Everybody knows that a bigger subwoofer means more bass.
But what about longer subwoofer?
I'm gonna catch a cable. I'm gonna ruin every, we're good. Longer subwoofer.
This is the Bose Acoustic Wave Cannon System
and it's f***ing dumb. It's 12 feet long and it can blast listeners
with super low wubs, it up to an ear-damagingly high 109 decibels.
And all we had to do was extract it from the home of some maniac on Facebook Marketplace.
But just how bassy can this thing get? I mean, it's called a sound cannon.
But as somebody who craves the thunder of the wubs,
I have very high expectations. The only problem is, it's not built yet.
So I've enlisted help of good friend of the channel, DMS, so that we can get this thing online,
figure out why it even exists. And hopefully we can make it sound
like one of those old Maxwell tape ads. Let's do it, let's do it.
Welcome to the latest installment of, we bought this thing, we do not know what we're doing,
but we're gonna use it anyways.
Hey Adam, there's something in here. Huh? Oh hey, it's our segway to our sponsor.
So the script says unbox it, but there's not really a whole lot of unboxing.
Yeah, the box probably isn't around anymore because the instruction manual says copyright 1988.
But what exactly did we get? I see that we have a big tube
and I see the driver for the subwoofer, but we also have a bunch of other stuff.
Yeah, so like many other Bose products,
this requires a sort of proprietary power system
because this uses DSP, digital signal processing
to make it sound a certain way. It's just a fancy way of saying they EQ'd it to make it sound the way they want.
So you couldn't just drop this thing into any system,
you need this. You technically could, however,
you would need to know what they did EQ-wise if you want it to sound the way it should.
But like, I don't think it's really a normal speaker because I have never seen a speaker that is 12 feet long.
It is a normal speaker. You could actually replace this.
It's just got a simple speaker tap on the side and this is just PVC pipe.
Wait, you're saying we spent $1,000 plus however long it took to get this here for PVC pipe?
Yes, but it's a lot less than people would have spent on it in the 80s.
Was PVC expensive in the 80s? No, actually the reason you would build a speaker like this,
specifically a subwoofer is because this is the cheapest way you could possibly build it.
Wow, that's so Bose of them. But that doesn't mean it isn't cool.
I mean, who hasn't wanted to own a cannon?
It's like a freaking bass bazooka. Yeah, my favorite thing about it is how compact it is.
Something you'll notice about this is it's open on both ends.
So there's not really an enclosure, right? Oh yeah.
That's because this is what's called a parallel port.
Now, the way this works is essentially ports, they help make one bass frequency louder than the rest
and we have one big one and one short one so we can kind of combine those
and fill out a bigger range of bass. So it's not just a one note, one trick pony.
Another benefit, or maybe it's a downside, a characteristic of having your bass in a long tube
is that it makes it very directional, which means that the bass only goes
where you want it to go, ideally.
This is why the guy who owned this previously had this actually mounted in his dining room cabinets,
but it blasted all of that sound into his home theater
so it maybe didn't disturb the dinner guests too much
while he was sitting by himself watching The Dark Knight for the 1700th time.
Usually bass is omnidirectional, means it emits in every direction,
pierces through walls, that's why you can hear your neighbors playing loud music.
But the way this thing is canceling sound out is the bass frequencies are so long
you measure them in feet out like this.
So you're saying this cancels out the frequencies?
Yes, the distance from that port to the other one is so big that those frequencies overlap in the air
and cancel each other out. So if you're sitting right in front of it, good bass.
But if you're the guy next door, not so good bass.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, before we do this, I actually wanna hear what this is gonna sound
like without the tube, because that way I'm gonna know what that tube do.
That means we need to figure out what that rat's nest is. Whoa.
Oh, yeah, that is an extra driver. Useful if you blow one up.
Do you think we're gonna do that? I hope not, but it's not outside the scope of possibilities
and I don't wanna make any promises. We're gonna blow it up. So this thing's weird.
Like a lot of things were in the 1980s audio wise,
it takes balanced inputs on these XLRs.
It's just weird seeing it wired for it on binding posts
that then go out to XLRs. Yeah, why not just XLR the whole way?
