 Dayton Loudspeaker Co. 10" Titanic Vance Subwoofer Kit
If there's one truism that applies to all audiophiles, it's
probably that no matter how good the system, there's almost never enough bass. Well, good
bass, anyway. You know, the tight, tuneful, extends-down-to-25Hz type.
The obvious answer, of course, is to add a subwoofer. But
the constraints that prevent many speakers from reproducing the lowest octaves apply just
as firmly to subwoofers as they do to loudspeakers: It takes a powerful, well-built driver
and a rigid, well-constructed enclosure to do right by the rumble region, and that
translates to big and expensive.
But maybe both of those givens are starting to, um,
give a little. Driver design has come a long way in the last ten years -- as has
cabinet design. And, with the explosion in subwoofer sales engendered by home theater,
there are an increasing number of generic crossover/amplifier units that loudspeaker
companies have at their disposal when they want to build complete, self-powered subwoofer
systems.
As a reviewer, I realized all of this, but the implications
hadn't truly sunk in until I received an e-mail from Phil at Parts Express recently.
Dear Wes, I don't know if you'd be interested,
but we now offer, in kit form, a subwoofer designed by Vance Dickason. It sells for $349.
Would your readers be interested in this?
Wow! A subwoofer kit for $350 -- I reckoned it would
consist of all the parts, plus a shop drawing for the cabinet. But no, Phil explained.
That price included the cabinet.
Let no one accuse me of not being thick sometimes. Oh, I
replied, you get the cut MDF pieces and then you glue and screw the cabinet
together and the finish it. That sounds like a good deal.
No, no, no. The cabinet comes assembled and finished.
For $349.
How could I say no?
Oh mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?
First, a word about Vance Dickason -- in the unlikely event
you don't know who he is. In the world of DIY speaker building, Dickason is a veritable
deity, somewhat along the lines of Adele Davis to old-school vegetarians. He wrote The
Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, which has gone through four editions and has been
translated into German and Portuguese. He also edits Voice Coil, a
newsletter aimed at speaker-design professionals, and is a contributing editor for Speaker
Builder, aimed at the loudspeaker hobbyist. He has also published articles in Audio
Sound & Video Communications. Dickason works on a consulting basis for various US
loudspeaker manufacturers. He has contributed significantly to the promotion of
loudspeaker measurement techniques through computer software, such as LEAP. In other
words, when he designs a speaker, you can be pretty sure it is technically sound.
The upper station of low life...
And the Titanic's cabinet doesn't disappoint. It's a
rigidly-braced 14.25"W x 14.25"H x 14.25"D box constructed from 3/4"
MDF in crinkle-textured gloss-black Nextel. A circular mounting hole is routed into the
front panel and T-nuts are already fastened into the inside wall as part of pre-drilled
speaker mounting holes. A rectangular hole is routed into the cabinet's back for the
amplifier/crossover/control unit. Holes are drilled in the cabinet's base and T-nuts and
heavy-duty spikes are supplied.  The front panel has been pre-drilled and fitted with speaker-grille receptacles,
and the grille comes with the grillecloth and ball-mounting hardware already attached. A
large piece of acoustic foam is included for cabinet-stuffing.
The 10" Dayton Titanic driver, which sells for $140 on
its own, is impressive. Its heavy cast-aluminum basket controls unwanted resonance, they
say, while the talc-filled polypropylene cone was designed for stable, non-resonant
operation. The surround is an impressive arc of Santoprene® rubber and the voice coil
assembly is said to be "super high-power," utilizing a
high-temperature-resistant Apical® former (which Dayton claims is superior to standard
Kapton®). The steel parts are coated with a black "high-emissivity" coating
(said to be originally developed for NASA), which is supposed to improve heat dissipation.
And did I mention that it's one heavy mutha?
The amplifier assembly, which normally retails for $199, is
equally butch. It weighs 12 pounds and looks like the same amp/crossover/control center
you've seen on any number of other subwoofers -- it has the extruded heat sinks that go
with its 250W Class-AB amplifier, a variable crossover (40-160Hz), output control, two
phase shift controls, a built-in rumble filter, line-level and speaker-level inputs, a 6dB
high-pass filter at 125Hz for use with satellite speakers, a 6dB bass boast at 30Hz (said
to extend its low-end response), and an auto on/off option.
Too low for envy, for contempt too high …
Assembly isn't quite fool-proof -- as I proved -- but it's
close enough for jazz. I almost immediately ran into trouble mounting one of the four
T-nuts for the spiked feet. The instructions tell you to mount the T-nuts to the inside of
the box by cinching them down to the inside box wall and then using a 1/4" bolt to
"draw" their barbs into the MDF, seating them firmly in place. I had a nut whose
hold on the bolt proved greater than the barbs' hold on the MDF and I dug a trench into
the MDF. I had to use a Dremmel tool to split the bolt, so I mounted the last two T-nuts
on the outside of the cabinet, carefully driving the barbs into the wood before screwing
in the threaded rods that the "footers" mount to.
Tapping the T-nuts into place from the inside is nearly
impossible because the braced cabinet doesn't leave you any room to swing a hammer. Doing
it from the outside isn't elegant, but it avoids a potential problem and is not noticeable
once the spikes are threaded into place.
The next job is stuffing the cabinet -- a interesting
project in three-dimensional geometry thanks to a massive sidewall-to-sidewall brace. But
some deft scissor work and the application of a good coat of 3M Super 77 spray adhesive
(not included in the kit) not only stuffed the cabinet firmly, but affixed the foam
solidly to the cabinet walls.
The next task is fastening the subwoofer
amp/crossover/control center to the rear wall with eight wood screws. The are no holes
pre-drilled for this, so don't expect to torque the amp down solidly against its foam
gasket with your typical three-inch long 3mm allen key. Get yourself a long-handled
T-wrench for the job.
The black and red wires coming off the amp board need to be
attached to the driver's terminals before you affix the driver to the cabinet. The kit
includes a four-piece foam gasket with an adhesive backing. Once this is glued around the
speaker's mounting flange, all that's left is tightening the speaker's eight mounting
bolts, popping the grille into place, and hooking it up.
How long does the whole process take? Well, if you don't
have to grind off a stripped bolt and replace a ruined T-nut, it shouldn't take any longer
than an hour, tops.
All of this sounds simple as pie -- and if you're not
familiar with the DIY world, you'd think it stopped here. But people build kit speakers
for a lot of reasons and one of them is to experiment with their hi-fis. If you're that
kind of DIYer, you're in luck -- Dayton has included detailed instructions on removing the
amp-board, locating the crossover circuit and replacing two resistors in order adjust the
filter's Q anywhere from 1-4dB. Soldering and basic electronics skills are needed for this
process, so be sure you know what you're doing before you attempt this. And make damned
sure you unplug the AC cord first -- I need to keep all the readers I've got.
Your true love's coming, that can sing both high and low
So let's recap. It's a kit that only costs $349 and it
takes less than an hour of unskilled labor to assemble. How good could it be?
Surprisingly good. Remarkably good. This is one incredible
subwoofer.
Of course, part of that's pride in my own craftsmanship
talking. You can laugh if you want to, but somehow the minimal amount of work that the kit
requires does make you feel like you actually built the darn thing.
First off, it looks awfully good. I was disappointed when I
learned that the cabinet came prefinished. I had dreams of rubbing a French Polish finish
onto a fine veneer. That would have looked better than the black crinkle finish it
comes in, but even I have to admit that it would be a snowy day in Hades before I actually
got around to cutting and clamping and gluing on veneer, not to mention turning my
apartment toxic pulling a lacquer finish.
You might be different -- you might actually have a
workshop, for instance. In that case, I'll bet you can substitute an unfinished cabinet or
even purchase a subwoofer components kit and build your own cabinet. But the basic plain
vanilla kit turns out a mighty handsome speaker.
And it's a pip! It is tight as a drum and incredibly
tuneful. In my large listening room (25' by 13' by 10'), I'd probably do best utilizing
two, if I wanted to really rock'n'roll the deepest low-frequency effects available for
movie soundtracks (and did I mention that the line in and outs can daisy chain as many of
these critters as you can afford?), but for most musical material, one seemed more than
adequate.
Since I was pairing the 10" Titanic with a pair of
Dynaudio Micron loudspeakers, I employed its line-level input, which does not have any
filtration, so I could run the Microns full-range and dial in the correct high-pass band
by ear and SPL meter (but my ear remained the final arbiter). This requires a fair amount
of discipline because the tendency is to want to hear the subwoofer woofing. This makes
sense, but it's wrong -- a subwoofer's mission is to fill in the missing bass without
calling attention to itself.
The best tool for setting subwoofer level that I've found
is solo piano music. I used Robert Silverman's performance of the Moonlight sonata
from his complete Beethoven cycle [Orpheum Masters KSP 830 10 CD set]. After a long period
of adjustment, I seemed to have a reasonably seamless crossover from Micron to Titanic, so
I pulled out my trusty copy of the Stereophile Test Disc 2 [STPH 005] and played
the bass-octave 1/3-octave warble tones, listening and also measuring with my Radio Shack
SPL meter.
