While few Australians knew what an Orchestra in full flight sounded like, many are now authorities on how much bottom end makes for a good car crash or galactic cataclysm, and they’re increasingly finding house space for an active subwoofer. Especially one that can deliver musical fidelity as well as movie drama.

Equipment
Accusound is made by Australian Speaker Manufacturers Pty.Ltd has released a major upgrade to its popular SW-150 active subwoofer, with a host of refinements including 50 watts more power - but no increase in price. 

Measuring 590 x 390 x 440 mm (WHD) and weighing 33 kg, the SW-200 is best moved by two, fit people. But it’s far from the usual ugly black box. Available in expertly applied Rosewood or Black Ash veneers, its styled to resemble a coffee table. ASM recommends you use it as such - it’s overhanging lip (hopefully) helping to direct accidental spills from the electronics. Don’t use it as a TV stand, however. It’s not magnetically shielded and the sensitive innards of a television do not appreciate such energetic vibrations.

Inside the SW-200, a complex band pass labyrinth mounts a 250mm woofer sideways (right to left), push-pull-style on an 18mm-thick baffle in a separate internal chamber. This is vented to a curved outer chamber which fans out  into two horn-profile port slots either side of the front panel, formed from two contour-routed 25mm thicknesses of Craftwood covered with grille cloth. The interior is heavily damped with innerbond - ASM’s own 350gm wool damping material, and the woofer is wired directly to the amplifier’s output section with high-quality cable. The SW-200’s control panel provides rotary knobs for level, phase and frequency cut off. ‘Level’ sets the sub’s own level- its proportion of the overall mix. ‘Phase’ lets you vary the phase of the sub’s output to cancel out completely or partially, the areas where the sub overlaps with your main woofers. Frequency cut-off (variable between 40 –160 Hz) can be used to the same end: Accusound recommending you start tweaking with the cut-off at around 60Hz. You can connect the SW-200 via the low-level, (line level) route, which uses one or two RCA leads from a home theatre receiver’s dedicated subwoofer output(s). Alternatively, you can, run speaker cables from your amp’s terminals to the sub’s high-level input and another pair from the sub to your main speakers. The SW-200 also provides stereo line-level outputs for the daisy-chain connection of a second or (good grief) a third subwoofer.

Performance
We were able to test the SW-200 alongside another (imported) 200 watt, 250mm subwoofer to which we had grown very accustomed. Slotted into its place, the SW-200 produced instant grins of gratification. Not only deep, warm, powerful bass ‘til Tuesday’, but also consistently musical bass which coaxed out the complex timbres- the big wooden double-basses of Charlie Hayden and Ray Brown; the cold, heavy steel of Stanley Clarke’s solid-body slapping, and the goblinesque grunt of a Joe Jackson synth bass… It’s bass with substance and authority, bass that lives and breathes, underpinned by tangible ‘juiciness’ and ‘meatiness’, with easily distinguishable pitch and an infectious, hip-twitching immediacy. Close listening with no upper/mid speakers attached revealed no audible ‘chuffing’ turbulence and the SW-200’s location was never evident, even when located well out of the listening triangle, with an (unknowing) listener sitting way off-axis and almost on top of it.

Switching to home theatre mode, we started to think that the SW-200’s ability to convey the individuality of different bass sounds might be wasted on Hollywood movie-makers now seem to recycle their sounds, dialling up Generic Car Crash No.3 and Door Slam No.8. Seriously, though, the SW-200 has enough trauma-inducing bass power for all but the vastest of mansions and catastrophic movies. And, importantly, it supplies the controls for fine –tuning it to any room or system to provide natural tonality and maximum intelligibility.

Conclusion
Accusound’s SW-200 is neither the cheapest 200-watter on the market, nor the most compact. But, with its tank-like Aussie construction, classically elegant lines, superb driver/amp matching and highly successful room-coupling, it’s among the very best in its class. 
Excellent value and true high-fidelity performance.      

Retail $1235

Manufactured by:
Australian Speaker Manufacturers P/L
Ph  -(02) 9545-3905
Fax-(02) 9545-3902