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Subwoofer JL Audio 113v2 vs 112v2 vs 110v2
- Thread starter Denosaur22
- Start date
Rythmik is honestly at the state of the art at the reasonable end of the price spectrum. The sealed models are all compact for their performance, their vented models are much larger but essentially are at the top of the performance heap in all aspects -- output, distortion, frequency linearity, functionality. My FV18 can knock shelves off the wall from an output perspective, but delivers excellent quality for music and extends strongly down to 10 Hz.
The trade-off is that it's the size of a small refrigerator.
Keith_W
Major Contributor
With any driver, how loud it gets is a function of the swept volume, which is (surface area of driver) * (excursion). To get more volume from a smaller driver, the excursion needs to be larger. So yes, it is possible for a high excursion smaller driver to produce the same volume as a larger driver with lower excursion.
However, many people (including myself) believe that larger drivers simply sound different. My opinion is 100% subjective, and I do not have a good explanation for it. There was a debate some time ago on ASR where I was told that this is expectation bias.
Rythmik also sell driver + plate amp kits, so you do not need to buy a subwoofer from them. This is a great advantage because it opens up all kinds of possibilities! Maybe you could build a sub into your coffee table? Hide your sub inside a sofa? Build it into a wall or under the floor? I have custom Rythmik subs that I designed myself. All I needed to do was come up with the design. I wanted it to match my existing furniture and blend in. So I designed an enclosure with the correct internal volume with adequate bracing. I sent the design off to a speaker manufacturer (a friend of mine) and he came up with CAD drawings. I sent those off to a machine shop to get them to cut the panels with CNC, then the panels went off to a furniture maker. His job was to assemble the box and apply the veneer to match the sample I sent him. I received the boxes, installed the drivers and plate amp, and my subs were finished. I have the equivalent of two JL F212's (i.e. 2x 12" subs per box), I paid less than half, and it fits the living room furniture perfectly.
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It was nice when Salk offered very nice cabinets for the Rythmik kits. There's a lot of very good diy for subs out there too aside from Rythmik. The diameter of driver translating to a "sound" definitely not my experience except that smaller drivers are more often just limited.
I don't know anything about Rhythmic, but your post reminded me about issues with plate amps.
Because of the intense vibration in subs, often the plate amps in subwoofers fail prematurely. How robust the amps are or how a company handles their service issues does vary. JL has proven to be pretty solid and very good with product support. Velodyne on the other hand used to regularly fail but they used to be good at serivice. Unfortunately since they have moved their focus into lidar and moved away from subwoofers getting one of their subs repaired can be difficult or impossible. JBL is pretty good as long as a sub is in production, but once they retire a model it becomes impossible to have them serviced.
Just something else to keep in mind.
OP
Denosaur22
Member
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2021
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- Thread Starter
- #26
Customer service after purchase is important. I learned that the hard way buying a Tesla. Love the vehicle, terrible customer support.
The one good thing is that Velodyne Acoustics (the German company) still has US authorized service centers. The surprising thing is that the Digital Drive+ is still in production. They moved toward integrator focus and the Google search pricing on the DD+ just seems silly expensive, but I can buy replacement remotes, etc. Their newer products like the Deep Blue just seem like rebadges. The Silicon Valley heritage is also gone.
Surprisingly, I have read that Monolith in 2024 is great for customer service as long as you are comfortable replacing your own plate amps.
What is this "German" company behind Velodyne now? Haven't followed Velodyne after they abandoned audio for lidar(?)
Velodyne sold their audio division to the German distributor in 2023. In contrast to “Kodak” and “Polaroid” the new Velodyne kept the old product line, maintained customer service (directly in Europe and through authorized service centers in the U.S.) and have launched a handful of new products.
Velodyne is a sad story of Wall Street. Lots of boardroom drama which you can easily google.
All that you can say factually is that Velodyne and Ouster both went to IPO via a SPAC and were worth $1.6B and $1.9B respectively in 2020 or so. In 2023, they merged and looking at them right now, the market cap is only worth $220M.
Another reason I went with Rythmik...good old customer support from a small American company. The plate amps in the upper subs are all Hypex Class D with zero history of regular failures. If it does fail, Brian can send you a new plate amp to swap out. I think Monolith makes a good value sub, but the customer support is extremely lacking.
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