Table of Contents
Pros & Cons Of Svs Subwoofers
Pros
- Both for music and movies, the SB-3000’s audio quality is first-rate.
- The SB-3000 can produce a significant volume with its 800 watts of RMS power.
- The SB-3000 has a small and compact design despite having strong bass.
- It is simple to use and mounted on the back of the vehicle.
Cons
- Although it could use a little more explanation, the control app for fine-grained settings functions well.
- The SB-3000’s gloss finish attracts fingerprints.
Svs Subwoofers Design
Svs Sb-3000 Looks And Build Quality
Great bass requires a lot of energy to produce. Because low-frequency sound waves travel through the air much more slowly than high-frequency ones, you need some fairly robust equipment to do it well. The $1,100 SB-3000’s biggest surprise, then, was how lightweight it was—in subwoofer terms, at least. 54.4 pounds may be nothing to sniff at, but it’s relatively simple for a single person to lift it out of the box without assistance, and move it around the room. A little over 15 inches on each side, it is also small enough to fit your arms around.
Given that many subwoofers are so large that they serve as coffee tables, this compact design is a welcome surprise. When we first got in touch with SVS a few years ago, they sent us the PB-16 Ultra for review. You can read the full review of this product here. It is still the most amazing and absurdly large device we have ever tested—a 175-pound monster that needed assistance to unbox and whose peak power of 5,000 watts could shatter the fabric of reality. The SB-3000 is compact and restrained, two adjectives we don’t typically associate with SVS or, for that matter, any subwoofer manufacturer. Even if your room is cluttered, its size is manageable, if not friendly, and it will fit in perfectly.
Additionally, the SB-3000 is constructed like a tank despite its small size. It’s a sealed subwoofer—we’ll explain what that is below—and the reinforced MDF cabinet is as tight and dense as a neutron star. Black Ash and Piano Gloss are the two available finishes. The latter was the case with ours, but despite admiring the construction, we weren’t crazy about how easily the gloss finish picked up fingerprints. If you find that to be a problem, we advise selecting the Black Ash finish. In spite of this, the design and construction are excellent if you can ignore the fingerprint issue. Currently, black is the only available color, and we don’t see that changing anytime soon. We have a feeling that if you asked a subwoofer designer to offer their models in a color other than black or bankers’ brown, they might give you an odd look and act like you were high.
Accessories
Subwoofers don’t generally need a lot of accessories to function well. With the SB-3000, that is unquestionably the case. There isn’t even a need for a remote because fine-grained control is transferred to the capable mobile app. The SVS subwoofer comes with two extras: a metal grille that fits into the front of the subwoofer and a set of screw-on rubber feet to protect your floors. The driver will unquestionably be protected by the grille, which is perfectly acceptable. Additionally, we like how it curves outwards rather than providing a flat surface because it adds to the sleek appearance. Nevertheless, we didn’t really use it all that much. Although it’s a matter of preference, we prefer having our subwoofers unadorned.
Controls And App
There are two methods that are as logical as the design for controlling the SVS SB-3000. The first is a physical six-button control panel on the back of the subwoofer that lets you adjust the crossover point, phase, and volume. It has an intelligent design, with a single line of lights representing the selected control (the buttons light up to show this). A child could use it because it is so simple. The controls are incredibly easy to use, even though the child would need to understand what crossover and phase are.
Compare them to the SB-3000’s direct rival, the $949 HSU ULS-15 Mk2 subwoofer. It provides a comparable array of thorough controls, but in the form of awkward knobs. All things considered, the SB-3000 is more sophisticated and innovative. Although it’s a little thing, it makes using the subwoofer enjoyable. This subwoofer can be configured and operational in a matter of minutes, and once you are satisfied with the sound, you won’t need to touch the controls once more.
If you do want to go deeper, SVS has one of the better mobile apps we’ve tested. You can explore one of seven different parameters and quickly pair it with the subwoofer. In addition to controlling the phase, crossover, and volume, you can also experiment with the polarity, EQ, and room gain compensation. The well-designed app is the best place to do it if you want to really fine-tune the sound to its maximum potential. We would have liked a little more detail on what each feature does and how it affects the sound, though. Each control has a help tab, but we occasionally felt that it didn’t really provide that much information. The app won’t really be of much use to you if you’ve never used a parametric EQ before in trying to understand what it is. The solution can be found with a little Googling, but it’s still an annoying extra step. We anticipate SVS expanding the app’s tutorial section in the future. For those who want to go deeper but don’t know where to begin, it would make things a lot simpler.
An on/off indicator light for the subwoofer’s front would be another addition we’d like to see. We like to be able to check the power consumption of our subwoofer without having to poke our heads around the back. It’s a small, perhaps somewhat personal, request. That’s crucial if you’re starting out at very low volumes because bass can occasionally be almost unheard. Although we understand that it would ruin the sleek design, wouldn’t a logo that was dimly lit work here? It’s only a minor complaint, either way. It’s also important to keep in mind that if you pair this subwoofer with an AV receiver, you might discover that using the receiver’s built-in sound customization features will yield better results. Though your results may differ, we didn’t.
Svs Subwoofers Features
High Excursion Bass Drivers
A bass driver with significant range of motion is present in every SVS subwoofer. Additionally, SVS uses voice coils with a larger diameter than what is typical, allowing them to travel such a distance while maintaining linearity. The top of the line model has an 8″ diameter voice coil, which is by far the largest we have ever seen on a residential subwoofer.
They can reach down far and quickly, producing high sound pressure levels. Their design also enables them to start and stop very quickly, which enhances their capacity to reproduce accurate bass without overhang.
Powerful Subwoofer Amplifiers
It takes a lot of amplifier power to move those huge drivers quickly and accurately. Each and every SVS subwoofer has a larger Class D amplifier than you would anticipate for its price range. Even the $499 entry-level 1000 Pro Series has a power amp that can deliver 325 watts continuously and 800 watts at its peak. That is actually pretty amazing!
Solid Well Braced Cabinets
A subwoofer’s cabinet must be extremely rigid and solid if it is to produce accurate bass. You can tell SVS puts some serious engineering into their cabinet designs because the entry-level model weighs just 26 pounds and the top of the line weighs 175 pounds.
Advanced Dsp Controls
A major benefit is the ability to adjust a subwoofer’s output to better match the acoustic properties of your room. For this price range, it’s pretty amazing that the 1000 Pro series has controls on the back of the subwoofer and comes with a continuously variable phase control for better matching to your main speakers. Even better, SVS now integrates Bluetooth-enabled smart app control into its entire product line, allowing for more sophisticated tuning and control.
Three listening settings are provided by the app (think of rocking out vs. not waking the baby). A three-position completely variable parametric EQ, room gain compensation, port tuning for the ported models, low pass filter adjustments, volume, phase, and polarity are also included. The app is incredibly simple to use because it recognizes the type of subwoofer you own and provides you with the options and tuning that are available for it.
We adore the fact that you can fine-tune things with these while sitting in your listening chair. If the subwoofer is overloading your room, you can roll off the sub’s ultimate output thanks to the room gain, which is very clever.
Industry Best Warranty
The subwoofer driver is typically covered by a 5-year warranty on subwoofers, while the power amplifier is typically covered by a 1- or 2-year warranty. An impressive 5-year warranty is offered on every aspect of all SVS subwoofers.
Let’s now examine the five different model ranges from which you can select in the SVS line.
Why You Should Buy The Svs Sb-3000
This subwoofer is helpful for anyone looking to improve the sound of their home theater or music system. Simply put, it is that easy. It far outperforms subs with much higher price tags in terms of performance for the money. We sincerely think that this is one of the top subwoofers available right now. The SB-3000 will satisfy whether you have a basic home audio setup or a home theater room with all the bells and whistles.
Why You Should Not Buy The Svs Sb-3000
Since the SB-3000 is so good, even with the fingerprint issues and minor app annoyances, we genuinely don’t believe anyone would lose out by owning one. At the very least, we would warn anyone who requires more than a simple stereo input. If you’re really into custom home theater builds, for instance, you’ll need balanced XLR connections, which you won’t find here.
Svs Subwoofers Review: Setup
My primary system, which supports my long-standing left/right pair of three-way active monitors, was used to test the SVS. The 3000 Micro’s RCA LFE input was easily connected to my preamp/processor using a long RCA cable, and the subwoofer was powered using the provided removable cord.
