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XW-500d Icon Sub in the house!


colterphoto1

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Beta testing this weekend. I've got it running Stereophile test tones this evening for break-in. Movie and music watching tonight. It's a sleek, HEAVY little beast of a machine with high gloss black top panel, real heat sinks out back, and the digital control panel like the RT and RW subs. Easy to program the three modes Movie, Music, and Night. The Punch and Depth Eq really make a difference.

For comparison, my two previous subs were the KSW-12 and the KW120/KA1000 setup. This falls in between performance and price wise.

I plan on using the XW-500d in place of my THX setup tonight, then move to the two channel room tomorrow and couple it with some H III, CW III, and perhaps F2 and Jamo just for the fun of it.

It's going to be a fun weekend!

Michael

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The quick listen through test warble tones of 1/3 octave sounded
resonable flat, ie, there was no band that really stuck out. I have the
sub positioned near my rack, which is near a LaScala, but away from
either wall. This proably helps. I'll tuck it next to a wall and put
her in a corner tomorrow to see if it gets boomy.

It's not keeping up with the Scalas so well, I've got her on max output and 'I haven't got any more power captain'. But it's nice and punchy and I get a feeling very musical. Watched U571, Children of Man (great rocket and gun battles), and some LOTR today. Not a boomy sound out of the lot. In fact this sub was pretty 'invisible' from the standpoint that it just put out great smooth sound without calling attention to itself. That's a very good thing. The sealed cabinet, still compliance, and very rugged cone is very controlled with less ring than other subs.

I'm going to listen to some DVD concerts tomorrow and hook it up to a smaller system (14x18 bedroom) with RB3's. Knowing that the XW is designed to go with the X Icon series which are a bit less efficient, I'd think that should be a good matchup.

The controls are easy to navigate and it's cool having the three memory banks to store EQ (deep,punch,flat), crossover, volume settings. I've been using the Deep and Flat for movies, but am thinking that the Flat or Punch will be right for music.

The quick listen through test warble tones of 1/3 octave sounded resonable flat, ie, there was no band that really stuck out. I have the sub positioned near my rack, which is near a LaScala, but away from either wall. This proably helps. I'll tuck it next to a wall and put her in a corner tomorrow to see if it gets boomy.

So far I'm pretty impressed.

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I found that I really liked the digital control panel. I used 110 degrees of phase, so a simpler sub with 0/180 would not have sufficed there. Nice tight, very musical bass. It did well on my Symphonic Yes 'Starship Trooper' and Diana Krall 'Live in Paris' test tracks as well as action adventure movies.

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  • 1 month later...

The Icon sub and the smaller version which will ship this summer, are sealed box designs with small enclosures and pretty high power. They are intended to match Icon speakers which have somewhat lower sensitivity / ouitput than Reference models and way less than Heritage models. The Icon subs are very musical with a slower rolloff below LF corner frequency than our ported/passive radiator models. So, if you have lower output speakers either because of reduced sensitivity or lower amp power, the Icon sub may be just the thing for you. Wait till you see how tiny the forthcoming XW-300d is. Of course any small box sub will also be output limited.

Now, let's talk about the Palladium sub. It was bashing my chest in the 10-20 Hz range just yesterday...

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