B&W DB1D SUBWOOFER

Fact. The DB1D is the most powerful active subwoofer B&W has ever made. And if that fact doesn’t get your blood racing, how about that it has a low-frequency response that stretches down below 9Hz, as well as the ability to comfortably generate a sound pressure level of 92dBSPL across the pass band with negligible distortion?

THE EQUIPMENT

If you know something about subwoofers, you’re probably wondering how B&W manages high SPLs, low distortion and extended low-frequency performance simultaneously, since the three are usually mutually exclusive, as in if you optimise any two, you can’t expect the third.

When you see a DB1D in the flesh, and read the spec sheet, you’ll immediately know how B&W managed it. First, the cabinet is not exactly small! (It’s not exactly large, either, but it’s probably rather larger than you might have imagined.) In fact, the cabinet is exactly 460 by 429 by 410mm (HWD). Second—and you really can’t tell this from the photographs, the bass driver is a full 300mm in diameter, which is ‘way bigger than the drivers fitted to most subwoofers. Moreover, although you can only see one bass driver in most of the photographs, the B&W DB1D has TWO bass drivers (the second one also being 300mm in diameter). The Thiele/Small diameter for each cone is 250mm, which gives a total cone area of 981cm².

At this point, you’re probably thinking to yourself: ‘So what? Lots of subwoofers have two drivers.’ And if you’re thinking that, I have to tell you that you’re wrong. Although many subwoofers ‘appear’ to have two bass drivers, often only one of those two is a driver—one with a voice coil, a magnet and all the trimmings. The other so-called ‘driver’ is actually a passive radiator, or ‘drone cone’, which does not have a voice coil, or a magnet—and sometimes not even a spider suspension. It’s just a cone. How could such a driver work? When the active driver’s cone moves ‘backwards’ into the cabinet, it compresses the air inside the cabinet, which in turn drives the cone of the