With AXPONA 2025 in the rearview mirror, as well as the subsequent write-up*, I scored a big and long-awaited upgrade to my two channel stereo system: I purchased a pair of REL Acoustics S/812 subwoofers and, yesterday, had the fortune and pleasure of having a couple friends assist with their setup. I am pleased.
I had the fortune of being on holiday. As an older educator, I had the dubious pleasure of having a late spring break and, following a day-and-a-half fast, endured the agony of a colonscopy. Thankfully, a day later, the FedEx truck pulled up with the pair of RELs I’d purchased a week ago. Being blessed with having a friend, Bob, a retired mechanical engineer and audiophile next door named Bob, he came over and assisted with the unpacking and initial setup of these gems that I ordered before an upcoming price increase in May.
We carefully slid the boxes, one at a time, down the carpeted stairs, and unboxed them. Wow. My wife, Belle, wanted them in white to go with the ATC SCM40 loudspeakers I recently purchased (she also wanted them in white to match the crown moulding and her sliding barn door in our listening and A/V area situated in our basement family room. They really are gorgeous! A fine finished gloss white, they have these lovely silver handles on the side and look very sophisticated. Setting them on the area rug in front of the media center, we watched a setup video on YouTube, read the instructions, and connected them to my Pass Labs X150.8 amplifier in the high level connection via the supplied Neutrik Speakon HIGH LEVEL Interconnects (be forewarned: per their instructions, there are some issues with Class D amplifier connection, however, my Pass is a Class A/B amp). My amplifier was unplugged and turned off during this connection process, but once secured, the amp was plugged directly into the wall socket and powered up. Then, we began experimenting with volume, crossover, and phase settings.
Initially, I wasn’t too pleased with the level of bass when we played a couple standard test tracks of mine, the John Mayer Trio’s “I’ve Got a Woman” and Kenny Loggins’ “Your Momma Don’t Dance” on the Redwoods album, but gradually we came up with more than adequate bass and had to dial it down a bit. Now this particular setup video suggested playing with phase and choosing the setting that was loudest, so we settled for the inverse polarity setting. His job done, Bob said goodbye and went on with his day.
Later that afternoon, my friend, Joe, dropped by. A computer database manager and a former audio dealer, he helped fine-tune my setup. As he played some test tracks he uses for optimizing speaker and subwoofer placement and setup, and when he played “The Ballad of Bill Hubbard” on Roger Water’s Amused to Death album, he suggested that I need to reduce the level of toe-in to get a wider soundstage to reflect the wrap-around effects of the album. He must have adjusted them out 15 to 20 degrees before we got it right (in all fairness, the instructions that came with the loudspeakers said to aim them directly at your ears in an equilateral position, and I actually had them aimed at the outside of my shoulders in the listening position). And then we played a variety of other excellent references. Gradually, we settled on a crossover between 55 and 60 Hz and a volume around the 9:00 position. And we changed the polarity setting to zero, making for a more clean sound when we played Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Look at Little Sister” song (Joe offered that typically, you have your front subwoofers in positive polarity and rear ones, if you use them, in reverse polarity).
The sound improvement wasn’t just in the lower octaves, but extended on up through the upper bass and into the midrange. It wasn’t merely an improvement to the lower foundation, but the overall improvement was startling.
Before he left, Joe said, “Those sound like different loudspeakers.” I agreed. They sounded much larger and more impressive than before.
“I thought there’d be an improvement,” he added, “But not that much! The depth, the width of your soundstage…” He went on. Honestly, playing reference recordings, they reminded me of some of the best I’ve heard at AXPONA a few weeks ago.
Now, I was a little nervous about Belle’s reaction when she got home from work. As I posted photos of them on Facebook, someone suggested that they looked like mini refrigerators. They were gorgeous, but being pretty big at 75 lbs. each, would she find them offensively large?
When she came down to view them, she was thrilled! “They look so modern,” she marveled. “They’re beautiful!” And when she heard Inger Marie Gundersen’s cover of “Wichita Lineman,” she was mesmerized. I offered to play something that she was more familiar with, but she declined. Eventually, we listened to a favorite artist of hers, Anne Murray, on Anne Murray: Country Croonin’. She sat smiling on her loveseat and soaked it in.
After listening for a good half an hour, she said to tell the REL people that the S/812s far surpassed our expectations in terms of looks and sound.
I definitely will.
*You can find my report on AXPONA by Googling Juan C. Ayllon and AXPONA 2025.