PC13-Ultra

These are by far the best Subwoofers I have ever heard or seen. I have been using them for one week now and they are literally a night and day difference from what I have been used to. I previously had dual subs from two differnt companies, the Polk PSW 111 and the JBL Base2/Basswave. I always felt that I was missing listening content in my music and movies but all of the stores locally that sold home subwoofers didn’t offer anything that pushed me to purchase any new ones. About four months ago I began looking into subwoofers online and ran across SVS. I did a ton of research and spoke with the SVS experts via text message. With their 45 day in home trial I finally decided to make the commitment and purchase the dual Ultra PC13’s. SVS will not be getting these back! Immediately I fell in love with the look of them and once connected,,,,, I’m hearing things in my music and movies that I never knew was there. I’m still playing around with the proper settings but “WOOOWWWW!!!” I love ‘em. Once you purchase these you won’t be able to go back, it’s the equivalent of first learning to drive, you never intentionally go back to walking everywhere. Awesome Subs!!!

I purchased two SVS PC13-Ultra subwoofers. The choice, going SVS, was between these cylinders and the sealed cube model (SB 13-Ultra). The application was music only, but including organ and other deep bass requiring music, which bottomed out my previous subwoofers. The other gear: Magnepan 1.7s, Parasound Halo P5 preamp, Krell showcase power amp, Sony ES HAP-Z1ES music player and Music Hall turntable (thats enough, though there is more!). Well, I started off in the ported mode. I calibrated and measured with DSPseaker. Excellent extension down to 20 htz in very large living room (1200 sq ft, 8 ft ceiling), but sharp drop off thereafter, as expected of ported mode, Nearly flat response across the spectrum.. No problem with measurements, to say the least! But listening, the bass was, well, blow-hard! I knew those subwoofers were there, exaggerating and not integrating: tuneful did not describe the performance. So I switched to sealed. Now extension to 10 htz (-5 db), equally flat response. But listening,now I had bass beauty to die for! To be fair, SVS recommends the sealed mode for music, so I should have known. Granted, at plus100 db the ported (and its physics) might show some advantage, but Ill never hear it, thats too loud for me (and for my wood framed house!). I am feeling very pleased with myself for making this choice to purchase SVS.

This is a impressive and fantastic subwoofer. I am from the belief that you can never have too much bass and the PC13 Ultra delivers. I started out with my 45 day free trial of a PC2000 and returned it with free return shipping paid for by SVS. I then purchased a PC12-Plus and returned that because although better, it was just quite not enough. Again, the return shipping was paid for by SVS 45 day in home trial. I then purchased a PC13-Ultra and BINGO!! Now, ultimately I would have preferred to have two PC2000's for about the same price as the PC13-Ultra but as many married men know that a marriage is a lot of compromise. That said my wife was not having any part of two subwoofers in our living room. Hence, one PC13-Ultra. Finally, the reason why I gave it a 4 star rating and not a 5 star rating is the silly volume control that SVS uses. I don't get it!!! -100 db to 0 db is the range. However, for all intents and purposes -100 through -90 is completely useless. The manual states when running the AVR auto calibration set it at -8 db's for small room, -5 db's for medium size rooms and -3 db for large size rooms. Something like that anyway as I don't have the owners manual in front of me. Common sense would dictate a 0 through 10 db volume control and leave it at that. I don't get it. I'm sure the engineers at SVS are much smarter than I and have their reasons, but I just don't get it. Hope this review helps anyone contemplating which subwoofer is best for their application. One…