AV Labs Dawg Crusher
The sub arrived early Wednesday morning and the best part of the morning was spent setting up and EQ'ing.
The first thing note worthy is my room was way worse than I thought. Interesting to note, it was way worse using Audessy than leaving it off. Andrew brought all his Sound Lab Equipment and he ran several test (yep, I don't know the technical names of all the stuff he did) and the graph displayed peaks and valleys like I have never seen before. After a significant amount of time, he had it set flat at 15hz.
This time would have actually been less but we had an issue with the Behringer DCX2496. In the end, it turned out that the reason we couldn't get any output was secondary to a factory default setting of "off" on the mute. (yes, I ribbed Andrew for this until I was blue in the face)
Well, you ask....how did the damn thing look?
I had my choice of any veneer I wanted but since I needed the sub to match my Studio 100's, I had Andrew dumb down the finish. We ended up covering the 13 ply Birch with a light wood veneer, staining it to bring out the wood grain and then painting over that in a flat black. It looks good to me, the Wife says it looks like a big ugly thing from the 80's. There is a place in the front where the paint ran that looks pretty bad and may need to be redone. It took her about 6 seconds to find that. I would have also used black screws to mount the driver but it came with the SS screws. I will likely change to black in the near future. All in all, it matches the rest of my stuff and I like the looks once I change/fix the issues noted above. She also wants a grill on it as soon as possible, Andrew will be building it soon.
Who care how it looks...how did it perform, you ask....
I will start by saying that my system sounds the best it has. I have to wonder how much of this is proper calibration/EQ and how much is secondary to better gear. Everything seems perfectly blended and the detail and separation is top notch. The more I listen to the sub the more I realize how good it is. It goes deep, it is very tight and it will get just down right loud and nasty. With music, it doesn't stand out, it just does what it is called to do. Just a nice extension where the 100's fall off without drawing attention to itself.
Did you watch a movie...did ya...did ya...
Movies are a different story. I like to run the sub +5 hot during movies. I gave this a shot with the new sub and it lasted about 40 minutes. I paused the movie, got up and turned the sub back down. It was just an ungodly amount of bass, not the kind that smeared the sound and made it difficult to understand the dialog, the kind that was deep, tight and shaking everything in my house. I normally like this and I will set it +5 hot when I show it off but it is plenty when calibrated "even" with the rest of the system.
After only having this for a couple of days my first impressions are favorable. It takes me quite some time to fully decide if upgrades are working for me and if they were worth it or not. I will continue to update this thread as I have more time with the new sub.
Compare that crazy new thing to the Servo15 will you....
I will go on record right now and say the Servo is no slouch and is an impressive sub. The new sub is tighter and seems to go lower and at crazy volumes it is way less muddy and boomy. If I tried to rate these on a scale, I would give the Servo a 7/10 and the new sub a 9/10. If I factored in the cost of these subs the ratio would improve on the DIY.
Anyway, sorry I am not very technical but I hope you are able to get a glance of what I experienced when I compared the subs and my feelings towards the DIY.
