are no free lunches. If the moving parts, this driver, is the element that actually makes sound right. It moves back and forth. This pistons in and out, and the moving parts of this on a REL are vanishingly light. Why is that important? Because that's the amount of amplifier you need to excite this, to get it moving.

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If we built it, like everybody else built theirs, very, very heavy, what you'd wind up with is something that requires hundreds of watts just to get it moving the first little micron. So we're wasting energy, and we're actually producing something that's really slow. Why does that matter?

Because your speakers are not slow. The speakers in your main speakers, the drivers in there are very light. Even on a relatively inexpensive pair, a little five and a quarter inch or six and a half inch driver in an almost any speaker that cone weighs nothing. It weighs far less than an ounce.

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So when you start looking at some of these things that our competitors do, where they have these massive magnets, really rich and butch looking and you start going, wow, that's really impressive ask yourself why they're doing that.

In many cases a subwoofer is the least welcome element in a person's home. Why? They're inherently larger than people want them to be. People would love them to be the size of a baseball and be hidden underneath the couch or tucked behind an occasional table in the corner.

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We work as hard as we can to do that, but we work really hard to make sure that this may be the best looking thing in the living room. The physical structure of these all takes its cues from exactly what's needed and then reinterprets them in a way that's both functional and physically beautiful. So, what do we do? We actually tune the...

REL Acoustics - 30 Years of Subwoofer Design in the Pursuit of Perfect Sound

REL Acoustics 2020-12-16 | After 30 years our commitment to perfect sound remains unchanged as we move into another year with our focus solely on designing & building subwoofers.

Learn more about REL Acoustics at rel.net