So.....a friend helped me unpackage and put this monster in place and one of the first things I did was turn the gain up too high like an idiot so that it bottomed out during one scene at the end of Matrix Revolutions. Luckily, no damage was caused, and I quickly turned the gain down to 3 (from 5, I believe). Anyway, I haven't had a sub in my home theater for 5 years now since my crappy JBL 8" blew out for the second time, and I'm used to my JL Audio 13w7 car sub's unlimited output, so I got carried away! I still have it cranked up too high, but I need to go buy an SPL meter at Radio Shack.
The sub is beautiful, of course, and about the same darkness as my cherry Axiom M60 and VP150 speakers, although much redder and definitely better-looking up close. I forgot to take my camera home from work or I'd post pics and see if I could get a video of the woofer in action, but I'd say it probably does around 3" peak-to-peak before bottoming out. I've already found a lot of stuff in my house that I'm going to have to dampen by using a resonance test sweeping from 0 Hz on up (very cool to watch the sub during this test).
For a good test from The Matrix Reloaded, I recommend the scene immediately following the scene where Neo stands up against the machines and goes into a coma. The bass following that where the ship comes to pick them up is amazing! A friend borrowed my copy of U571, so I don't get to hear the deep bass from it yet, and I don't own a copy of Master and Commander.
I'll be calibrating my Emotiva LMC-1/LPA-1 and this sub once I get a calibration disc, probably Avia. I still need to buy a few Axiom QS-8 surrounds, but I think I'm going to run the wiring in the walls first, so that may be a while. Anyway, I'm not qualified to review anything, I just thought I'd share my initial thoughts.
