It began right after the YG Acoustics Peaks Ascent speakers went back to Colorado. The speakers had spent their final weeks in Canada over at Rob’s place, and Rob had been loving the experience. He’s had three different sets of speakers in his system over the past while, including my own Aurelia Cerica XLs and, after the YGs went back, my Focus Audio FP60 BEs.
So, Rob went from a set of full-range floorstanding speakers to a pair of large-ish stand-mounters. Now, the Focus Audios are extremely good speakers. They were my reference speakers for many, many years, and I still love them. They split right down the middle between crisp accuracy and sweet listenability.
The YG Acoustics Peaks Ascent speakers at Rob’s place
Rob is in love with the Focuses. He had them in his system a while back, and he’s heard them in my listening room on many occasions. So when the YGs went back and he pulled the Focus Audios out from behind his couch, he wasn’t unhappy. Rather, he was mourning the missing bottom end in his large room, but also rejoicing because, man, are these things wonderful speakers.
A couple of weeks after the YGs had shipped off, I received the upgraded amplifier for my SVS PC13-Ultra subwoofer, which I wrote about here on SoundStage! Global. My sub sits behind me, tucked into a corner, and as such, I haven’t thought about it much over the years. But since I’d laid hands on it, worked on it, seen it in its underwear, I started to scheme.
After the article went live, I sent a follow-up email to the folks at SVS and presented them with an idea. I had a neighbor with a beautiful Architectural Digest home who was experiencing a profound bass deficiency. How about we set him up with a couple of subs and see how their products worked in the real world, with a non-audiophile bass-curious civilian?
I proposed this idea to Rob and he was immediately skeptical. “I don’t want it boomy,” he said to me more than once. I knew where his mind was going. He’d heard shitty subwoofers before, having been around audio for years but not having swum in the high-end waters. I tried to explain how a good subwoofer would work, but he kept giving me side-eye. I can go on, though; I can nag. After several such conversations, he gave in and agreed to try it out.
SVS was game, and I arranged a Zoom call with Ed Mullen, SVS’s director of technology and customer service. In that call, I introduced Mullen to Rob and walked him around Rob’s living room and system. The intent was to determine an intersection between aesthetics and performance. We needed to choose two subs (because what kind of lightweight makes do with one?) that would add the bottom-end kick that the Focus Audios lacked while still looking elegant enough to fit in with the decor.
In the end, we settled on two different approaches. SVS would provide a pair of their 3000 Micro subs and a pair of SB-2000 Pro subs. The idea was that the compact 3000 Micros would blend into Rob’s living space unobtrusively, thanks to their clever opposed 8″ drivers, which result in a footprint that measures a mere 11.7″ × 10.7″. Conversely, Rob’s large open-concept main floor with its cathedral ceiling might call for higher output, which the SB-2000 Pros, armed with 12″ woofers, would provide, albeit with larger cabinets.
The 3000 Micro, which retails for $899.99 (all prices in USD), is rated to extend down to 23Hz in a quasi-anechoic environment. The SB-2000 Pro also sells for $899.99, and its -3dB point of 19Hz is just a touch lower than that of the 3000 Micro. The cabinet is noticeably larger, though, at around 14.5″ per side. Now, 23Hz is more than sufficient extension for any sane person’s needs. That said, the 3000 Micro is a small box—albeit a clever one—and we’re talking about a very large room here. The 3000 Micro would fit in better aesthetically, but could those small cabinets fill the room? Probably? Possibly? That’s why SVS also sent the SB-2000 Pros.
Mullen was a great help. He evaluated the dimensions of the room and the specifications of the Focus Audio speakers. His eventual recommendation was that we should start with a crossover frequency of 50Hz and a slope of 24dB per octave. Ed was also somewhat insistent that we do our damndest to place the subs just in front of the speakers to compensate for the very, very small delay caused by the SVSs’ DSPs. Rob and I solemnly promised to do our best, but even at that moment, on that call, I’m fairly sure we were both of the same mind—we would live with the delay rather than install jet-black tripping hazards in a high-traffic area. Mullen was clear that the extremely small delay wouldn’t be noticeable. His recommendation of placing the subs forward of the main speakers was driven by a purist sensibility.
The subs arrived by truck and I unloaded the boxes into my garage, as Rob was unavailable that day. The following weekend we installed the 3000 Micros into Rob’s system. The subs were finished in SVS’s premium Piano Gloss Black. We installed one at each end of the fireplace, on the limestone-slab hearth. At this point, Rob was still extremely skeptical, and I was getting the feeling that I’d begun to wear out my welcome; my Audiophile Neighborhood concept was starting to get stale. “I’ll leave you to it,” Rob said after he’d helped me decant the subs. “I have work to do.” He went upstairs to change.
SVS’s extremely cool smartphone app immediately located both subs. I set the crossover points to 50Hz, selected 24dB slopes, and fired up a couple of tracks. I cued up “Purple Hat” by Sofi Tukker (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC, Ultra Records / Tidal)—a cool techno track I’d heard last year in Munich at High End 2023. I had it cranked up really loud, and the default sub volume was way too high. I also noted that there was at least one low-end mode that was severely elevated. It sounded like I was in a huge, resonant dance bar.
Focus Audio FP60 BE standmounts with SVS 3000 Micro subs set up at Rob’s
At that point, Rob came back downstairs and shot me a filthy look. “Yup. That’s exactly what I don’t want.” And with that, he walked out of the house without looking back.