Why not indeed? I'm gonna take this thing off of here
just because since we're not using it,
I don't wanna leave some bare wires sitting around that might just short out on us.
It's just weird that there's binding posts for everything. I'm not used to seeing binding posts leading out to RCA's.
And why do they have balanced inputs and unbalanced outputs?
What were they thinking here? What was the plan?
It's almost like you could like give a press conference
from here. I'm John Bose, inventor of the Bose headphones
and Soundwave Canon. You wanna overprice the box?
We got you covered. Sweet. So now we should be able to play something on this.
Yes. I'm gonna set this beautiful thing right here on top.
Oh yeah, look at that. Why are you not making sound?
Why have you forsaken me base tube?
Hey. It's doing a little bit. Update.
Turns out that this Bose controller doesn't really work.
So we plugged it into this SVS prime wireless pro sound base
and plugged that directly into the subwoofer. And would you know it?
It works. I'm tired, boss.
That's noise coming from me adjusting the knob here.
Well, they just got some peaks. Yeah.
There's the, that's the frequency of the tube that's sitting right there.
Is it making that thing? It's resonating off this.
So I'll just sit on the couch and see if this makes sense. Do we want to rotate it so that it fits?
Fits where? Directly. So it faces the couch? Oh, you should.
This is actually the correct orientation. What? Yeah.
What? You don't want to be in front of it.
You don't want to. You technically want to be on this side. Why?
If you are on this side, you're going to be farther from one side to the other.
You're going to get more phase cancellation. Oh.
So technically, this is the correct side according to the maths.
Because what you want to do is launch the sound that way it disperses within the room.
It's coming out both sides. Oh, oh, oh.
I get it now. It's the parallel port.
I get what you're saying. Yes. Which means there should be spots when we're walking around on the sides when it should
just cancel out and sound weird.
It's not very bassy. It's not that bassy. What the hell is this?
Let's find the right side of it.
But you just walk around and it disappears. Yeah, it sounds like a Google Home.
You see why these didn't really catch on? But I mean, if you built them into a bespoke environment, what if you could work?
Yes. If you had a space designed specifically where you're trying to only get bass in one spot,
that would work great for it. Which seems like a lot when you have other solutions, like just making a lot of space
of other solutions, like just making a bigger subwoofer.
But a true sign of a good subwoofer is how it integrates into an audio system.
So DMS hooked us up with these amazing SVS Ultra Evolution.
It sounds like a Goku type thing. It's basically the end game for a lot of speakers.
These things are crazy. How we got like, what are these 8-inch drivers?
Subwoofer, subwoofer, subwoofer, subwoofer.
I think this will probably produce more bass than the tube does.
Bro, don't tell me that. Don't tell me that. We spent so much time getting the tube.
Okay, let's try it. We got the tower setup.
We got the Bose acoustic wave cannon setup. Let's see how good it sounds.
Okay, so...
Yeah. What happens if we take out the bass cannon?
My guess, not much.
It's honestly just cleaner. Yeah. It's just cleaner. It's a little bit less boominess.
Maybe... No, it's just better. Yeah, it's just better.
It just sounds better. I feel like a f***ing idiot.
Our suffering is other people's. I was so excited about this bass cannon.
And it's garbage. Honestly, the tube is still a little bit better than I thought it would be.
Really? Yeah.
Speakers weren't that good in the 80s. I feel like everyone's talking about like,
oh, my dad's like 70s hi-fi speakers are so good. Yeah.
But 70s hi-fi, in most cases, the vast majority of cases is not nearly as good as like $100 modern speakers on Amazon.
But generally speaking, things were not very progressed acoustically in the 80s.
Dad, don't watch this. They're not that good.
You haven't written it yet, but I heard your comments. You're saying, why would they test that subwoofer in a big warehouse?
It's not even like a good use case for it. So we decided to bring it to the lounge,
where it's a more normal sized space
and probably something that's kind of relevant to this actual use case.
Probably a pretty big room for a house, but a reasonable size for a community space.
So we think that this is a more fair representation.
This is a 88 inch TV. It's a lot of TV.
And look at how big the tube is. It looks like almost two of that TV.
It's so stupid. Okay, but let's hear how it sounds. Let's play.
All right, we're not here for the TV. I have no idea how loud this is.
