6kwatt Sub with dual 21" Drivers Costs $100k: Are they Insane?

[its phillip]

Wow, do you have a bunch of things wrong:

• Six 8" woofers give the response of one 8" woofer, but with 6 times the excursion, 6 times the power handling, 6 times the heat dissipation and 1/6 the distortion and non-linearities one 8" woofer doing the same work. These are approximations, but they work out to be fairly true.
• The cumulative weight of the voice coils, formers cones and air load is a non factor... they act independently for each driver, not as a summed group
• 8" subs tend to have a moving mass including air load around 3 oz. That is substantially less than this sub so if you are trying to tell me that six, well-designed 8" subs will be as slow as the best 18" driver, sorry, you are wrong
• Once you start getting upwards of 18 inches for a sub driver, the size of the magnet being able to control the driver has already started diminishing. That's just a fact. Sorry.
• Moving mass is never advantageous when you are designing a loudspeaker driver. It is a necessary evil that can be utilized when engineering a real world design, but it is not ideal.
• Six, well designed, 8" sub drivers will eviscerate any 18" sub driver any day of the week
• The lowest note on most instruments is a low B which is about 31Hz. You can go even lower, a super low E is 20.5Hz, but nothing but a pipe organ or synth can hit that (OK, John Paul Jones' crazy bass string things can do that, but, hey, those are not normal as is he... in the greatest way!)

Bottom line is this:
• A phalanx of small subs is better than one huge sub any day
• The reason there aren't more subs like Paradigm's is the expense, plain and simple

Bass myths: https://data-bass.com/#articles/5cbf5e7357f7140004d6d0ec

Paradigm Signature S2 review/measurements: https://data-bass.com/#/systems/5b11d85da201f10004e39d70?_k=y923ea
Funk Audio FW21.0 review/measurements: https://data-bass.com/#/systems/5c11783c4f4746000425b908?_k=yjmat9
JTR Captivator S2 review/measurements: https://data-bass.com/#/systems/5c1d4e6c45bca300046104df?_k=n0o5f2

I agree that multiple small subs can potentially perform better than one huge sub however, but that of course depends on the subs in question

 

[William Lemmerhirt]

The difference is TomV is quite active on this forum (or least used to) and his posting/marketing style could be described in what I think is quite aggressive/pushy (at past, the subs comparisons were fuzzied to point of borderline dishonest). Dr. SHU, on the other hand, does very little to no marketing at all and let his products speak for themselves. You'd be the judge.

Idk. I’ve seen Tom recommend subs from other builders before too. So while his tactics may be “questionable” sometimes, I can say all of my personal interactions with him have been positive. mad you said though, I have seen some measurements/comparisons that seemed to be.....slanted maybe? Anyway, hopefully we end up with third party(data-bass) data to read. FWIW, their new subs do seem pretty compelling.

 

[killdozzer]

Not trying to get anyone angry, but taking a serious step back from this topic... I don't think this is Audioholics grade. 400k TT (I know, it was another system)??? It is not "absurdly expensive " it crossed that line ages ago in the direction of really stupid.

 

[tonyE]

Forget it.

I'm just waiting for Magnepan to deliver an 8 foot tall, 14 foot wide wall that I can use a room divider in my living room.

The only issue will be the 10,000 watt amplifier needed to drive it.

THAT, will be real fast bass... everything else is just a cone pushing air. pfffft.