Sweet sound and easy to listen to now.

Huh?!

Yup. Get $9.00 worth of sound insulation at the Shack and stuff it into that humungo box. I cut to size and glued in the back and sides, then re-installed the woofer.

A once boomy sub is now so sweet and tight. With eclectic tastes ranging from the Dead, Tull, Sheryl Crow, and The Floyd, to Clannad, Fairport Convention, Stravinsky, and the Beasty Boys the listening is equally pleasurable across the board.....

That claim I read from somebody about a low to mid-priced sub sounding like $1,000.00? Very right on..... Can you say massive understatement...?

If you dare, and your electronics is good enough (please use a DVD player!), check out "Violet" the last song on Seal's debut 1991 recording. Now that is a scary bottom end. But don't even try if you have not gone to the Shack for that sound insulation and installed it. Or, hey, try before and after and be totally in awe of what this subwoofer can do. Or try the last second's of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's "Lucky Man".

Is it true that the new owner of Audio Source (can you say just another corporate take-over and some rich stockholders???) is no longer shipping the SW-15?! They are fools if that is so.

You lucky owners imagine a higher quality driver in place of the one that comes with the box! Gives me a warm fuzzy feeling down to my numb and vibrating toes.

Similar Products Used:

RTR 600D's. Now that was a great time in my life...... Four 12" drivers, two of which were proprietary for ultra-lows. Corporate take-overs suck!
But here comes Audio Source with a big powered sub whose price does not give one any idea of how good it can sound.

Pumps hards, you can hear it from a long distance

vibrates and losens everything in your car

extremely worth it. Pumps so hard that your head hurts. The best in the market.

Similar Products Used:

none

Pumps hards, you can hear it from a long distance

vibrates and losens everything in your car

extremely worth it. Pumps so hard that your head hurts. The best in the market.

Similar Products Used:

none

At first Power and Cost. Now, overall performance

At first Boomy somewhat sloppy. Not any more.

I've had this sub for almost 2 years and always thought it sounded good for the money. It was sloppy but powerful.

After reading the reviews here I decided to try adding insulation. I bought 2, 1square yard packages of fiberglass speaker insulation at Radio Shack ($3.99 ea) and installed 1 yard in the rear half of the enclosure and 1 yard in the front half. I just stuffed it in basically as it came out of the packaging (I didn't even unfold it).

The sound is now astoundingly tight and precise. The difference was so great that my wife (not an enthusiast) noticed it immediatly.

According to my sound level meter the output dropped by about 1-2 db but the gain control easily compensated.

This is now the best sub I have heard at anything under $1,0000 dollars.

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M&K GoliathII, Design acoustics PS-SW

volume; price; tightness (after tweaking)

size; needs tweking

This sub rocks. Don't listen to anyone who reviewed this sub and says it sucks. If you spend 20 min and $3-5 on some polyfill batting you will be ecstatic with this sub! Here's the deal:

I recieved the sub and hooked it up right away. As most people said it is rather boomy even if you set the crossover really low. It also sounded terrible with classical music because you can't tell if you are litening to a tuba or a drum. So I did what everyone else said - I bought sound dampening material. I took the driver out and the first thing I noticed is that the idiots who put this thing together stuffed polyfill in front of the ports! I took this crap out and then proceeded to glue 2" of ployfill batting that I bought from JoAnn Fabrics to all the walls (of course leaving the vents open). And the difference was - well there is no comparrison. Before I did this I had the sub volume turned to three quarters before I would get the walls rumbling. Now I have it set at ten O'clock and DVDs still rattle the house. One warning - before I had turned down it down I started up a movie and it shock the rafters - I thought my windows were going to break. I have tuned my woofer since then. As far as the boominess goes - it is gone. I have the crossover set at 80 - which is a little high since my speakers will go down to about 40 - 45 but I don't hear any boominess and I get more bass this way. If you decide to get this sub you really must add the poly fill - it makes a world of difference. and you won't be dissapointed. I listened to a lot of subs at Audio King and other places and this sounds as good or better than most of their $500 subs.

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bose; passive wharfedale

Low cost. Sounds good after modifications. Tunable bandpass control. Amp is powerful enough.

Power supply is weak. Enclosure needs poly fill.

The SW-15 was somewhat muddy sounding when received. I installed about three (3) inches of polyfill and what a difference! Next, stuffed the two (2) ports and the bass became a little tighter. After a period of a few months I unstuffed the ports and bass was still tight, but extended a little deeper. I guess speaker break-in helps. The speaker tuned best with power pot at 3 o'clock position and bandpass at 9 o'clock position. Be carefull of adjusting the upper end of bass within the lower limits of your full range speakers. This can cause time delays and cancellation effects. I noticed at higher volumes the power supply transformer smells hot. I am going to replace the power supply transformer with a more powerful transformer and add some more filter capacitors. I bet this will tighten up the bass further. I rate the overall rating as 4.5 after the polyfill modification. Value is a five (5) because of cheap polyfill mod. For best bass, I would purchase two (2) as the cost is so low!

Similar Products Used:

None.

