As many of you may know, the Swarm subwoofer system received a Golden Ear Award in the September issue of The Abso!ute Sound magazine, page 66.
Recently I had the opportunity to demo a Swarm to the proud owner of an Edgarhorn system. This particular Edgarhorn system features a field-coil-motor compression driver built by John Wolff of Classic Audio Reproductions. The midbass bin was built by authorized Edgarhorn builder Nick Ferber of New Orleans.
I wasn't sure whether the Swarm would "keep up", both volume-wise and subjectively, with the horn-loaded 15" midbass section, not to mention the field-coil-motor compression driver or top-of-the-line Fostex tweeter. Well on both counts the Swarm fared well enough that the owner placed an order, and Nick built the flat black Swarm that you see here (sorry for the grainy cell phone photo):
This was one of the few times that I've used the Swarm in sealed-box mode. With the ports sealed, the Swarm becomes a Qtc = .50 sealed box, so some bass boost is needed. We can use either the single band of parametric EQ or the +3 dB @ 25 Hz bass boost filter on the back of the amp (or both if needed). Anyway after playing around with settings for maybe half an hour or so we got a very smooth in-room response and a sonically invisible blend between subwoofers and midbass horn. Edgarhorn owners tend to be pretty hard-core, othewise they'd have never ended up as Edgarhorn owners. Anyway the success of the Swarm in sealed box mode in that application got me to thinking about sealed box mode a bit more.
So long story short, I've made a woofer change. The new woofer has a little bit more low end than the old one, such that we're now -3 dB at 18 Hz instead of 20 Hz in-room in vented-box mode. In sealed-box mode with the bass boost filter engaged, we've extended the in-room -3 db point from 25 Hz down to 22 Hz.
This new woofer is considerably more expensive, and I've had other cost increases that haven't been passed on yet, so now that I can offer a genuinely improved version of the Swarm, some of those cost increases (though not all of them) are being passed on: The price of the Swarm is now $2800, and the website will be updated shortly.
