Kansas City Subwoofer Meet

I'm drumming up interest for a Kansas City subwoofer meet. I'd like to have about 10 quality subs in the same house for a Saturday subjective and objective listening comparison by a panel of the subwoofer's owners, similar to what craigsub did in 2007 with his now famous listing!

If you have interest in this please subscribe to this thread and mention the subwoofers you have.

I have a pair of Infinity HPS-1000 subs and a pair of Jamo D7subs that can be used in the comparison.

There are a couple of other posters from KC area that likely would be willing to participate.

Here is my thread in AVSForum Area Home Theatre Meets section
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/kansas...subwoofer-meet

Here is my thread in the mostly dead local KCHT Enthusiasts forum
http://www.kchtenthusiasts.com/kcht_...opic.php?t=999

Here are the folk that have expressed interest and the sub equipment they own/would bring.
Archaea - Infinity HPS-1000 and Jamo D7sub (dates good)
carp - SVS PB Ultra 12/2 and JTR Captivator (both dates don't work)
Luke Kamp - HSU VTF-15H (dates good)
menotsodumb - Martin Logan Abyss
eviltwincustoms - Definitive Tech Trinity (may require assistance moving) (May 1 - May 26 does not work)
stitch1 - SVS PB12-NSD (May 3 good, May 14?)
Counsil - Epik Empire (plan date no, Subwoofer meet day good)
KGB540 - JTR Growler Duo (Omaha, but willing to drive in)
tcottonab - SVS PC13-Ultra Sledge (dates good)
superedge88 - THT (may not be able to come for a Saturday meet)
wildcat82 - Epik Empire (plan date no, Subwoofer meet day 50%)
Randy Bessinger - Seaton Submersive (assistance moving sub required) (dates good)
04FLHRCI - sealed B&C 21SW152 (unable to attend at this junction/other responsibilities)
energyfun - JL Audio F113 (plan date no, Subwoofer meet day yes?)
jonnyozero3 - Rythmik D15SE (Omaha - may not be able to come unless meet is > late June)
Chirpie - SVS PB 12 plus (plan date? Subwoofer Date good)


Interested in attending the planning session or meet, but won't be bringing a sub
KC Sphinx (both dates won't work)

Dates are set!:

Tuesday May 3 at my house at 6:15 PM for the planning session
Saturday May 14 at my house 10AM for the actual subwoofer meet and testing.

PM me for questions, phone number, address.

THE SUBWOOFER MEET was held live on ustream. It had about 80 viewers throughout the day. Pretty amusing.


See the new thread for our results postings.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1335139

We can help you move it when we make this event happen. i'll add your name above. Exciting to see a monster sub like that possibly added to the audition! When we get about 10 people interested then I'll organize a short get together/planning event and we'll get the dates and plans figured out!

We'll need to, as a group, figure out a select few reference movie and song clips that will be standardized for each audition.

Probably all of us (but one) will be in the market for an upgrade after a comparison like this

This little meet is shaping up nicely -- looks like we've got some quality products to review. Counsil your home theatre subwoofer setup is nothing short of impressive! Just a few local folk and their comparison pieces wanted (I'd rather have more than less knowing that not everyone will be able to come on the day selected.)

hey you know what - if you are willing to drive three hours each way to hear some nice equipment and even willing to bring some nice equipment to add to the spectacle-- your attendance is fine by me. I'll add you to the list. You'll might miss out on the planning meeting being that it'll likely be in KC but I can forward you the itinerary and we'll give you equal measure in accepting input you have.

Brandon Nash sent me a PM that I think is worth copying out to this thread. Having hosted one of these meets before he has some insight to keeping it running smoothly. Here is the summary of what he said. He put a few specifics in the pm that I have taken out because he may not have intended them to be publicly read. I appreciate this fine community and brandonnash's sage advice to help us ensure a fun and successful gathering.

Hey man,

Some things I was thinking about to make your meet go a bit more smoothly.

When I had my meet I actually got the idea from warpdrv and the meet he had. I wanted to streamline it some so we'd be able to fit in as many as possible and still have a chance to get a good feel for everything that was there. The biggest thing I believe that worked for that for us was having a setlist for all the things we wanted to watch and listen to on single discs. I made a dvd demo disc with good bass heavy parts of movies that most people knew and some that weren't as well known, but with that we had a solid baseline for each sub. It's a little boring after the 4th or 5th time listening to, but it ultimately was the most fair way of judging the ability of the subs by ear. A couple suggestions for the dvd (or blu ray if you have a burner) I can make are WOTW pods emerge scene to see if the subs can reproduce the super low frequencies, and the THX trailer "amazing life". The THX trailer actually bottomed a couple subs we had just from the sheer output on it. One of the reasons I made a compilation disc was because midway through my thread I had people wanting to bring blu rays to play. The only problem I had with that was that the time it would have taken to load new discs and then get to the good parts. This would have added a ton of time to the meet and instead of going for I believe 8 or 10 hours it would have run late into the night.

ACCEPT DIY AND PRO SUBS!!! If you really want eye openers I'd be open to having the big guys in there. You'll have incredibly interesting conversations on how they're built and you'll be amazed at the kind of performance/dollar ratio can be had with these things.

Booze...Collective subwoofer meet experience says don't let anyone come who intends to get stupid drunk. Someone did at one party. Apparently there was some guy that showed up at his and threw down a 12 pack in a couple hours and kept bumping into things and insisting on listening to fergie cds and being an extreme annoyance to the other attendees. He also fell down and broke some stuff at the meet.

