Another review & comparison:
Last week, tomtuttle (Tom), samandnoah (Rich), and WhatFurrer (Steve) all came by for some comparative listening tests between these two subs as well as a demo of the entire Epic 80 system as a few of these guys hadn't heard the 80s in action before. The get-together was a ton of fun, but for now I'll focus on the comparison of the subs given the subject of this thread.
I'll attempt to repeat what I heard from everyone while we were listening, though of course it'd be better if they all jumped in and commented themselves.
First, some technicalities. I did move both subs next to each other (grunt, groan) in the right rear corner of the room. Room trim on both was off, XO was in bypass on the sub, 100hz in the receiver (not my normal listening XO, but for purposes of the curve, I wanted to go out further), the SVS was tuned to its 10hz setting, which means 2 of the 3 plugs were put into the ports on the front of the sub).
Both subs were tuned to 80 dB, the mains were tuned to 75, center to around 78. Just my personal preference, no further science to the choice. The subs were then also both tuned to a flat response individually using the BFD. (As a side note, this is one truly miraculous little device - I HIGHLY recommend it for flattening in-room response.)
Here is a comparative view of the tuned response curves:
Just as comparison, here are the two curves before the BFD tamed them (witness the power of the BFD!)
As you can see, they both have a nice flat response from 20 - 90hz, with the only noticeable difference in the sub 20hz range, where the SVS is capable of producing ~15-25 dB more than the 600 in my room. (this is running it in its lowest tuned mode, to 10hz, which cuts total SPL possible from the SVS, but in my room, I've yet to approach its limits, so there's not much downside for me to tuning it down to the 10hz mode.
Now, onto the actual thoughts/reviews...
Opinions were very mixed on the subs depending on source material. For the U571 scene, I felt that the SVS was absolutely incomparably better (blow your pants off better), but others weren't as certain as they felt it was almost overpowering, which I guess is what I like.
Tom pointed out that he liked the 600 more on the U571 explosion scenes because he thought the SVS was overpowering the mains and not producing any of the finer details in the explosions of the depth charges. The SVS was clearly louder and produced more "shake your pants" effect, but for him the 600 was still a nicer sound. Rich and Steve agreed that they noted this difference, though I don't remember as clearly which one they liked better.
We also watched the opening scene of Toy Story 2 where the opening credits roll in and the following scene where Buzz infiltrates Zurg's headquarters. In these scenes as well, the SVS was clearly deeper and louder. The output was so much louder with the SVS that it led all of my guests asking whether the two subs were really tuned to the same volume, which they were, but I'm still not sure everyone believed me.
(despite knowing that I'd done this myself, the difference was so noticeable that I was questioning myself as well).
For music, the SVS was a little harder to blend into the rest of the material. Despite Rich's objections, we listened to Hotel California from the Eagles DVD (in DTS) to test the subs' performance on music.
Here I believe we all agreed that the 600 definitely smoothed into the background more nicely without additional tuning effort, which I can't really explain considering the very comparable response curves. When I knocked down the SVS by 2 or 3 dB in the Denon's menu, it blended a bit more nicely but still not as well as the 600. With that said, I still feel like somewhat of a neophyte when considering all of the options on the amp for the SVS and need to do more work with the various tuning options before giving a final verdict on musical performance.
Since the test, because of the strange volume differences we observed during both music and movies, I blanked everything out of the BFD and Denon and recalibrated everything one more time to ensure that there was nothing off in the setup. That took a couple of hours and I haven't been able to actually do any more comparative testing, but at this point the room is ready for it.
I plan on doing more this week (Mother's day is not an idea day for such tests it appears). I'll post back with my thoughts.
Jakewash, I'm looking forward to what you think as well now that you've got it back in your room.
