Paul in Tulsa, Oklahoma

It’s the dream of many home theater fans to have an audio system so powerful and convincing that it eclipses the performance of any professional cinema or home audio system you can experience. Paul from Tulsa reached this promised land. His journey to four PB16-Ultra subwoofers started when he was 16 and bought some new subwoofers for his first car and ended when SVS announced its new 16-Ultra subwoofers.

Now, he is enveloped in a blanket of clean, room-pressurizing bass every time he fires up a movie in his home theater, a feeling he has yet to experience anywhere else, and has become and SVS customer for life.

Questions And Answers:

When did you first start getting into audio and home theater?

It started when I was a kid, like 16, when I got my first car and I really wanted better bass and a good system I could enjoy while driving. That whole experience just got me hooked on audio. After I got my first house, I had to have a good system for the living room so I built a 2.1 with a cheap Onkyo receiver, some Infinity Tower speakers and a Sunfire subwoofer, and that was about 20 years ago.

I’ve never been one to cheap out, so even though this was my first system, I still tried to get the best I could afford, and that’s always been my mentality because I can appreciate the higher quality.

How did you end up with 4 SVS Ultra Subwoofers? What was the process and your thinking?

When I built my house, one of the most important things was a theater room and I knew I wanted this to be the best set-up I’d ever had so I went on the internet and started researching subwoofers and ultimately bought two PB13-Ultras which I ran for 5 years or so, and I loved them.

But when I saw you introduced the PB16s, the kind of person I am, I always want the latest and greatest so I knew I had to have them. So I ordered dual PB16-Ultra subwoofer and put the PB13s for sale. Well, they didn’t sell right away, so I made the most of it and put the PB13-Ultras in the rear and was running four subwoofers and I was just like, “Oh my god,” it just sounded better than I ever expected it to. Just perfectly even bass throughout the whole room.

Well, low and behold, some guy wanted to buy my PB13s and by that time I had been spoiled by having four subwoofers so I was just like, I’m going to order two more PB16s. What really sealed it was a null that appeared in my main listening position, and sometimes I actually sat in the second row of seating to get the full experience but when I ran all four subs, it wiped out that null.

What has the impact been from having multiple SVS subwoofers?

It’s been like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I’ve never been in anyone’s room or any professional movie theater that sounds like mine. I’ve never experienced anything like what I have at home with the four 16-Ultra subwoofers. It’s hard to explain, but it completely pressurizes the room where you can feel the bass all over and its super clean.

It pounds you in your chest in a way that feel good and at times kind of feel like someone’s fluffing a blanket over you, and there’s a ripple effect too.

What’s funny is that there’s nothing I can really compare it to. My buddy had a JL Gotham, but my two PB13-Ultras outdid the Gotham in terms of output and extension for less money.

Did you use the 16-Ultra Bluetooth app? Or make any special adjustments to settings to get the subwoofers integrated into your system?

Not sure if you could tell, but ‘m a basshead, so what I did was set all of the subs to -15 before running the receiver EQ. After that was set, I ran the subs about 10db hotter, so essentially adjusted to -5.

I also had to play with the phase a bit because there are four of them. I changed the phase on the rea because generally you’re supposed to adjust the ones that are closes to you but it didn’t have a huge effect so I ended up changing the phase on the fronts to 135 each and that’s where it had the most impact and it sounded the best in my main listening position.

Without questions, the app was a major convenience when changing the phase and making other DSP adjustments because I could just do everything on the fly. And the presets were huge too because I could save all my settings, then listen to them and compare. So much easier than going back and forth from behind the subwoofer and trying to do it by memory. It was just awesome to have the immediacy of the feedback.

The control system is pretty awesome, it made it a breeze. I actually had fun calibrating the subs.

What are some of your favorite movies or music for demonstrating bass?

When people come over, I always play the light bike scene from Tron: Legacy and also some of the battle scenes from Pacific Rim. They both just have a lot of intensity that grabs attention and actually scares people a little bit if they’ve never really felt that level of bass.

Anything else you want to share with the SVS community?

Besides making a great product, SVS just has the most unbelievable tech support. I must’ve called 50 times and everyone I spoke to was so helpful, down to stuff that’s not subwoofer related, just audio related. I have never had that kind of customer service experience with a company before. In the past, I’ve called manufacturers and it’s like their support is reading out of the manual and not very knowledgeable. With SVS, I felt confident in the advice on every level of set-up and I know you’ll have my back if something ever goes wrong. I will never buy a subwoofer from anyone else.