The bass decade is a series of digitally generated test
tones that center at: 200Hz, 160Hz, 125Hz, 100Hz, 80Hz, 63Hz, 50Hz, 40Hz, 31.5Hz, 25Hz,
and 20Hz. The disc provides a 1kHz tone, so you can set the meter and you then note how
much each successive tone deviates from that setting.
Now, if life were simple, all you'd have to do is watch the
measured signal and you'd know how good the bass response was. But there are two factors
you need to keep in mind. One is that placement of the subwoofer can have a huge effect on
bass output, so you need to try moving the woofer around if your results are off.
 The other thing you have to
remember is that the Radio Shack SPL meter is a seriously flawed piece of test equipment.
It can reveal some discrepancies your ears will miss, but its accuracy is all over the map
at certain frequencies, especially deep bass. So you need to listen carefully for the most
even response you can achieve, no matter what the meter tells you -- but first you need to
use the meter to get within hailing distance of "flat."
Sounds like a lot of work, but I've been down this
particular road a time or two and I had my ideal position even faster than I'd
"built" the subwoofer. My final check for subwoofer placement is to play a
recording or two that was recorded in a large hall -- preferably one that doesn't have
what you would typically think of as deep bass information.
In this case, it was the Tallis Scholars' glorious
recording of Allegri's Misereri [Gimmel CDGIM 339], which was recorded in the
Merton College Chapel at Oxford -- a highly reverberant building. Technically speaking,
there's no low bass on this record. About the lowest a male bass sings is 60Hz, which
would be well into the subwoofer's domain, but this music doesn't call for such heroic
response from the basses -- a nice deep baritone 100Hz is probably more like it.
Yet, in toggling back and forth between subwoofer on and
subwoofer off (remember, the Microns were running full-range), it was undeniable that the Misereri
sounded fuller, richer, realer with the subwoofer. The voices had an almost physical
weight to them that was lacking without the Titanic. And here's the truly
counter-intuitive part -- the voices sounded purer and sweeter with the sub engaged.
Presumably, the reverberant signature of Merton College
Chapel adds a deep bass component to the sound that is buried far beneath the actual
voices of the ensemble. When the Microns attempted to reproduce it unaided, it remained
buried. Switching in the Titanic added that component to the overall sound in a way that
was undeniably more musical.
But don't write the Titanic off as a mild-mannered
pussycat. On good old-fashioned rock'n'roll, such as Little Feat's remixed cuts from Waiting
For Columbus, as served up by Hotcakes & Outtakes [Warner Archives R2
79912], it grabbed hold of Kenny Gradney's second-line bass and made it pop, growl and
moan like a boiling pool of essence de funk.
Now maybe that doesn't impress you, but remember we're
talking about Microns here -- tiny little two-ways that were actually made to disappear on
a bookshelf. When you can really add powerful, fatback bass to their strengths of clarity
and tonal purity, you're dealing with something powerful. They weren't about to open a can
of whup-ass on the $30,000 Dynaudio Temptations in my main system, but they would
have rocked out a party all night long. (In my experience, the party that Waiting for
Columbus can't invigorate at 1am probably wasn't that good a party in the first
place.) There's no doubt that the Titanic/Micron combo would have set all the right rumps
in motion.
All the daughters of music shall be brought low
So there you have it. For $349 and about an hour's labor,
you can buy yourself one heck of a subwoofer. It's solidly designed by a true audio
superstar and it's built like a tank. It even exudes a kind of manly (er,
subwooferly) charm perched on its serious spikes and clad in deep black crinkle finish.
I've had $5000 subs in my system that will go lower --
although I thought 28Hz from a 10" sub in my room was pretty impressive (and wait
'til you factor in the price!) -- but I've also auditioned $1500 subs that weren't as
articulate and controlled as this little gem. In terms of cost-to-performance ratio alone,
the Dayton Loudspeakers 10" Titanic subwoofer stands at the top of the heap.
Add the fact that assembling it is fun and that the company
makes it easy for you to experiment with different degrees of bass boost, and the deal
just looks even better. The Titanic's one heck of a good subwoofer and it represents a
bargain that borders on theft. You simply can't go wrong buying the 10" Titanic.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
Dayton
Loudspeaker Co. 10" Titanic Vance Subwoofer Kit
Price: $549.96 USD ($349.80 selling price)
Warranty: Five years parts and labor
Dayton Loudspeaker Co.
P.O. Box 52
Springboro, OH 45066
Parts Express
725 Pleasant Valley Drive
Springboro, OH 45066-1158
Tel: (800) 338-0531
Fax: (513) 743-1677
Website: www.partsexpress.com (or go directly to the subwoofer kit's page)
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