High-pass filter sounds good and does not muck up the sound. Calibration microphone helps sub blend seemlessly with the rest of the system to make it as coherent as it's going to get. Looks good, well made, and has a nice manual and remote control. Slider bars are user-adjustable to tailor the sound for your room.

High-pass crossover could be adjustable for users with small fron mains (crossover point and slope) as it's currently fixed. Low-pass cut-off frequency hass adjustable slope, but should go lower than 15Hz (be more adjustable). Slider bars don't allow enough adjustment. If they were +/- 18dB, this would be a perfect unit (or even have +/- 12dB would be nice), but instead, only offers +6 / -12dB adjustment. Good enough for listening to music using large mains, but not good enough for most room sizes using small front mains and watching movies.

First of all, this is the third time I had to enter a review for this item on this website because someone keeps deleting my review, so I'll keep it short this time.

The unit is nice and well-made and sounds good. It is best used for the casual user that is not too discriminating with the overall results bust just wants to attempt to do something about their bass management. It could easily be a much better product.

Customer Service

Customer service was very nice and helpful, but it depends on who you spoke to. (One guy was very arrogant!)

Similar Products Used:

Bryston 10B-SUB, Bag End InfraMXB

Good looks, nice remote control, well-written manual, overall good sound, blends well with mains, calibration microphone is easy to set up and use

Not adjustable enough to fulfill one of the main purposes for which it was designed, parametric equalization adjustment of low frequencies does not offer enough adjustment to account for basic room acoustics.

This is a well-manufactured product that looks good and sounds good. It comes with everything you need to get started, including a terrific owner's manual with "quick start" instructions and detailed instructions for really dialing in the sound. I did not notice any degradation of sound quality from the high-pass filter, and lows were blended seemlessly with the main speakers with no issues of phase or spikes or dips in the response. The problem that I have with this unit is that it is marketed to people wanting to account from individual room acoustics, yet it does not allow the user to make enough correction. After paying for the unit, I found this most frustrating because now I have to buy another product to get the job done. When I called the company to inquire about why the parametric equalization of the low frequencies are not more adjustable (they adjustable, but not enough!) and if a software upgrade (or modification) was an option for me, I received a very cold reply about not using the unit according to its intended purpose and given no opportunity to pay for an "upgrade" or modified unit. Regardless, I still give the unit a good rating for sound quality in general and to blending subs to mains and for trying to compensate for room acoustics. However, when you're dealing with a subwoofer system and you need a certain amount of dB adjustment to get a flat response, then the SMS-1 will most likely NOT compensate enough due to lack of enough adjustment of the low-frequency parametric equalization slider bars. An adjustable high-pass crossover frequency would be nice, too, for users with smaller speakers. The fixed 80Hz / 6 dB/octave high-pass will be a little too aggressive for some smaller speakers if using this unit for home theater applications (which most users will).

Customer Service

There was always a tech to take my call. If he did not have the answer, he would call me back to make sure I was taken care of. Another tech, though, was very defensive about the design of this product and was not fully open to meeting the customer's needs. It's was basically like "here's a product we made, love it or leave it" (not quoting the person, just giving the jist of the response). I guess some folk just forget who they're really working for.

Similar Products Used:

Bryston 10B & 10B-SUB crossovers