This is a review and detailed measurements of the Sunfire HRSIW8 DSP Subwoofer Class D amplifier. It is on kind loan from a member. The HRSIW8 seems to have come out back in 2012 with its companion in-wall subwoofer. As best as I can tell, the retail price is US $999 but I see it on ebay for much less.
HRSIW8 comes in a compact, 1-U configuration:
It is extremely heavy for its compact size. Hefty relays click on and off when you power the unit. A rotary control changes the volume. Press it and you get into a number of menus. Alas, there is no parametric EQ is available which would be highly useful to get rid of room modes. Instead you have a crossover and different modes for "music," etc. The crossover is fully programmable as far as frequency and roll off steepness. I set the crossover frequency to highest it would go (160 Hz) for testing.
Note that this is a single channel of amplification.
Subwoofer Amplifier Audio Measurements
Before we get into our usual dashboard, let's run our frequency response test:
View attachment 45770
Hmmm. What is going on here? No matter what I did I could not get rid of that peak. Is this just made to go boom boom? Heaven help you if you have a room mode at 37 to 40 Hz as you will indeed get very boomy sound.
With the above info at hand, I ran my dashboard at 40 Hz:
View attachment 45772
Second harmonic is very low. Third harmonic at -80 dB is likely to not be audible or moot if the subwoofer won't play it.
Next I ran a power test at 4 ohms:
View attachment 45773
Just 260 watts? What happened to the other 260 watts?
Warm up did not show anything of concern:
View attachment 45774
Conclusions
I was hoping this was a general purpose subwoofer amplifier with nice parametric EQ. Unfortunately it is not. It has a completely non-flat response with no way to bring that peak down that I can find. Considering the very high price of nearly $1000, it simply is not something I can recommend that you buy.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
It is starting to snow and we are down to freezing temps. I picked such a great time to test speakers in our garage. To avoid being frozen stiff, I am running an electric heater. These cost money to run so I hope you see the need to
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