I got to work. First thing was to reduce the volume on both subs. The app made that easy, but I had to switch back and forth between each sub and there was a bit of a delay as the app shifted its focus. It would be nice if there were a way to change settings on both subs at the same time. Still, the app made settings changes far, far easier than having to get up and physically interact with each sub.
With the volumes set at a more appropriate level, I started playing some acoustic jazz. Cassandra Wilson’s Sings Standards (16/44.1 FLAC, Verve Records / Tidal) works well for this. On “I’ve Grown Accustomed to His Face” there are lots of up-and-down acoustic bass runs, and they’re great for hearing if any one frequency is jumping out. Sure enough, I could hear a couple of frequencies that were elevated in level.
I dug around in Tidal for a bit and found Audio Line-Up Test Tones (16/44.1 FLAC, Audio Check / Tidal), which features handy 30-second test tones starting at 20Hz and jumping up by 10Hz increments. Using my phone’s SPL meter, I noted a 6dB hump at 30Hz, with a bit of an elevation continuing to 40Hz. Via the SVS app, I used the parametric EQ to dial in a 4dB cut at 35Hz with a Q factor of 4.7, meaning quite a narrow adjustment.
With these changes active, I sat back for another listen. Now the acoustic bass blended extremely well across the crossover region. I played a couple of bass-heavy tracks and found myself right chuffed with the extension, ease, and invisibility of the subs. I shut the system down and let myself out the servants’ entrance (the garage).
That night I got a text from Rob, short and to the point: Got a minute? I headed down and met him outside.
“What did you do? It sounds amazing.”
We went inside and I had Rob install the SVS app on his phone. I guided him through the menus so that he could fine-tune the subs to his preference. Rob’s not a technical guy, but the SVS app is extremely intuitive, and within a couple of minutes he was comfortable with it. I left him on his own to listen and tinker. He’s got a really good ear, and I had a feeling that he would be able to get even better performance from the subs once he’d had a chance to listen for a while.
Even though they are very compact for high-quality subwoofers, the two 3000 Micro cabinets took up a fair bit of real estate at the front of the room. “It looks like a high-quality, giant ’80s boombox. I like it!” said Rob.
Ron, my other audiophile neighbor, had been following our project with great interest. “I wonder how those subs would sound with my LS3/5a monitors,” he said to me one day after Rob had told him how good the 3000 Micros worked with the Focus Audios.
Ron has a smoking system downstairs, so I don’t really see his secondary rig upstairs. But this conversation shot off a flare inside my head. Could there ever be a pair of speakers that would benefit more from subwoofer augmentation than these diminutive BBC monitors? Right! A noble challenge, this, but only if we didn’t screw it up. I’ve heard Ron’s secondary system, which is installed on his main floor—a big space for these little speakers—and the LS3/5a’s sound fantastic driven by his Audiomat tube integrated amp. The Audiomat was the only wrinkle here. It’s gotta be 30 years old, and it’s bare bones—it doesn’t have preamp outputs. So a whole bunch of maneuvering here: Rob was still using the Kinki Studio EX-M1+ integrated amplifier, which freed up my old Hegel H90 integrated amp, which does have preamp outs.
Ron is a tube guy. Full stop. We were going through his garage the other day, looking for I don’t remember what, and he opened up a Rubbermaid storage tub—one of the big ones—and it was full of tubes. I picked up a couple at random and saw a sleeve of Philips 12AT7s, and another of Sylvania 6SN7s. There were also several other boxes packed full . . . it was One-Eyed Willy’s rich stuff. So slamming a solid-state integrated amp into his system wasn’t an idea that he relished, but he agreed to it so we could move forward with the subwoofer experiment.
The bass response of Ron’s Stirling Broadcast LS3/5a monitors falls off a cliff below 100Hz—the -3dB point is somewhere around 80Hz. Still, it was sure worth a try. A quick follow-up email to Mullen netted a recommendation of an 80Hz crossover point with 12dB/octave slopes, which I corroborated by using SVS’s Subwoofer Matching Tool.
Since Rob was still evaluating (and enjoying) the 3000 Micros, I broke out my dolly and we hauled the SB-2000 Pros down to Ron’s place. Rob helped haul them up the stairs and I left them to do the install, as I was heading out of town that day and would be gone for a week.
On my return, I discovered that Ron was having trouble integrating the SB-2000 Pros. So I headed down and took a peek. We ran some diagnostic test tones and discovered that there weren’t any egregious modes in his room. The tones did reveal that the sub levels were a bit too high, so we lowered them, and also lowered the crossover point to 75Hz. Now it sounded much better. I think we’ll still need to fiddle with it a bit, but it was totally listenable, and a ton of fun now that there was some actual bass in the room.
Stirling Broadcast LS3/5 monitors with SVS SB-2000 Pro subs at Ron’s place
In thinking about it, we all realized that we may have had the wrong subs in the wrong rooms. With its cathedral ceiling, Rob’s room is larger than Ron’s. Rob’s speakers are larger and have more extended bass response. So ideally, I think, we’d have the SB-2000 Pros in Rob’s place and the 3000 Micros over at Ron’s.
That’s all to say that the story doesn’t end here. I need to follow up and let you all know how the swap-over goes. I’ll also spend some more time at Ron’s place tuning the system there, and provide a report on how these two systems have settled in. It’s going well so far, but I think we can do better. Stay tuned.
Jason Thorpe
Senior Editor, SoundStage!
