Subwoofer

This is the thing that surprised me most when I first removed it out of the box. The subwoofer has 25.7 watts of power but to my surprise, it used the acoustic suspension design, which is quite rare.

Subwoofers with 20 to 30 watts of power usually use the bass reflex design, which is also known as ported enclosure design. The bass reflex design helps increase the subwoofer's efficiency. That's why it's common in subwoofers that do not have a lot of power in the first place.

The Z-640's subwoofer is roughly 23cm x 23cm x 23cm in size. It is heavy enough to stay still when it's pumping loud volume bass!

Placing the subwoofer volume control knob on the subwoofer itself is definitely not a good idea. It's really inconvenient to crawl under the desk everytime when you need to adjust the bass volume.

Acoustic Suspension Vs. Bass Reflex

As mentioned before, an acoustic suspension (or sealed) speaker is airtight - fully sealed from the air outside the enclosure. This means the speaker has to compress and decompress the air inside its enclosure and the sound waves generated does not actually come out.

This reduces its efficiency as some of its power is lost compressing and decompressing the air within the enclosure. Of course, the speaker is still partially moved by the air as the compressed air pushes it back.

When it comes to the bass reflex (or ported) speaker, air is allowed to move inside and outside the enclosure as the speaker moves back and forth. The sound waves generated inside the enclosure is allowed to move out of the enclosure, which further increases its efficiently. If the enclosure is properly designed, it can deliver as much as 3dB more power than a acoustic suspension subwoofer of the same wattage.

However, while the bass reflex design increases the speaker's efficiency, its accuracy is actually decreased. Bass reflex subwoofers trade their accuracy for increased bass efficiency. So, the sound reproduction of bass reflex speakers may not be very accurate.

Acoustic suspension subwoofers, albeit with lower power efficiency, provide superior accuracy and precise control of the speaker. This means the sound reproduction of acoustic suspension subwoofers are more accurate than bass reflex subwoofers.

Installation

The installation process is just very simple. All you need to do is match the colours of the plugs to the proper jacks. and manage the cable a little. It won't take a lot of time.

At the back of the subwoofer

Plugged into my sound card

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