It was like going back to primary school for home theatre enthusiasts during yesterday’s talk by Geoffrey Heinzel, Managing Partner, R&D, Sales & Marketing from ASCENDO at AV Designs’ showroom at Boulevard Business Park, Jalan Kepayang, Kuala Lumpur. AV Designs is the Malaysian distributor for ASCENDO AV products.
Since Geoffrey is the designer of ASCENDO’s subwoofers and amps, he is obviously the expert and his talk was filled with scientific facts and figures and explanations. He made many references to the laws of physics and expounded on crossovers, frequency response, bass rolloff, room boundary and wall reinforcement.
There were so many facts and valid explanations in his talk that it seemed like Subwoofer 101 to me and Geoffrey totally dismissed something I brought up and made me realise that I had to go back to Home Theatre Kindergarten to relearn everything.
I mentioned to Geoffrey that many home theatre enthusiasts use a pair of bass-reflex and sealed-box subwoofers to enjoy the best of both worlds — the speed and tight bass of the sealed-box subwoofer and the lower and fuller bass of the ported subwoofer.
His immediate response was that it is the wrong thing to do, and proceeded to explain in a scientific manner that the port would act like a second speaker to create sound that would be out of phase with that coming from the sealed-box subwoofer and there would be cancellations of sound waves.
He recommended using two subwoofers to fill the listening space with bass evenly, but they must be of the same size. So if you already have a 10-inch subwoofer, get another 10-inch subwoofer. He prefers sealed-box designs as they offer speed and precision in generating bass.
After his talk, he held demos in the two AV rooms in the showroom. The smaller room featured a 5.2.4 all-ASCENDO system and he played a drum track, a video clip of Lady Gaga singing You’ve Got a Friend and two movie clips.
Geoffrey doing the demo in the smaller AV room.
Then we proceeded to the larger room which featured a 32-inch ASCENDO subwoofer and played the same Lady Gaga clip and a few other movie clips.
It was a most informative and educational talk by Geoffrey, and like the saying goes — you always learn something new every day.
