Thank you Audioholics and David Waratuke for your comprehensive review and giving Elemental Designs the opportunity to express our position regarding some of the concerns that have been raised in this forum support thread. We realize we are not the end all be all to subwoofers; it is not our intention to be. We sell a product for a price that is far less expensive than most companies using better materials and proprietary parts. While doing this we do realize our products aren't right for every customer that is something that is perfectly fine with us. We hope to earn their referral by guiding them in the direction of a product that is right for their needs. We're hoping to provide a product to the clients whose application we fit. For now that's big subwoofers, painted black, without many limiters, made from good materials.
What we lack in refinement we make up for in product, support, pricing, and care. If we sold the exact same product as everyone else not only would that be boring, but we'd have no way to pay our bills since the market would be oversaturated with too many similar products. We're out to build a different type of product the way our customers ask us to.
I would encourage anyone to drop our sales / tech department an email or phone call with any questions or concerns they may have. If that's not convenient we also have live support available 9AM to 6PM right on our web site or forums.
Re: Car/12v Drivers. (It looks like this was already addressed in this forum but this is one thing that makes us extremely unique).
When it comes to the transducers used in Elemental Designs home audio subwoofers they are all comprised of Elemental Designs parts. I.e. these are not over the counter parts or someone else's work. This is our tooling, our parts, and our engineering. A little known fact about Elemental Designs is our part catalog dwarfs most companies. Our current catalog includes over 200 tools of which are not sold or licensed to any other companies.
Having such a massive parts catalog and driver base allows us to match parts at a greater speed and predictability than a typical speaker company here in the USA.
It is also worth noting that the original engineering behind most of our bass transducers is geared towards a small sealed box due to their 12v heritage. This really lends to EXCELLENT small vented performance or for matching with a HT sealed alignment in a higher dampened enclosure.
By design our drivers lead to excellent home audio performance; and long term we'll likely change some cosmetics to make them less silver. But for now we feel our drivers outperform the OEM options set forth by some of the standard driver giants.
These drivers 12v heritage also speaks to the hunger clients have for more output down low. We've really helped pave the road in high value, high excursion, and tight tolerance subwoofers over the past few years. We're not alone but we've spent almost a decade concentrating on the craft of subwoofer transducers.
I think we represent a black sheep in the audio world. We've spent more time on the drivers than we have on the cabinet finish; a fact that is likely obvious. We'll adapt and grow with the market. We made a conscious decision to manufacture these cabinets here in Iowa in house. While that may limit our refinement a bit I think that it gives us more control over the evolution of our products; albeit this fact carries some cosmetic short falls for clients looking for different finishes.
The difference typically between a well engineered transducer sold to the 12v market and the home market is color and stickers. Not much else.
RE: Roll off.
As mentioned in the thread any time your using a sealed enclosure you'll see a few things that are a fact of life. They each have ways of correcting them.
1. Higher roll off.
Problem : When un-eq'd the roll off point visually is going to look higher and need electronic correction unless electronically limited prior to being input into subwoofer if that perfect line is desired. We prefer not to do this due to the expense of output that customers love.
Solution : eQ. By supplementing the product with heavy EQ (as most manufactures do) you'll actually lower the peak output around its low frequency peak / roll off point. This won't actually change the roll off dramatically but on paper this will make it appear significantly smoother.
You could utilize an eQ.2 or something like a SMS-1 and still be at half price of comparable output subwoofers if you’re chasing the line. We'll be happy to walk over the set up of either device.
2. A shallower roll off.
Problem: A shallower roll off vs. a vented enclosure is what I’m referring to. Your f3 point may be higher but the f10 point typically will be lower by a large margin. This corresponds to increased output sub 15-20hz.
Now this isn't to say you couldn't experience anything in between. Obviously our web site typically is going to (like any seller) feature an idealized vision of the product.
This shallow roll off is a bit deceiving as attributing sound pressure levels and sound quality to a line expressed in a computer is next to impossible for any of us to do. We can see it but the difference to closing your eyes and listening to your favorite CD vs. looking at a graph is quite dramatic.
Typically while the roll off may be different from a vented cabinet; the amount of output the cabinets retain at low frequencies you can still hear and feel is significantly greater than many other offerings simply due to cone area, mass, and power. Again, as seen by the review, it's an incredibly capable speaker. When the speaker is on and playing through different source material, even people with the highest dollar reference speakers find it to be incredibly musical and capable.
With that said.
We don't inherently limit the top end to make the roll off different. We allow the cabinet to roll off naturally and open the door with equalization if the user sees fit by providing headroom in spades.
As you can see by David's review we may lack some of the good looks of other cabinets. We've followed a very simple theory with our home subwoofers. Keep it simple. Don't fight physics. Paint it black. Offer free tech support for life on every product sold.
It's also worth noting. Our job is to give the consumer what they want. If they want a different driver, cabinet, amplifier or whatever else; we'll build it and ship it just the same. Luckily we are the manufacturer and we can actually customize product quite quickly.
