This is one of the best purchases I've ever made. Here's a little background:
If you don't know about this product, this was the standalone processor that Velodyne began to market after their success in implementing it in all of their Digital Drive subwoofers. When I first set up the audio room, I had a Velodyne DD-10 instead of the pair of REL B2s that I have now. Before the Velodyne, the bass is my room just didn't work regardless of room placement or treatments. My bass response graphed out looked like something out of a trigonometry textbook with a fairly large peak between 30 and 37 Hz and an ENORMOUS valley at 40 Hz which pretty much sucked the bass right out of the music. We then peaked again a little above 50 Hz which made the lower midbass sound really boomy and downright annoying. The Velodyne did help somewhat, but as I have mentioned before in other threads, I had a visit from Jim Smith (Get Better Sound fame) who "voiced" my room, set everything up and insisted that 2 RELs in stereo would be better than the one Velodyne. The problem with this was losing the DD correction software. I followed his instruction anyway and sure the RELs bass was deeper, smoother, and more musical, but no matter where I put the damn things, I still had the peaks and valleys in my response. The problem now was that to take advantage of the REL "bass pressurization" and other advantages of REL subwoofers, I had to turn the volume up too high. Even with the RELs ABC crossover set to the lowest setting, when I would turn up the volume, I would begin to get an even louder midbass hump (since you really cannot fine tune the RELs with slope etc.) and still no help with the 40 Hz valley.
A couple of weeks ago I said forget it and started looking for one of these SMS-1 processors...I figure it's not too expensive, somewhat rare, and I could resell it if it didn't work well with the RELs.
http://www.ibiblio.org/tkan/audio/velodyne_sms1.jpg
So I got it a couple of days ago hooked it up and began dialing it in. Using no equalization, I moved the RELs around until I got the best response watching the graph (in real time) on a monitor. Once that was finished, I performed the auto eq which gets you about 80% of the way home. After that was complete, you can use the software to adjust each frequency, the Q value, and the crossover/slope. To make a long story short, after I was done, the microphone showed now an almost ruler flat response from about 15 Hz to 65 Hz. Sweet. Another thing I was able to do was adjust the crossover slope and make it somewhat steep so that I didn't have too much overlap with the Avalon's. the on screen graph makes it easy since I was able to disconnect the Avalon's to get a graph of the RELs by themselves. Next it was music time.
Holy Crap. :music: I have never heard such deep, smooth bass in my life and I've listened to some pretty outstanding systems. Stereo RELs combined with ruler flat response down to 15 Hz is something to hear. You can actually feel the REL pressurization that you read about without anything muddying up the lower mids. The soundstage now goes wall to wall, since I'm actually getting response between 40 and 50 Hz which was absent before.
Listen, I'm not an equalizer guy, I hate tone controls and I'm sure the engineers at REL would cringe knowing that I had to use a Velodyne processor to help, but let me tell you something, if the room you have negates the advantages of high quality subwoofers, then give it a shot. If there is any time smearing or anything detrimental to the sound by using this, I cannot hear it and even if I could, the advantages far would outweigh the negatives. This is by far the most cost effective upgrade I've ever purchased and it cost me less than $400......I believe it retailed for $799.99 when new.
If anyone out there cannot tame bass response in their room, I urge you to comb ebay or audiogon and give it a try. Amazing! :banana: