We’ve recently received in our Wellington store, two pint sized sub-woofers from Velodyne: The SPL-800i and the SPL-800 Ultra. At first glance, both of these tiny sub-woofers look amazing! There’s very few living rooms where these guys won’t be able to tuck away somewhere. Now let’s see if we can make these sound as good as they look!
Just from reading the spec’s it might be kind of difficult to tell them apart, with both being a similarly sized 8″ driver in a similarly sized cabinet. Put them side by side in a music system and the difference couldn’t be more apparent…
We started with the SPL-800i which is the less expensive of the two at $1,499.00. We plugged it in, in demo lounge one, with the excellent Dynaudio Emit M10 Bookshelf speakers. These little speakers are pretty damn impressive in this room in their own right, but any small bookshelf could always do with a little more bass extension.
We quickly connected the sub-woofer and speakers to the Rotel RA-1570, a very flexible traditional stereo amplifier.
In a perfect world, we would use an amplifier or pre-amp which had a built in bass cross-over, to separate the low frequencies away from the main speakers, but I wanted to see how the sub-woofers would work in a small stereo context first.
With a little careful set up (trying a few different locations in the room then setting the bass cross-over and level on the subwoofer) We managed to get this guy singing very impressively.
Richard
