A Big Black Box Of Terrifying Tricks

GoldenEar's flagship SuperSub XXL is for those moments when you need serious bass. Ed Selley goes deep

- Ed Selley

ONCE YOU HEAD past the £2,000 point, subwoofers tend to get a little on the serious side. This is rarefied territory with devices that offer subsonic bass and the sort of impact you’d associate with letting off a grenade in your room. In the case of US brand GoldenEar, this asks some interesting questions.

You see, we’ve already looked at the SuperSub X in HCC #272, and despite it being a relatively dinky little thing, the performance it offers is seriously impressive. So what happens when you scale it up?

The SuperSub XXL is – as the name suggests – like the SuperSub X but bigger. This means it dispenses with the twin 8in drivers of the smaller model and brings in a pair of 12in units. These are arranged, again, in an opposed pair and are again complemented by passive radiators on the upper and lower surfaces of the cabinet. The thinking is that this arrangement applies equal forces on the sub and keeps it stable. Power rises from a claimed 1,400W in the compact model to a gloriously over-the-top 1,600W in this one, again generated by a Class D amplifier.

The radiating area that the SuperSub XXL offers is huge, so in order to keep this anchored the weight stands at just a whisker under 40kgs. In other words, it's very heavy, and remains completely inert even under extreme provocation. Like the smaller model, the SuperSub XXL sits on soft rubber feet for additional stability.