Substantial Sub Bass From The Shallows
Achieving lots of sub-bass in a car has required multiple amplifiers and subwoofers in large enclosures for many years. Whole companies in the past existed on their ability to quickly manufacture MDF boxes for enclosures that would eat up all the luggage space in a vehicle.
The entire car audio industry has been negatively impacted in the past by the need to give up significant amounts of space to the production of low bass, which has put many off bothering to upgrade. After all, what’s the point if the most critical frequencies to many music lovers are not available without giving up golf or shopping?
More recently, tremendous advances have been made in producing sub-bass frequencies (80 Hz downwards) of sufficient level to balance with the rest of an upgraded system. Active subwoofer solutions from the Audison Prima range have drawn a lot of new interest in car audio upgrades due to their compact size and incredible performance.
One of the significant obstacles has been in producing enough air movement from shallower speakers. The key to his particular piece of audio magic is in cone excursion – The freedom for the cone to move significant distances in both directions without interfering with its enclosure while reducing the depth of the “motor components” and suspension system.
Hertz now brings you Mille Shallow subs. These new subwoofers have a radical new motor design, available in 10” and 12” versions at four or two Ohm. A large surround and re-imagined electro-mechanical component layout help the new subs move 20% further in either direction than traditional designs.
A six-layer voice coil is wound around a former with an ingenious suspension design. The cone suspension happens outside of this and allows the spider and cone suspension to be mounted out of the way of the motor components. This clever design allows for more cone excursion while mounting the strong magnets inside the suspension system means less protrusion out back.
Of course, if things were that easy, such innovation would be coming thick and fast. One of the challenges was how to effectively cool the motor components to prevent analogue compression and increase linear response. A series of holes in the suspension system seems primarily responsible for this, although we have no official explanation of how this works – Mysterious lot, development engineers! There is a hint of fluid cooling inside the voice coil inner chamber. They have named the air-cooling system Air Intercooling Revolution (AIR).
Hertz has this to say about this new cooling system; “Hertz R&D has developed the proprietary AIR (Air Intercooling Revolution) technology, optimizing the fluid dynamics inside the voice coil inner chamber and the magnetic group to minimize the internal compression of air and maximize cooling capacity.”All clear? Good.
Initially, the range will include the Hertz Mille MPS 250 S4 (S2 for the 2ohm version). This 10” subwoofer can handle 500 watts Continuous or 1000 watts peak power. It will deliver tight low bass (down to 20Hz) from a 14.2L enclosure. The Hertz Mille MPS 300 S4 (S2 for 2ohm version) is the 12” version with the same power rating. Recommended sealed enclosure size is just 22.7L. The enclosure size will open up a lot of vehicles that can now be discreetly fitted with a fantastic Subwoofer.
We look forward to letting you know what we think of the real-world performance of these subwoofers as soon as we can get our hands on them.
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