Passive subs

[furrycute]

Can anyone recommend some good quality sealed passive subs? What do you need to drive them? I have a 2 channel amp I can use to drive the sub (no the amp cannot be bridged to mono). Do I need an external cross over?

 

[crashguy]

If you want to run passive subs, you could look in the car audio world. The only drawback is that most of them are 4 ohm. You could, however, wire 2 four ohm subs in series to make an 8 ohm load. Whether or not you need a cross over depends on how you are getting the signal to the amp that will drive the subs. If it's a receivers sub out, likely no X-over will be needed.

 

[annunaki]

He could also purchase a dual voice coil woofer with 4 ohm coils, and simply run them in series. Thus, leaving him with a single 8 ohm woofer. If looking into car audio subwoofers, be careful. There are many subs that 'look' impressive, but leave much to be desired. http://www.jlaudio.com and http://www.adireaudio.com are some good places to start. For car audio subs anyway.

SVSubwoofers and parts express have some good passive subs as well.

 

[big deal]

I use 2 10" Oz Audio 250Ls in a ported enclosure I designed with WinISD, and although I am admittedly biased, I have never heard a better sounding sub. Its a pretty big enclosure (a bit over 8 cubic feet) but frequency response is very flat down to 25hz and only about -3db by 20hz. I use 4ohm models but there are many good car audio subs available in single 8ohm voice coil models, or dual 2, 4 or 8 ohm voice coil models. I agree with annunaki, JL and Adire both have great products, also check out Image Dynamics, Oz Audio and Infinity's Perfect series. Theres lots of others that make solid products but like anything else, you get what you pay for. Stay away from flashy plastic stuff with big 1000WATTS written all over them. Also keep in mind that unless you plan on building the exact enclosure that the store has them installed in, auditions can be misleading. Manufacturers tend to quote smaller enclosure sizes as "optimal" to make them more attractive, but any product worth buying will have TS parameters available to design your own. Hope this helps.