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|  | | | Customer Reviews: | | | Average Customer Review: ( 109 customer reviews )
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97 of 100 found the following review helpful:
 A Good Home Theater Subwoofer May 28, 2010
By Chad A. Hasselius
At this price, what you will find essentially is two types of introductory powered subwoofers: one is built for home theater, and one is built for listening to music. And this is fine, because there are basically two types of listeners: one who mostly wants to listen to music for home parties and such, and another who mostly wants to listen to blu ray movies with high fidelity sound.
The subwoofer built for music will give you that "thump, thump, thump" bumping sound you hear when listening to hip hop or pop music. At the introductory level it will have more of a "one note" sound, but will have a kick to it. The subwoofer built for home theater will give you more of a crisp sound to it, which will allow you to hear movie special effects such earthquakes, lightening, explosions, trees falling, the "wop, wop, wop" of a helicopter, etc with high fidelity. The lower the volume is the higher quality the sound will be, and at the introductory level you will not get a kick to the "thump, thump" sound in music.
This Yamaha subwoofer is clearly built for home theater. Why is that? For starters it's only 100 watts, and dynamically tuned so it starts out at only 45 watts. Also, it has Servo technology, which has a feedback mechanism to give you more crisp sound. Granted, it's not particularly advanced Servo tech, but nothing else even close to it's price range has Servo. The frequency response goes all the way down to 25hz, which means it can give you a lower tone than anything else in it's price range. It also has two input jacks in the back instead of one, and is of a relatively small size. Unlike most subwoofers, it is magnetically shielded so it can be used close to a TV. It only has two types of crossover setting's, with the recommended one being at 80 hz- which is ideal for home theater (where a sub made for music has variable crossover settings because crossover will be much more involved.)
This kind of explains why there are two types of reviews for this product. Some people love it and some people hate it. If you are using it to listen to Dr Dre you are going to be disappointed, and you'd be better off with Onkyo's introductory sub or maybe even Polk's. But, if you are listening to a Transformers movie on Blu Ray with a 5.1 or 7.1 sound system, you will be blown away. If you want a sub that can do both movies and music well you will need to step up in price (HSU or SVS comes highly recommended on message boards.)
Also, I know this has been beaten to death but speaker placement will make a huge difference in subwoofer sound quality. Speaker placement will make or break any subwoofer because of the ways the soundwaves bounce around and can cancel each other out. Like others here, I wish it had an auto on/off feature, but it wasn't a deal breaker. I just leave it on all the time.
50 of 50 found the following review helpful:
 Excellent natural sound Jan 11, 2007
By Michael Beckham
This subwoofer puts out plenty of deep tight natural sounding bass, not "boomy" bass. It sounds great! I am using a Harmon Kardon 3380 receiver and 2 Klipsch SB-1 bookshelf speakers, and this sub in a 12x20 room and it fills the room with sound.I listen to mostly jazz and classical, with some new-age thrown in. On ocassion though I pop in Sound Garden or Metallica too. I find that I have to adjust the bass output down quite abit when rockin' out, or the bass is overwhelming.There is no auto on feature on this sub, but I have it plugged into a switched outlet on the receiver, so it goes off and on with it.Overall, I recommend it highly.
55 of 59 found the following review helpful:
 An OK inexpensive subwoofer Aug 13, 2009
By C. Laub
I purchased this subwoofer to augment some rather small bookshelf speakers. I reviewed the owner's manual online before buying and decided that this sub would match up well because the built in low-pass crossover would match the roll off of the small speakers. The sub arrived and was well packed in the manufacturer's carton. The sub is not heavy so you can expect the same experience (no shipping damage).
I connected the sub via the speaker level inputs and played around with placement and level with a variety of music types. For the price, you get a lot of bang for the buck. Overall the sub looks nice and is not large so it can be hidden easily. Because it only needs 45 watts of input power, I could connect it directly to a switched power outlet on the back of my equipment so I didn't mind that there is no "auto-on" feature. I was not really too impressed with the overall quality of the sound, but I have some pretty good hi-fi equipment at home to compare it with.
If you want really good sounding bass with more extension and control, buy something else but be prepared to spend at least 5 times the $$. For casual listening and for non-critical ears, this is a great buy and you can even afford to buy a stereo pair.
18 of 20 found the following review helpful:
Awesome Purchase ! Oct 22, 2007
By Avnish
"Thrillseeker"
Many people are saying that the subwoofer doesn't have enough kick, but I think the problem lies with the positioning of the subwoofer. The manual suggests that you place this woofer at an angle of 45 degrees in a corner of your room. This setting works most of the times but sometimes it doesn't work, I mean if you don't have a square or rectangular room, there is no necessity of placing it in corner. Instead, try this trick, place the subwoofer at any random position in the room, make sure you don't have much furniture ( Temporarily remove the furniture ). Play it at a sufficient volume. Move around at every area of the room, and try to find the spot where your subwoofer sounds the best to you. Now place the subwoofer at this position. Don't worry you won't find this area in the middle of the room :), it has to be somewhere near the wall.
Another important factor is the output of your preamplifier or the receiver. If it is incapable of producing the frequency range where you have good bass, like 20-40Hz, how can you expect the subwoofer to perform well.
Finally talking about this subwoofer, this is truly a masterpiece, the audio quality is simply superb and most importantly its not boomy. However this doe
18 of 21 found the following review helpful:
Nice Sub Oct 30, 2006
By Kevin J. Nicolellis
This makes plenty of nice, tight, bass sound for a small/medium room. Put it in a corner and have it face at a 45% angle toward the sofa or chairs. It does not auto-turn-off, but it has an off switch in back.
See all 109 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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