The subwoofer makes your experiences greater

Welcome to our series about subwoofers. It consists of four episodes, and while it’s about subwoofers, it is above all about our experience of sound. At System Audio, we are fascinated by what technology can do for people – and how it can turn music and movies into a living experience.

System Audio has three subwoofers in the lineup, and through four episodes we’ll show you how they can transform your way of listening. This won’t be a boring technical review, but a journey into how bass affects us – and why it’s crucial for the full audio experience.

Here’s what you can look forward to:

• Why the subwoofer is important for music and movie lovers
  How sound has evolved from the 70s to today.
• Who wants a subwoofer that just goes BOOOM? No one!
  Why precision is key – and how we work with it.
• We play at low volume 95% of the time – and what that means for the subwoofer
  Why DSP is a game changer.
• Subwoofer placement and room correction – the key to perfect bass
  About room correction and how you get perfect sound in your living room.

Let’s get started.

Why the subwoofer is important for music and movie lovers

69% of music’s energy is in the bass. We can see this when we analyze music on Spotify and Tidal – but it hasn’t always been that way. Listen to a huge hit like Dancing Queen by ABBA (1976), and you’ll wonder how the song sold hundreds of millions of albums. To modern ears, it sounds like a production error – but that’s how music sounded back then!

There was virtually no bass, because recording techniques and the vinyl medium itself couldn’t handle the information. The 90s changed everything. Technology took a quantum leap, and music got a new sound. Bands like Rage Against the Machine and Massive Attack introduced deeper bass – tones we had never heard in music before. Big sound became part of music, and it spread to all genres.’

From home theater to high-end sound

The 90s gave us the first home theaters, where subwoofers delivered the sound for all sorts of explosions and car chases. It was fun for movies – but it didn’t work for music. The sound was not precise, and many abandoned home theaters again.

It gave the subwoofer a bad reputation. But at System Audio, we have redefined the subwoofer and created something new.

A new era requires new solutions

Today, low frequencies are not just a detail – they are the foundation of the modern music experience. Music today (regardless of genre) contains lots of energy in the 20–60 Hz range. This is where you feel the music, not just hear it. The deepest tones create a big sound and a presence that makes the sound engaging. It’s a feeling of energy – that makes us feel the music.

The problem? Most traditional speakers – and subwoofers – simply can’t reproduce these frequencies. The tones disappear, and nothing can bring them back. Music and technology have moved on, streaming services now deliver higher sound quality than ever before, and artists produce sound with a depth that requires equipment that can keep up. If your system can’t deliver the lowest frequencies, you miss out on a big part of the experience.

Welcome to a new world, where low frequencies are a natural part of the sound experience – and where a good subwoofer is the key to experiencing music and movies as the artist and producer intended.

Why a good subwoofer can’t be cheap

Bass is expensive. It cost more than other frequency ranges. Woofers cost much more than midrange drivers and tweeters. Amplifiers need powerful power supplies to deliver current for the deep tones, and the cabinets must be extremely stable to support precise bass.

In other words: A good subwoofer can’t be cheap, because bass frequncies are the most expensive part of the entire audible frequency range. But in the next episodes, we will show how innovation makes System Audio’s subwoofers affordable.

Summary

In this first episode, you’ve heard about how sound has changed – from almost no bass in the 70s and 80s to deeper bass in the 90s and onwards. The new sound makes music bigger and more engaging.

In the next episode, we move on to a big challenge: Why most subwoofers fail – and what we’ve done about it.