Sub output: Is it the woofer size or the rated RMS

But the small cone has more linearity in its movement. It is fascinating to see the large driver/small driver debate return again after we all thought it was settled. When I was young the bigger the better was the rule, EV had a 30" woofer, Hartley a 24". In music reproduction the last 40 years has seen a gradual reduction in driver size. This may or may not apply to HT. But the driver size or amp power alone tells you little about the quality of a particular sub, a good designer can use either paradigm. You have to match the performance of a particular unit with your requirements.

Excuse me , but that is ridiculous. Some of the best and most expensive speakers made use 10" or smaller bass drivers. In the 60s no self respecting speaker had less than a 15" woofer, they now are extremely rare. Look at the DIY speaker sites and see what is for sale there. They are hardly affected by marketing considerations. If you do not understand speaker design I can recommend some good books, starting with HIGH PERFORMANCE LOUDSPEAKERS by Martin Colloms. What part of my statement about cone linearity did you not understand?

There are many things I could say to socalled sogood but will stop with saying that I have been in audio 46 years, some of it as a Krell dealer, have 4 pairs of subs, none of which I would trade for any of his, and will end with what my wife told me to tell him, " its not the size of what you have but what you do with it."

Its not your insults I mind ; its your stupidity. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. I suppose you never heard of "speed" in a sub woofer. If all you are interested in is making noise then the HT set up you seem to favor is fine. For those interested in serious music reproduction other considerations come into play. Oddly enough, my motivation is exactly what you profess yours to be, the prevent the clueless from misleading the unwary. My two REL Stadium subs use one 10" Volt driver each and cost $3000 each. I suppose that is your idea of cheap. You appear to be one of those who thinks that because they have spent a considerable amount of money on their system they have some how acquired knowledge and authority. Making wild and unsupported statements is hardly the mark of knowledge.

Sorry to have gotten irritated, I was upset at the idea that many manufactures are only concerned with marketing. I have known many , beginning with Sol Marantz and Stu Hegaman and by and large they were driven by considerations other than the maximum amount of money they could make. Of course there are those like Bose who are all marketing but they are rare. Most designers are trying to produce the best they can at a price they can sell their product for. The optimum size of woofers is a subject that has been debated for years and will not be settled in my lifetime and I respect anyone else's opinion. What I do not respect is unsubstantiated attacks on the motivation of people I like and , in many cases, admire. It has often been said that the way to make a small fortune in HI End audio is to start with a large fortune , sometimes good products are rewarded but often they are not. The lack of marketing skills has been far more prevalent in hi fi than an excess of them. The point I am trying to maintain is that it is possible to disagree about equipment without impugning the motives of those who make products we ourselves do not like. I have never succumbed to the charms of Magnapans but I do not think those that do are somehow defective in some respect. It would be boring in the extreme if everyone liked the same things. The older I get the more I realize that everyone hears things in a different way and what suits one will not work for another.

Sogood, it is strange to see me called a snob because I pointed out that not all subs that used small drivers were cheap. The idea that marketing was behind sub design implicitly assumes that it is money that drives the market. I will point out to you that Wilson has just replaced 2 18" drivers with ONE 12" in their latest sub, the Watchdog, which runs $10,000. Do you really thing that this is to make it more paltable to wives? The top REL sub, at the same price, uses 2 10" and is widely regarded , IN THE AUDIOPHILE COMMUNITY, as being possibly the best sub available. I am becoming aware that the HT community has a completely different set of priorities. When REL brought out the T series for HT use they were quite different from the S series designed for music reproduction. The T series has no real bass below 30hz ( as opposed to below 20hz for the bigger S series) and the lowest filter setting is 60hz. With my subs I start rolling them off at 22hz. The idea that cone linearity and speed are irrelevant can be instantly falsified by looking at the speaker compliment of large speakers. The new Snell Illusion , which is their best speaker, uses 2 10" magnesium cones and is specified to be -3db at 27hz. Do you think that when a company is trying to get $50,000 for a speaker they will not use the best possible driver combination? The Avalon Eidolon Diamonds , which are specified to be 1.5db down at 24hz use 2 11" woofers. They are about $34,000. Why do I mention money? Because I am a snob? No, it is to point out to you that at this price range the only consideration has to be performance. All of these are far out of my own price range, the $2600 I paid for the Duettas is my high water mark. Ah, you say, but these speakers are not subs; while smaller cones may have an advantage at the range these speakers operate in they do not at the low end. This assumes that there is some magic frequency at which physical law inverts itself and what was true at 100hz is no longer true at 50hz. Someone mentioned that smaller cones have no advantage in the range 20-80hz. If this were true why do the speakers mentioned above not use larger drivers? I have never heard anyone suggest that the B&W 800d needs subs, yet it uses 2 10" woofers. The less mass something has the quicker it can react. The smaller it is the more linear is the movement. this is simple physics. But, you say, speed in subs is unimportant/nonexistant. There we differ. The search for a sub that will mate with Quad electrostatics is over 30 years old. As they react much faster than cones most subs are hopelessly slow. But some do work; i.e. those with smaller drivers. It is also important in matching the main speakers, larger drivers have more momentum, they do not keep up as well as those 12" and below. All of this is regarded as self evident in the music reproduction community. The HT community obviously has different ideas. As I am not a member of the community, even though I do have a video system, I will refrain from deriding the ideas of its members if they will extend me the same courtesy,