LiveSound! International

Making Better Bass
The State of Low End in Our Real World

Truth is, the life cycle of much Real World Gear is nearly endless, especially where amplifier, loudspeakers and microphones are involved. As such, most professionals maintain a personal list of indispensable, vintage favorites.

Live sound! readers have frequently commented that our traditional Loading Dock equipment coverage is limited to new product releases and disregards many vintage standards. We agreed, and seek to change that.

As such, Real World Gear, seen here, will examine various products, in specific categories, both new and old. You will notice we have given the manufacturers their take, but we will follow with our own Real World take, sometimes from experience and other times from user interviews. Innovative technologies will be covered of course, but not at the expense of performance-proven equipment.

Manufacturers Take: The D18E-R is a double 18-inch ELF type bass system in a portable cabinet configuration. This ELF type system operates drivers below resonance allowing for a reduced cabinet size of three cubic feet per 18-inch driver.

Operating below system resonance the loudspeaker does not favor the resonance frequency, common in other designs, and can reproduce all bass notes without emphasizing the notes around the resonance frequency.

Low pass filters and their associated delay are eliminated and the crossover function is achieved with the use of the ELF Dual Integrator.

The Dual Integrator also allows for extended bandwidth down to as low as 8Hz without compromising the time domain response. The resulting flat frequency and time response couples well to most upper-range systems.

Our Take: We used this ELF technology for several dates in the mid 1990s and were surprised and impressed. Nothing we know of goes this low and sounds this good. Simply amazing.

Additional information not included in review: D18E-R