SVS PB2000 – An Upgrade Teaser
This is just a little “carrot dangle”.
I shall be upgrading my front pair of SVS PB12-NSD subs in the near future to a pair of SVS PB2000’s that are now in-house. My rear SB2000 subs will remain. This will provide me with 2xPB2000’s and 2xSB2000’s that use the same speaker chassis and amplifier (but different DSP EQ). The PB2000 provides an improved LF response with a slower LF roll-off as seen below, plus a slightly higher power amplifier and lower distortion at a given SPL than its predecessor, the PB12-NSD.
Frequency Response Credit: SVS. PB2000 response was appropriately scaled to match the PB12-NSD axes
The challenge as before will be aligning the impulse and group delays of these two pairs of very different subs to match and be additive in such a way that they provide a flat frequency response when equalized down to 10Hz, while maintaining my current fast LF room decay. My subs crossover at 40Hz to my Genelec 1038’s and 80Hz to all other Genelec (8040 & 8030) satellite speakers. My current LF room response, 5Hz to 300Hz, for the two PB12-NSD’s plus two PB2000’s is shown below:
Final LF Frequency Response SMS-1 EQ only: Two PB12-NSD’s and two SB2000’s.
LF Room Decay SMS-1 EQ only. The 16Hz and 27Hz decays are NOT room modes; see my white paper.
LF Room Decay With Audyssey XT32 EQ and SMS-1 EQ. Note LF roll-off below 20Hz & peak smoothing.
The 5dB LF roll-off below 20Hz is a result of the AVPA1HDCI electronics and Audyssey XT32 EQ.
The current sub alignment took many months as I had to learn what parameters to change to get the desired performance, see my white paper here. I am hoping that the lessons learned will significantly speed this upgrade to just a few days.
I actually have space at the front of my room to install all four PB subs but that would require removing some LF damping and adding a third sub delay system. Possibly the loss of the damping material would be made up for by the addition of the two subs, but I have decided that trying to align three different pairs of subs is just too much to take on for now. This is despite the potential improvements in dropping the LF distortion as I would be barely driving six subs in order to get my desired SPL of 115+dB at 20Hz and 100+dB at 10Hz. But I never say never! That might just be a project for my upcoming retirement.
Stay tuned.
See here for the actual PB2000 sub upgrade post. (November 3rd 2022)
See here for my original sub alignment post.
For more PB2000 details goto the SVS web site.
Looking forward to your future report of a reasonably smooth upgrade process with a genuine, even if modest, performance improvement.
Jerry,
I did a quick swap out just to see how close things were but with the correct levels set the impulse timings were off as was the EQ, not too surprising. They sounded very similar but different, being a bit bass heavy/thick.
I now have to find a ‘window’ that will not interfere with my movie viewing and reviewing to do the job properly.
Paul