Сабвуферы — Living Voice Vox Basso

The Vox Basso is a reflex-loaded sub-bass unit from Living Voice, the British maker of the Vox horn loudspeaker series. It was created for rooms and systems where the much larger horn-loaded Vox Elysian will not fit, and Living Voice describes it as 3.5 times smaller than that model, with slightly less than half its depth and two thirds of its height. Like the Elysian, it is supplied in pairs so that bass is reproduced in stereo rather than from a single mono cabinet. The Basso was introduced alongside the Vox Palladian, a horn loudspeaker whose system could be ordered with the sub-bass units as the Palladian Basso combination.

Key specs that matter

Every Basso enclosure houses one 18-inch bass driver loaded by a 250 litre reflex enclosure. Living Voice quotes a frequency response from 20 Hz to 70 Hz, a sensitivity of 100 dB and an impedance of 8 ohm, with power handling of 500 watts. The pair comes with dedicated 500 watt amplifier and crossover modules that include adjustable equalisation. Each cabinet measures 600 mm wide, 571 mm deep and 970 mm high and weighs 90 kg.

Engineering and use context

The amplification sits outside the cabinet rather than being built into the enclosure. The external amplifier is a class B MOSFET design made in the UK, and the active crossover works at 24 dB per octave with a fourth-order slope. The driver uses a paper cone, and the wooden enclosure is braced with multiple internal struts to suppress resonance. The base of the enclosure forms a built-in plinth running on PTFE skids, so the heavy unit can be slid into position across the floor without lifting. The reflex loading lets the single driver reach the lowest octave from a far smaller box than the horn approach needs, which is the main trade that separates the Basso from its larger sibling. The equalisation in the crossover modules lets the low-frequency output be adjusted to suit the main speakers, and the stereo pair arrangement allows each cabinet to sit near its own channel.

Pairing

Living Voice designed the Basso to partner its Vox Olympian and Vox Palladian horn loudspeakers, whose high efficiency the Basso is meant to match. Because the crossover and amplifier modules are external, the system can also be integrated with other loudspeakers, with the modules taking a line-level feed from the preamplifier.

Alternatives

The Living Voice Vox Elysian is the larger sub-bass option, using two 12-inch drivers front-loaded by a 4.6 m folded exponential horn with a 25 Hz to 70 Hz range.