GoldenEar Technology SuperSub XXL Preview

We got a chance to see GoldenEar’s new SuperSub XXL subwoofer last week at CEDIA and were impressed with the performance for its moderately sized form factor.  GoldenEar employed what they call a 360 degree dual-plane inertially-balanced driver and sub-bass radiator combination to reduce cabinet resonances and distortion.  Sandy Gross claims he could balance a nickle on the cabinet running it at full power and it won't move.  We didn't confirm this, but he did shake up the demo room pretty well with this impressive subwoofer.

The enclosure of the XXL is constructed of thick, high density medite, which is finished in high-gloss piano black lacquer. Two 12” long-throw active drivers in the horizontal plane and two 12 ¾”x14 ½” planar infrasonic radiators in the vertical plane drive the sub to effectively move air in the room. GoldenEar Technology says that's because there are two active drivers which are separated horizontally in space, as well as two passive radiators which are separated vertically. GoldenEar claims the driver-to-room coupling is distributed more smoothly as the different driver locations couple to different room standing wave patterns, and work well with the room modes.

The electronics package that drives the driver and radiator arrays is made up of a 1600 watt Class D Digital Amplifier, originally developed for their Triton One floorstanding speaker.  It is controlled by a 56 bit DSP device with a 192 kHz sample rate. This Programmable Logic State Machine is reported to have 278ns update time to manage functions including frequency response, soft clipping, DC offset control, output-stage saturation control, discrete multi-band limiting and phase-perfect equalization.

The amplifier also utilizes small, separate power supplies for each circuit section in order to provide isolation, so there is little opportunity for coupling through the power supplies.

GoldenEar utilizes reconstruction filters in order to maximize damping factor.  The RCA inputs are provided for both LFE connection, as well as low-level connection from a stereo source.

How Does It Sound?

We got a chance to hear the SuperSub XXL in action at their demo booth at CEDIA along with a full compliment in in-ceiling and in-wall speakers for a full fledged Dolby Atmos system.  The system played plenty loud and had good dynamics. The immersive effect of Atmos was somewhat diminished by having all of the speakers at the same listening plane around the room , but it was still quite impressive for a mostly all in-ceiling speaker installation.  The XXL sub proved to be powerful though Sandy got a little carried away with the level his new sub was playing at.  It was obvious he wanted to show off his latest creation but lowering down the sub level about -6dB would have been better suited to our tastes.  We will definitely have to get a unit in for evaluation in our sound labs in the near future.

U.S. Retail Price is $1999 each and will be available in September

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