It dawned on me after posting this that some of you might be thinking "who the h#ll is this guy, and why did Cadence send him a CSX12 for review?". Perhaps I should elucidate...
I maintain a thread on several forums dedicate to "budget" subwoofers, an example of which can be found
here. In support of this thread I also review some of the more obscure and/or less well know products. By less well known I also mean those that don't seem to have much in the way of professional reviews, for whatever reason that may be. Up until recently I had limited myself to subwoofers listed on my budget thread, but I've since begun to branch out and evaluate more expensive subs. Illustrations of my reviews can be found
here,
here,
here and
here.
The CSX12, with it's $399 retail price, could still probably be considered "budget" to most -- so I haven't altered my charter to any large extent -- but I have decided to start evaluating some products that don't fit the criteria for my budget subs thread. The Cadence name is known to many, but little information about them exists, so they seemed like an ideal candidate. They concurred, which is how we got to the position we're in now.
Lastly (and just to complete the picture) I've also co-designed a few subwoofers. The EbenLee
ELA-3 was the first of them, followed by the
ELA-5. A 12" version, the ELA-4, will be released shortly. While it may initially appear as though I simply another Joe Homeowner I do actually have a bit more experience then the average person probably does. That doesn't make me an expert, of course, but it does give me some additional perspective.
And to answer the inevitable question that someone is bound to ask... why don't I post the budget sub thread and my reviews on audioholics.com as well? Unfortunately, the less than standard way this forum is setup is not conducive to it.
The first problem is post sizes are limited to 10,000 characters. My smallest reviews are more than double that, so I would have to split them into several pieces and use concurrent posts. That's counterproductive for me. The second problem, which is a total non-starter, is that after a very short period of time your post is locked, and can never be updated/edited again. Since I need the ability to make changes in perpetuity -- say I transposed a number or the grammar or punctuation was wrong, etc -- having no method to support changes once the thread is locked makes it impossible for me to use this forum for those posts.
For the CSX12 I'll be making an exception though, because I ensured Ryeon (CadenceSound) I would post my review here, but regrettably for all the others I can't. I would prefer to post them here as well -- because I like this forum -- but the current configuration makes it such that I'm simply not able to.