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What are the benefits of subwoofers? One of the characteristics of better loudspeakers, vs a modestly priced or entry-level speaker, is that better speakers usually offer much more heft on the bottom end. The rich low notes on a pipe organ, the solid slam of the drummer’s kick drum and floor toms, and the powerful impact of the whole orchestra typically come through much more convincingly on better speakers.

But there’s a catch: better quality speakers with great bass also tend to be physically larger. It’s a matter of physics. Instruments that generate deep bass - the orchestra’s double bass, and a kick drum - have more room for low notes to develop. A grand piano is far bigger than the upright piano in your living room, and the left side of the grand piano, where those long deep bass strings are located, is much larger than the right. Sometimes, speaker size isn’t a drawback for a consumer, but in other cases, a large speaker is a deal-breaker.

So - how do you get great bass, without a big speaker? By using a quality-powered subwoofer. Subwoofers are specifically engineered to reproduce music and movie bass information. When properly blended in with your main speakers, your favorite music arrives at your ears as a seamless whole, rather than sounding like several different speakers.

Even better than adding a subwoofer to augment your main speakers is adding multiple subwoofers. The main benefit of multiple subwoofers is NOT that you get a lot more bass! Rather, multiple subs, when located correctly, assure more listeners of a great musical experience, as you’ll get a more even bass response throughout the room.

Because deep-bass wavelengths are so long, they can reflect back from the walls, ceiling, and floor, and “fold over” on top of each other, effectively canceling bass at specific spots in the room. Try playing a song with a steady bass rhythm, and in walking around the room a bit, note where the bass sounds weaker vs other places. Such spots are referred to as “nulls” - as in, very little audible bass there.

If your favorite couch or chair happens to be in a null relative to where your subwoofer is, you’ll hear much less bass than at other spots in the room. With twin subs (or, as with large installations, as many as four subs), the bass is very tight and clean, not just at one seated listening position, but throughout the room.

In the small Loft of Gramophone’s Timonium Showroom, we don’t have much room. So we’ve installed Focal on-wall 301 speakers plus a pair of SVS 3000 In-Wall subwoofers to fill in the bottom end. The result? Very impressive sound, with no floor space occupied by speakers and subs!

The SVS 3000 in-wall subwoofer has won many honors, including a TOP PICK from one leading magazine. SVS 3000 has become a strong part of our business because these are SVS subwoofers! SVS has a strong background on display in their award-winning freestanding subs. Few brands have won as many industry awards as SVS has in the past decade.

SVS 3000 In-Wall Subwoofer features: twin 9” heavy-duty bass drivers per cabinet are shallow enough to fit a standard 2 x 4” stud bay. SVS had to create a custom driver with the size to generate low, loud, clean bass, yet shallow enough to fit the walls in your home. Not easy - but if they didn’t custom design these drivers, these subs would not generate strong bass.

A powerful Sledge amplifier can easily drive twin subwoofers, as it is built on the platform SVS employs in their award-winning freestanding subs. It features both a high-power digital class D front end, with 800 W RMS, AND the warm sound of an analog output stage, with high current, fully discrete MOSFETs. This delivers high current, for clean kick drums and movie explosions, but with class D cool.

The amp can accommodate twin subwoofers easily, so if two subs are not an option for whatever reason, you can use one with this amp. SVS also makes a Soundpath Wireless Audio Adapter, so if what’s needed is to retrofit the subs into the wall with no easy way to run wires, that isn’t a show stopper.

The cabinet (chassis) housing the drivers is solid and acoustically inert. The baffles are of custom-formed aircraft-grade aluminum. Sheetrock is a resonant material. NOBODY builds speaker or subwoofer cabinets of sheetrock! But USA walls are almost always sheetrock, so SVS was smart enough to create a cabinet that won’t resonate or add its own distortion when generating the terrific levels of bass that these can generate.

Last but not least, the awesome SVS smartphone app. We cannot easily move an in-wall speaker once installed. So having Bluetooth-based software to dial in the subs and optimize their performance is a great benefit. You can optimize phase and low pass filters to blend well with your, use their 3-band EQ to tame nasty peaks, save a custom preset for movies and another for music, etc. SVS 3000 In-Wall subwoofer is a great option for rich bass, with a clean look.