Aperion Audio Bravus 10D Subwoofer Review

The Aperion Bravus 10D is an attractive, potent little subwoofer at a reasonable price. It certainly doesn't have the output and extension of its larger peers but that's a tradeoff for a smaller box that blends more easily into your room décor. In that respect, the Bravus 10D excels. It's beautiful to look at and makes it hard to not justify putting two of these subs in your theater room - something we highly recommend.

Editor's Note: Be sure to also check out our full review of the Aperion Audio Bravus 10D Subwoofer with measurements.

The Bravus 10D is in the middle of the Aperion line of subwoofers. You can order it in two finishes: cherry, shown here, or high gloss black. Both are stunning and the quality of the finish is second to none - in fact it's a higher quality look and feel than any other subwoofer in the market at this price. One standout feature is that the cabinet is rounded with NO sharp corners. Aperion also supplies both rubber and metal feet, so you're good to go on carpet, wood or tile.

The 10D features dual anodized black 10" Aluminum cone woofers with butyl rubber surrounds. They fire on opposing sides, which allows them to cancel out one another's stress on the cabinet. Aperion specs the cabinet as being constructed out of 1" HDF and we found that it was well-braced. The woofers are recessed into the cabinet so the grills end up being flush with the box. It's a great look, but if you want to pull the grills off, you will need to use their supplied tool. The 10D also comes with a remote control which is very rare at this price.

Now the woofers do have stamped baskets but they are made well. The drivers are NOT magnetically shielded but having two back to back nets the same result. We still wouldn’t recommend setting this sub on top of your CRT television... (pause)... for various reasons.

The 10D uses a 300 watt BASH amplifier. The back panel has both speaker level and line level inputs. There's a voltage selector and a power on/off switch. There are no speaker level outputs so you can't use the sub as a crossover for satellite speakers, for that you'll need to use an A/V receiver which we recommend anyway.

That remote we mentioned earlier? It's neat, but more for preset switching and volume, since it's virtually impossible to read the sub's LCD screen from across the room. Since there are no knobs, using the sub's onboard software is the only way to change Crossover and phase settings. It also lets you configure the preset modes and 1-band parametric EQ. Speaking of that PEQ, you get 6dB of gain or cut from 30Hz to 60Hz in 10Hz steps, and you can set the Q, or filter width to "Narrow", "Normal" or "Wide". This is helpful for lowering an out-of-control bass peak in your room.

We actually measured the 10D outdoors and also in-room. Running the Aperion sub up to its max output, it hit a whopping 115dB SPL at 1 meter at around 80Hz. Obviously, the bass response sharply fell off below 40Hz and the sub seems to go down to around 30Hz before it really drops out.  The Bravus 10D integrated well with several brands of speakers and never sounded boomy, no matter how hard we drove it. It also never bottomed out -a testimony to Aperion's design philosophy. Aperion Audio has combined good driver design with an attractive cabinet at a reasonable price. You can get more output from a bigger box, but that's a different product then, isn't it? We can easily recommend the Bravus 10D for small to medium sized rooms. That recommendation goes double if you buy two.

Editor's Note Part Deux: Based in part on our testing and feedback,. Aperion Audio changed up the Bravus 10D and released the Bravus II 10D which features an active down-firing driver and two passive 10-inch radiators. The result is greater output, which overcoms one of the chief limitations of the original Bravus line.

Unless otherwise indicated, this is a preview article for the featured product. A formal review may or may not follow in the future.