Depending on the amount of people that show up and your room and the equipment being used, your room could get quite hot. My room is hard enough as it is to keep cool. The day we had our meet it was about 80 degrees outside and by the time everyone left my room was probably well over 90 degrees. That was with the A/C going. If you just have commercially made subs you shouldn't have too much of a problem as they don't get too hot. We had a ton of equipment in the room. Don't know if you looked at the pics, but we had a couple big equipment racks with amps putting out a lot of heat. Here's a pic of some of it.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3403/...60eba3_o_d.jpg

Things will get broke! There may be problems moving heavy boxes up/down stairs or smashing them into drywall. At mine, I had a wood sub scratch up my floor a little and when the big commercial subs started going one of them (the Danley TH-50) knocked stuff off my walls. I'd remove pictures and any other loose items from the wall before you get going. We ended up liking that sub so much afterwards that Danley designed a home theater sub kit and I have the first one made. If you want to read about it if you haven't already it's http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1189404
here.
The last thing I have on my mind, I'm sure I'll think of something else for you, is if you're wanting to have some subs that may not be readily available around you, email the manufacturer and tell him what you're doing and give them your plan for the day and they may send you a sub. The one I got from san diego was sent by TC Sounds. I emailed Ed Mullen from SVS who declined for several different reasons, and also JL audio who would have sent their road demo unit of a F113 or a Gotham but they were both at a show that weekend. So if you email JL and their schedule is free they may send you out something.

Hope all this helps. I'm planning on having another meet sometime this year, just don't know when yet. Thinking a speaker meet, but the subwoofer meet was too much fun. You can really tell a difference between a good sub and a great sub when they're in the same room.

With brandonnash's suggestions in mind I think we should either buy a demodisc from one of the other community members here for the gathering, or I could attempt to make one based on our collective input. (I'm an IT guy)

If we make a disc - I'll suggest that each participating attendee gets to choose one clip of a song about 1 minute long and an movie scene of their choice that is about 2 minutes long. (I can edit the portions out before the meet. If we had 10 attendees that is 10 minutes of songs per sub and 20 minutes of video per sub. That makes 30 minutes of media per sub or 5 hours of demoing with 10 subs just for the listening portion --- which may be too long as it is by the time you add setup/teardown for each sub. Do we want to calibrate each sub with audessey xt or equivalent and put each sub in the same exact room position for the testing, or just turn all EQ off and just play the subs in the exact same position to save time over using audessey calibration? I'm not opposed to using a whole Saturday for the tests, but I guess I'd rather listen to subs on demo material than calibrate with test tones all day long. Perhaps even the 30 minutes of demo material for each sub is too much? Maybe we each still choose a 1 minute song clip, but vote on only about 5 movie reference scenes to drop the demo time to 20 minutes per sub.

As far as house we should get some input on who is willing/able to host and what equipment they have coupled with the room setup and ease of access.

My house - located by the Royals and Chiefs stadiums easily accessible off I-70, 350 hwy, or 71 hwy.

Positives - I have a 3500 cubic foot theater room with a walk out basement sliding glass door immediately attached. We could get the subs in and out easily and without damaging them. I have a 8 foot section of wall on the right side of my projection screen and it would be an ideal place to put each sub for testing. There is plenty of space to move subs around and not be running into people. I have an AmericanDJ V3000 amp that is currently unused by in my rack that has been previously used for subs. It would save people from bringing their own amp if they don't mind using other equipment. I use a Onkyo TX-NR1007 receiver for the mains and sub outs. I finished the room myself so every outlet on the front side of the room (that you could possibly connect any home theater equipment to is it's own 20 amp dedicated circuit. (like five dedicated 20 amp circuits on the front wall alone - meaning we wouldn't have power problems and we could at some point hook up all the subs up at once using splitters and probably knock my house down.)

Negatives - My room only has four dedicated seating positions. I could bring in some chairs for people, or we could move my berkline chairs out and sit on the floor, but there are not 10 ideal seating positions in current setup.

I could probably get us free access to my local church and we might be able to host the event in a classroom there, but setting up and tearing down and enjoyment factor might go down based on the room not being setup in any way for home theater. We could host the event in a Kansas City Park, like at a Longview lake shelter house, but the subs would be outdoors and it might not be a good comparison for actual use with room gain in effect.

While I'd be happy to host the event, I'm certainty not glued to my room/house as the hosting facility (especially seeing that I have some of the lighter subs on the list and could easily move my equipment). If anyone else has a location they wouldn't mind hosting this meet in speak up. We can compare the options. I know from this list that Luke's home theater room would be too small for 10 subs and 10 attendees. I don't really want to host the event in a room where we are all crowded and there is no room to maneuver equipment in and out, and I'd like to avoid any place that might have power issues because damaging our expensive equipment would ruin the event.

To brandonnash's warning on booze. If you bring it keep consumption respectable. Get wasted some other time, this event is not the time to be hammered.

Tim, Cool - nice to have the newest SVS sub up for audition!

I think this lineup is filling up much faster than I anticpated. I expect 20% or 25% of the people who expressed interest won't be able to make it on game day --- so we'll give it a few more signups and then I'd imagine we'll have enough to make a full day of it.

good idea...

I've got an 8x4 trailer and a 700cc quad myself so if we have it at my place that idea is covered. Counsil, did you know about the kcorr.com? hook up with local kc atv owners.

www.kcorr.com

I was just poking around Danley's website and didn't see anything called the THT. Which model is that?