I picked up this monster for only 199 bucks at COSTCO. The box is HUGE and I think it weighs something like 60-70 lbs. I hooked this up using the line out on the back of the sub and plugging it into the sub out on my reciever. The sub has a built in crossover, and a level(volume) control. Also has a phase reverse switched that i have never used. I hooked this sub up and the amount of bass was amazing. It did tend to sound a little boomy, but I heard this was normal for a 15". Im please with my purchase and have not found any problems with this unit what so ever. It goes really well with my 2 paradigm atom's in the front, and 2 paradigm micro's for surround. I couldnt imagine paying over 400 for it though, so if you need a good sub and can find a good deal on it, its deffinately worth it.

Tried out an Audiosource SW-15 a lot due to the fantastic reviews here.I was hoping for an awesome sub, but I was dissapointed.
I could not hook up any speaker wire thicker than 18 gauge to the rear high level speaker input clips. When trying to "wiggle" and "shove" my 14 gauge wire into the clips, one of the speaker clips and spring actually broke off.
Also, when I tried it both with the high level speaker inputs, or with the subwoofer out RCA from my receiver to the sub, the auto-on circuitry did not want to turn the subwoofer on a lower volumes. I had to raise the volume up to a medium level or so to get the subwoofer to kick on. Pretty frustrating.
Also, when the sub was on, I had to raise the volume level control to the near maximum to get the proper sub volume.
Maybe I had a lemon?? Who knows, but for around the same money, my Advent AV550S totally blows this Audiosource away. I'm sending back the Audiosource and getting a refund. I'll be looking for another Advent with the Sunfire amp built in.

I got it at Costco for the $199.99-last one left, floor model with a scratch on the side. Uugh. Costco has a great return policy, though.
Got it and hooked it up fine. I will agree with the 2nd guy below that had trouble getting the auto-on to fire up at low volumes coming from the receiver - happens to me too - the woofer wouldn't come on until I increased the receiver's volume. But of course you can override this and not use the "auto on" and just turn it on. I use the direct input, via RCA jacks, and don't put speakers through the woofer, but the second guy is also right, the speaker through-puts are small, and I'm disappointed that the piece broke off for him.

Yet I only had to turn the woofer's volume itself to it's normal, middle position and used my Dolby Digital receiver to adjust the liberal volume setting for what I wanted (and I have a cheap, cheap Dolby Digital receiver ... the Teac AG-D9100 from Costco, but it's ok for me [gulp]).

This sub woofer comes with an Audiosource cd to play your woofer and adjust it so that it matches with your receiver and other speakers. So now all my speakers are set & balanced well with each other. Also this woofer is front firing. My previous woofer was floor firing. I've tested other front firing woofers, and they called attention to themselves, but not always. The SW-15 doesn't. It sounds very natural and smooth.

The SW-15 woofer had problems initially when I had it close to the wall. It sounded very slow to respond especially with music. But when I played the Audiosource cd, and it said that the woofer needed to be 3 feet from the front wall (or so), I moved it. Bingo. Everything was much more tight, natural & in sync.

I'm growing to like this woofer more and more. It is neither dull, nor punchy, nor draws attention to itself. This woofer with my DVDs and CDs is silky smooth and is so very nondirectional like it's supposed to be!! It will smolder the whole room with full, natural, deep, filling bass without calling attention to itself, and it sounds better and goes lower than my previous one that I had borrowed from a friend (who paid about $550 for it new a few years ago...Mission Electronics Model SW76 also 200Watts).

Musically it seems to be obediently smooth, rich and tight when it needs to be, again, without calling attention to itself. Set up is key. Also, the woofer can be flat to the ground, or it has 4 holes drilled in the bottom and comes with 4 little hard rubber legs, slightly coned in shape, that you can put below in the drilled holes, so that it stands up a bit and, obviously, wont move after some bass workouts. Nice touch, Audiophile.

After all of this being said, even with some of it's little faults, I gotta give it 5 stars because the damned thing is so cheap and in its element, at least for me, delivers very satisfying, unpretentious, powerful and stirring bass quality with home theater or music. Oh yeah, and it's got a hell of a lot of power.

I know, an "audiophile" wouldn't look twice at this kind of crap.
But this thing is different, because of the price. If you want better performance, you have to pay significantly more money. The SW-15 sounds better, even with music, than many more expensive subs. I was so impressed, I bought one for my video room.

I'll certainly not hook it up between my Naim preamp, Phase Linear 400 amplifier and NEAR speakers; that would be a crime. But this thing was made for home theater, and as long as it isn't reproducing anything more demanding than movie soundtracks and TV stereo broadcasts, it is a surefire winner for the money you lay out. I'm really never going to drop the bucks on a state-of-the-art DTS/AC3 system, because DTS/AC3 on a budget gets pretty close to the high-buck stuff, especially given the program material your video system is asked to reproduce most of the time.

My advice: home theater shoppers, you've found the "boom for the buck" champ, which can even do passable music duty if you move it out into your room away from the wall.

Music listeners: lay out a little more money for a good fast sealed-box 12 with a separate amp and a good electronic crossover unit. You'll need the flexibility and speed to ensure a decent match with your speakers. Better yet, save your money for real speakers that don't need a subwoofer. You'll be glad you did.