Can I give it more juice?
It sounds a lot better in here. Yeah, significantly so.
I don't think that it can pressurize that warehouse, but in a room of this size, I mean, it works.
But it doesn't really have like a lot of like rumble. Like it felt like I could hear bass,
but I wasn't feeling it. It sounds more like a woofer than a subwoofer.
I would say even in a room this size, it's a bit cumbersome still.
Do you want to compare it to like a normal sub?
We're now listening on the 10 inch Mackie sub.
So funny enough, the wave cannon actually did sound a little bit deeper.
Yeah, I was thinking that. I think the Mackie sounded tighter.
I do think as a whole, the Mackie sounds better to me. Yeah, but I felt like I got more of the bass experience from the cannon here.
Yeah, surprising. I mean, again, this is a 12 inch woofer.
That's a 10 inch woofer. A 10 inch woofer in like a one foot box versus a 12 inch woofer in a 14 foot tube.
So like they both have their strengths. Would I say that it would make sense to implement this 12 inch 15 or 12 foot long
12 inch subwoofer versus that tiny compact 10 inch?
Absolutely not. There's no deployment where I would be like,
like if you really needed to just get another one of those. Yeah.
And the situations where these were manufactured for where you would like stack them,
that might actually do some cool stuff. Yeah.
But for the amount of space it takes up and how much it would have cost at the time.
Let's go back to Labs and compare this against another subwoofer.
This is the SVS PB17 Ultra Evolution.
Holy s***. It's insane.
It is. It's like even tapping on it. Listen.
It's like the size of a mini fridge. Yes.
These are about 165 pounds a piece and 6,000 watts.
And we have two of them. So these have a 17 inch woofer whereas this thing only had a 12 inch woofer.
Yes. And the magnets on these things go back to like here.
That's... It doesn't. It's hard to do justice to the scale of this thing.
Here's a 10 inch subwoofer for scale. And this is what we would call like a pretty good subwoofer.
Yeah, that's pretty beefy. You want enough bass to fight God.
I want to hear this. We got to hear it.
It sounds terrible.
It's so much bass.
It's at half. Yeah.
It's at half. For reference, the speakers are all the way over there pointing in a different direction.
And this is causing the robotic ARM to sense force.
Holy crap.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Holy s***. That was like the whole building like the AC and the LED wall.
Yes. Come into those two things.
I've seen people put four of these in their houses before.
This is crazy. It's so much.
It feels like a theater. Yeah.
I like how this video was supposed to be about this Bose acoustic wave cannon,
but it ended up just being like, wow, look at these SVS subs. Yeah.
And realistically, again, I don't think anybody needs this specifically.
I feel like someone could get by just fine with like a $400 SVS sub and that would be insane.
Yeah. They probably need these SVS subs about as badly as they need the acoustic wave cannon system.
Yes. So in that sense, this is almost the perfect comparison.
It really is. They're both needless and you can probably satisfy anything that you need with a very,
very affordable and effective option.
Actually, we'll have some good subwoofer recommendations from DMS himself down linked below.
But if you wanted to go absolutely insane with it.
No better way. This is the way. Yeah.
Skip the tube, get the 17 inch subs. Yep.
Slap these in a home theater, run them at a very low volume to protect what little hearing
you're going to have left after like one movie. I wonder how much productivity we've destroyed today in Labs since they're like,
Listen. Right there. I warned them.
Just to give the candidate a fair of a chance as I possibly could, I set up a low pass filter
and then did some DSP tuning by ear to try and match what they're doing with this guy.
It's not going to be perfect, but honestly, it's a big improvement of where we were at.
I don't know exactly what sort of DSP curve they're applying here, but if I had to guess,
it's probably close to what I just did digitally. Yeah, I can like feel the pressure in my ears.
I don't like feel it though. That's a base tube.
That's base tube.
That's all I got. Thanks for watching this video. Thanks to DMS for coming out and helping us out.
And thanks to SVS for sending over those speakers. And if you liked this video, why don't you check out the fire truck that we put some crazy subs in there,
give it a whole sound system upgrade. Now that truck is fire.
That joke was probably made in the video. I probably am not the first one to make that.
That's pretty good though. I know it is good. Joke's so nice we made it twice.