Product Highlights
- 10″ Composite Woofer
- Sweepable Crossover Between 50 to 200 Hz
- Frequency Response Down to 20 Hz
- Designed for Use with M-Audio Monitors
- Stereo XLR & TRS Inputs & Outputs
- Footswitch Bypassable
- Phase Inverse Switch
- Includes Footswitch
- Engineered Especially for M-Audio Monitors
- Designed for use with the M-Audio M3, BX Carbon and BX D2 series, the BX Subwoofer delivers deep bass response necessary to optimize the lower frequencies in your music, film and multimedia projects. Many of today’s personal audio systems can reproduce very low bass frequencies, so it’s critical that your audio production environment allows you to monitor and adjust those frequencies while you’re mixing.
The BX Subwoofer empowers you to do just that. When paired with any M-Audio studio monitor, the BX Subwoofer becomes part of a monitoring system that provides accurate sound over the entire 20 Hz to 20 kHz audible spectrum. Although designed to be used with M-Audio monitors in mind, the BX sub will enhance the low-frequency performance of any brand of high-quality near-field monitor
- Don’t Strain Your Speakers, or Your Ears
- Studio monitors like M-Audio’s BX5 Carbon are designed to work as full-range monitors. Yet when they are asked to reproduce extremely bass-heavy material at high volumes, it can be taxing on the speakers and fatiguing to the listener. When they’re used in tandem with the BX Subwoofer however, the system comfortably reproduces full-range signals at significantly higher levels without any audible stress.
This is because the active HP/LP crossover in the BX Subwoofer acts as a “traffic cop,” directing low frequencies to the subwoofer and only letting those frequencies above the user-chosen crossover point to go to the satellite monitors. When the satellites are relieved of the burden of trying to reproduce the deep bass with their modest 5″ woofers, they can play at much louder levels with markedly lower strain and distortion. The entire system now plays cleaner, louder, and with greater detail, which means you’ll get cleaner audio information and make better mixing decisions.
- Active Crossover
- The BX Subwoofer accepts two-channel stereo outputs from your mixer, audio interface or sound card. Your main L/R monitors connect to the subwoofer’s outputs. As stated above, the internal crossover network of the BX Subwoofer splits the signal at a user-chosen crossover frequency ( between 50 to 200 Hz), routing everything below to the sub and everything above the crossover point to the main L/R monitor speakers.
The steep 4th-order HP/LP filters (24 dB/oct) can improve your system’s overall fidelity because they limit the amount of “overlap” between the subwoofer and the satellite, thus minimizing phase-related frequency response cancellations and other crossover-induced anomalies. This assures that each component only has to deliver frequencies to which it is ideally suited: deep bass for the BX Subwoofer, and mid-bass/midrange/treble for your near-field monitors.
The variable crossover also makes it possible to tailor the bass response in your monitoring environment in order to achieve the most accurate acoustic response-in both studio and home theater applications. For example, to minimize “localizing” on the sub (detecting the origin of the sub’s sound by ear, which destroys any semblance of a believable sonic image), you can choose a higher crossover frequency if the subwoofer is reasonably close to the L/R monitors, or a very low crossover frequency if the sub is located far away from the L/R monitors. Sound becomes more “localizable” as frequency increases, while very low bass is non-directional. Therefore, you can see how a widely-variable 50 to 200 Hz crossover-like in the BX Subwoofer-really opens up your system placement options
- Bass Performance
- Bass you can feel takes some heavy-duty power and components. That’s why the BX Subwoofer carries 240W average continuous of totally discrete Class AB power for ample headroom. “Headroom” is the amount of undistorted instantaneous power an amplifier can deliver in excess of its “continuous” or “average” RMS long-term power output rating. It’s what makes one amplifier sound “louder” than another, even when both have the same power rating
The 10″ driver features an oversized magnet for higher sensitivity (“efficiency”) and a high-temperature, long-throw voice coil, delivering maximum low frequency output and optimized power handling.
The cabinet is made of 3/4″ vinyl-clad MDF with 1″ front and back baffles, serious internal bracing and a flared rear bass-reflex port to minimize audible air turbulence and optimize low frequency output. The fiberglass/paper composite driver provides exceptionally accurate bass response, resulting in deep, articulate low-frequency output that adds stunningly lifelike body and weight to any program material
- No More Mixing Guesswork
- A good monitoring system allows you to create material that translates well across a variety of playback environments. As such, it’s important to know what your mixes will sound like both with and without the low-frequency extension a subwoofer provides. This is precisely why the BX Subwoofer includes a subwoofer bypass function that completely removes the subwoofer amp, speaker, and crossover from the signal path-sending the full-bandwidth program to your near-field monitors. By plugging in the included footswitch, you can control this function dynamically as you’re playing back your material-even from across the room
