I just get tired of the almost car audio level of misleading junk most subwoofer makers in particular offer.
JL have always offered pretty reasonable specs, and Monoprice have done so on their premium Monolith line.
But for a company like ELAC to offer specs like: "Anechoic 18 Hz, In Room 14 Hz" is worthless. The Fs doesn't magically change in a room
Their Dual Reference subs are powerful, but when you dig deeper, they have pretty sharp rolloff below 20 Hz. So at 16 Hz they might not be louder than a KEF KF92.
Unfortunately we will never know unless we buy them.
For hone theater addicts much of this is irrelevant. They can put vibrators under their seats and hire moving companies to relocate their 150 KG subs. I want something around 50 to 75 pounds that I can move myself.
I like decent movie performance but I'm a lifelong audiophile and want to be able to distinguish between pipe organs playing close to 16 Hz.
Based for instance on the replies from Rythmik I would disable their rumble filter and instead use a digital Butterworth filter at 48 dB per octave at 14 Hz on the input. This would achieve the response curve I want, protect them from the EOT soundtrack and still give decent pipe organ response. And this would likely cost around $350 for a stereo device that could handle two subs with XLR cables.
And the lack of figures on maximum output together with distortion are seldom published except by JL.
Indeed some of JL's speakers seem less competitive unless you look at the detailed specs with both output and distortion listed.
As for less costly brands, you typically get a lot of "frequency response" curves at around 80 dB.
So if you turn up the volume they will either distort horribly or fade into the background or both.
IMO start with measurements and then work your way to a decision - as you've noticed, starting either with random opinions online or subjective reviews just sends you on a long journey back to where you started. If the sub hasn't been independently measured then don't put it on your list for consideration, easy.
Speaking from experience, even if a speaker manufacturer wants to share real data, it's hard. An honest speaker company faces two big problems when it comes to sharing measurements:
- Very few of their customers understand measurements
- Most of their competitors are lying about measurements to some extent
This creates a situation where publishing real measurements feels like a major liability. Your customers will look at your truthful numbers, compare them to the competition's fake numbers, and buy from the competition. They mostly don't understand measurements anyway, so the truthfulness and accuracy of your numbers is lost on them, they can't tell the difference between yours and the lying competition. So unless you happen to know your customers are particularly sophisticated, you don't play that game.
Now, hopefully sites like ASR will change this over time. There are thousands of people looking at this site for advice. So maybe more brands will realize their customers understand measurements, or will at least seek out someone who does.