YG Acoustics InVincible 21.2 6kwatt Subwoofer Costs $100k?!?

What is the best bass you’ve ever heard? For me, two very different systems come to mind. The first is an utterly ridiculous two-channel system that I recently heard at a high-end dealer in Santa Monica, featuring Wilson Audio’s flagship WAMM Master Chronosonic loudspeakers ($685,000 per pair) and WAMM Master Subsonic subwoofers ($90,000 per pair), driven by a rack full of Dan D’Agostino’s gleaming copper-clad electronics. The source was the $400,000 TechDAS Air Force Zero turntable. Yes, this megabuck system was absurdly expensive, even by high-end standards, but the sound was memorable, to say the least. The focus was on lightning-fast transient speed and extreme clarity, all the way down to the lowest frequencies. There was a sense of effortlessness to the bass, which blended so seamlessly that the towering subs seemed to be doing nothing at all. The system did a remarkable job of recreating the acoustic space of Carnegie Hall on a track from Harry Belafonte’s 1959 live album. This experience was very different from that of my other pick for best-ever bass — a surround system comprising electronics and omnidirectional loudspeakers from Germany’s MBL, with supplemental bass provided by a pair of JL Audio Gotham v2 subwoofers ($16,500 each). The bass was, as JL Audio would put it, devastating. Aural memory may be less than perfect, but I definitely remember how this system felt. At a moment’s notice, these subs could have pulverized my entire skeleton to dust. There was a seemingly endless reserve of power and slam, and the low frequencies extended down to just above the core of the Earth. For me, the platonic ideal of bass would capture the best of both worlds. Is it possible to convey the WAMM Master Subsonic’s effortless speed and clarity while delivering the Gotham’s mind-blowing depth and power? That is precisely what YG Acoustics set out to achieve with the company’s enormous InVincible 21.2 subwoofer, which sells for a cool $100,000 each.

YG Acoustics has made some of the world’s best loudspeakers for 15 years now, but the InVincible sub is unlike anything the Colorado-based company — or anyone, really — has ever produced. YG says the InVincible sub is:

“the world’s first hyper-high-end sub-bass speaker,” created to be “a truly extreme solution, a no-holds-barred assault on everything deemed possible in the sub-bass realm.”

According to YG, many owners of the company’s flagship speakers wanted to add subwoofers to their systems, but found that doing so came with serious drawbacks. We’ve all heard systems in which the bass simply can’t keep up with the higher frequencies, and this problem can be even more apparent in highly resolving systems. In order to create a sub that could go toe-to-toe with the best speakers from YG and its high-end competitors (such as Wilson, Magico, and Rockport), YG’s designers began by developing a new 21-inch BilletCore driver, which is machined from a single, massive slab of aircraft-grade aluminum. After more than five hours of CNC machining, a 14.5-ounce cone is all that remains of the 66-pound slab from which it was delicately carved. The 21-inch driver is only 0.6mm (0.024 inches) thick, yet is reportedly far more rigid than any competing design. According to YG, the CNC-machined basket is “precisely assembled from 238 parts using lab-grade alignment and tolerances.”

6000 Thousand Watts? Great Scott!

The InVincible 21.2 sub uses two of these huge drivers in a dual-opposing, push-push setup. Each driver sits in its own enclosure, and is tilted at an angle that YG says improves the ease of room-integration by approximating the dispersion of a front-firing driver, while delivering the vibration-cancelling benefits of a push-push setup. The drivers are powered by a custom, American-made class D amplifier that provides up to 6,000 watts RMS (iyou're going to need a custom wall outlet to deliver anywhere near that power). Like YG’s flagship Sonja loudspeakers, the InVincible sub uses a “box within a box” cabinet design to minimize vibration. The sealed cabinet is CNC-machined from solid aluminum billet, and stands 5’10” high. The cabinet also features a YG technology called Focused Elimination, which relies on precise, sophisticated geometries to eradicate standing waves with less loss (i.e. less friction) than traditional stuffing and damping methods.

According to YG, the result is “a quick reaction-time, freedom from boxiness, and a tight, punchy bass.”

The InVincible sub uses an advanced DSP-based crossover, allowing it to blend with most high-end speakers in two-channel or surround sound setups. The DSP design was inspired by YG’s exclusive Dual Coherent technology, which ensures that the crossover is coherent in both the time and frequency domains. The user can select whatever crossover frequency works best, but the guesswork is eliminated for owners of YG speakers, thanks to pre-programmed settings for all current YG loudspeaker models, as well as for many legacy models. Like YG’s Sonja loudspeakers, the InVincible sub is modular, and is therefore available in two single-driver, single-enclosure configurations, either of which can be upgraded to the larger, dual-driver flagship design described above. The InVincible 21.1 is the upward-firing single-driver configuration; it is basically the bottom half of the dual-driver InVincible 21.2 configuration. The 21.1i is a downward-firing version of the single-driver configuration. It is designed for high-traffic installations where the user does not feel comfortable leaving the driver exposed. Because the 21.1i has a flat top surface, it can also double as a stand for the center channel speaker in a surround application. Both single-driver configurations sell for $55,000 each.

Will YG’s InVincible sub succeed in setting a new standard in the world of ultra-high-end bass performance? What is the best bass you’ve heard in an audio system? Share your thoughts in the related forum thread below.

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