Audiobahn unleashes a monstrous 15-inch subwoofer designed to pound you into submission.

The 1508X was a 15-inch subwoofer that was delivered for testing in a sealed enclosure with an internal volume of about 2.7 cubic feet. Features included dual 1-ohm voice coils, a cast aluminum basket with polished chrome finish, a composite glass fiber/laminated paper cone, oversized treated foam surround, a flat spider, and an extended and vented pole piece.

SUBJECTIVE
The guy at Audiobahn actually said, "Blow it up and I'll send you another one." Hope he was serious - that's a lot like asking Jack the Ripper to baby sit. Inside every man of science, there's a twisted, sadistic freak that longs to absolutely destroy something under very controlled conditions. It generally doesn't take much to bring out that side of A2000's collective personality, but with an offer like that, you know our evil intentions are gonna' be in full effect. However, I'm getting ahead of myself. We didn't tear anything up until the last objective test, so I'll wait until the objective section to release the grisly details.

From an outright sound quality standpoint, the 1508X leaves something to be desired, but this isn't exactly an SQ woofer. It sounds like what it is: a big, heavy subwoofer that's intended to be loud. The upper octave of the typical subwoofer range seems both soft and lacking in detail, but below about 50 Hz the thing turns into a real jackhammer. Boom tracks are definitely the musical genre of choice with this woofer. Enough of that, lets get to the fun part.

OBJECTIVE
All tests were performed with the 1508X's voice coils wired in series. Impedance measurements show a maximum of 47 ohms at 33 Hz and a minimum of 3.5 ohms at 54 Hz. Average impedance measured 9 ohms between 20 Hz and 100 Hz. Out-of-car response measurement shows a rise of about 8 dB below 100 Hz, followed by a 12 dB-per-octave roll-off below system resonance. In-car measurements at one watt show a sensitivity that averages 95.9 dB between 20 Hz and 50 Hz and an overall response window of about 18 dB.

And now for the in-car, in-sanity measurements. We normally run this last measurement with our "medium-sized" amp of about 5 kW, but this time we decided to roll out the King Kong of amps. Our technical editor, Richard Clark, recently got the necessary conversions done on our air conditioner-sized General Electric Gradient Drive MRI amplifiers finished. These monsters will do 20 kW in stereo and 40 kW in bridge. He's been absolutely itching to hammer the devil out of something. The last sub that got connected to this beast went south with about 3 kW of music, a disappointment to say the least. We were hoping that the 1508X would provide a more spectacular show and we definitely got it. As the chart shows, the 1508X survived sweeps at 1 watt, 3 watts, 10 watts, 30 watts, 100 watts, 300 watts, 1kW, and 3kW. It even managed to remain reasonably linear in the process, with only a dB or two of power compression between the 1kW and 3kW measurements. I only remember one other woofer that we drove to that level, and it was definitely well past its linear range.

Given the performance thus far, we decided to kick the power up one more step. The last small piece of a trace shown at the very top of the chart represents what happened at 10kW. It didn't make it very far, but that was a one with four zeros or about 13 horsepower below 35 Hz into a single subwoofer. I think the best quote went something like "Daaaaaaamn." Maximum SPL measured 132 dB at 34 Hz on the brief 10 kW sweep and 130.9 dB at 34 Hz on the 3 kW measurement.

Price & Contact: $629.99; 714-690-7530, www.audiobahninc.com