Hi guys, a dear old subwoofer that I've had since college finally went to its eternal reward, and its time to pick out a new one. I was planning on replacing the whole speaker set in a few months anyway; we just finished the basement/media room and I have a couple of other home improvement projects to tackle before I can in good conscious spend 3k on speakers. But, with the recent death in the family, the timetable for the sub at least has just been moved up!
Anyway, I have a moderately sized room, just under 3000 cubic feet. The sub will be used almost exclusively with Home Theater. When we do get a new set of speakers, I'm all but sold on the Axiom Epic 60 set with the EP-500. However, now that I'm looking at replacing the sub earlier, I started thinking about some other options too, namely the SVS PB12-Plus or the UFW-12.
I've read a lot of material, and it sounds like they're all good products, but I had a couple of questions that I was hoping people could help me use to narrow the options down:
How important is equalization for "real world" performance?
The UFW-12 comes with a (reportedly) excellent eq tool, the PB12-Plus is available with paramatric eq, and the EP-500 looks like it has a more limited "trim" feature capable of providing some boost above 33Hz.
So, while in a lab the UFW-12 may be the weakest of the three options, will the robust eq feature make a significant "real world" difference? I'm more than happy to tinker with placement and do some manual tuning, but bass traps and room treatments just aren't in the cards. How important is that eq feature?
How important is extension below 20Hz?
It looks like the PB12-Plus can be tuned to go a little deeper than either the EP-500 or the UFW-12. Keeping in mind that this is almost exclusively intended for home theater, how important is that slightly lower reach?
All else being equal, I'm leaning towards the EP-500 on the assumption it will blend a little better with the Epic 60 set from Axiom. However, if the parametric eq on the UFW-12 or the extra depth of the PB12-Plus is a real advantage, I'd be happy to change my mind.
Thanks much for the help!