Even though we talk about subwoofers, the room itself is what we are actually hearing in the bottom three octaves. Room dimensions, construction, surfaces, and furnishings profoundly affect the performance of any sound source below a couple of hundred Subwoofer evaluation by ear indoors is therefore tricky due to the Hertz. The unit being tested is placed in my well-known subwoofer spot, which, according to decades of trial and error and research, produces the smoothest, least-peaky (but still far from flat) excitation of room modes. This is true regardless of the size or type of subwoofer positioned there. Full disclosure: To overcome this most egregious of acoustical obstacles, I use a single narrow parametric equalization that is either implemented in my A/V processor or in the Roon music management software. This allows me to hear what a subwoofer is actually doing both below and above the worst mode in my room. (This makes up about 80% of the magic produced by room-correction systems like Audyssey or Dirac. Knock the energy at your room’s primary mode down by 6 or 10dB, or whatever’s necessary (this works best for a single listening position), and the sonic improvement over the full audio range—because bass resonances muddy up everything—will surprise you.
Svs Subwoofers Review: Listening
How low, how loud, how clear, and how smooth (or flat) a subwoofer is all that matters. The interaction of subwoofer response and room acoustics is what yields “fast” or “tuneful” bass, not woofer cones made from unobtanium.
So how low did the SVS 3000 Micro go? Very. I played a parade of my favorite “bass cows,” or tracks with strong content below 40Hz, and was not once disappointed. For instance, Bela Fleck’s “Flight of the Cosmic Hippo,” my current favorite subwoofer wet-read, has a series of strong, down-sliding electric-bass notes that cover the range from about 45 Hz down to 25 Hz, and these were audible and distinct. At a level I’d call “solidly loud demo” (roughly 83dB SPL average), the 3000 Micro matched my regular subwoofer—one of those enormous, upright, tubular jobs I mentioned above—perfectly. The KEF KC62 micro-sub ($1,499), which I so admired when I reviewed it in the June/July 2021 issue, was also compared to the SVS. Once more, there was nothing I could hear to separate the two. Both sounded identical at this loud-but-not-too-loud volume within the confines of my room, system, and listening position.
The Competition
Svs Sb-3000 Vs. Svs Sb-4000
If the SB-3000 isn’t for you, there are plenty of alternatives since SVS has a wide selection of subwoofers available. The larger and more powerful SB-4000 is one subwoofer you might want to take into consideration. The SB-4000 is a sealed subwoofer with the same Sledge amplifier setup and app control; however, a few significant features have been added. The addition of balanced XLR connections and a front-mounted volume display, both of which are incredibly useful, are both present. Additionally, the SB-4000’s 1,200 watts RMS of power is significantly more potent. In addition, it costs $1,500 as opposed to the SB-3000’s $1,100.
To be honest, we believe you can probably save some money and get the SB-3000 unless you are incredibly desperate for these extra features. It’s almost as good and much less expensive. Even though the extra power, extra connections, and front display are nice to haves, the SB-3000 still captures the essence of the experience. As with all SVS subwoofers, the SB-4000 has a ported version, the PB-4000, which will give you deeper bass in a bigger body.
Svs Sb-3000 Vs. Q Acoustics Qb 12
The SB-3000 is not the same animal as the Q Acoustics Q B12. It’s not just a less potent, more affordable subwoofer. It produces sound that is almost the polar opposite of the SVS sub (in a good way) using a completely different amplifier configuration. This song’s audio quality is exceptional; it is rich and subtle, forgoing raw power in favor of a sure-footed, assured style that emphasizes detail over grunt.
The Q B12 was awarded the top spot and the title of Best Overall Subwoofer in our most recent roundup of this year’s best subwoofers. It’s undoubtedly the best option for the majority of people, in our opinion, in terms of value and quality. The sound quality is excellent, and the $599 price tag is very reasonable in the world of subwoofers. The SB-3000 may have more sophisticated features, but it also costs a lot more money. It might be worthwhile to consider the Q if you don’t require the intense power that the SVS sub offers.
Svs Sb-3000 Vs. Rythmik F12
The $980 Rythmik F12 has a different vibe than the enjoyable and amiable SB-3000; it seems like it was produced in a physics lab at a university. It employs Direct Servo amplifier technology, which essentially adjusts the sound in real time to deal with any imbalances. After hearing the F12, we agree that it sounds fantastic, though it was difficult for us to determine whether the servo technology made it “better” than other models. It’s just different, with a sound quality that is perhaps a little more detailed and sterile than the bouncy audio that emanates from the SVS. The F12 might be worth a look, in our opinion, if you value total neutrality and clarity in a subwoofer.
However, it’s important to understand what you’re getting. Despite its cutting-edge technology, the F12 has a decidedly retro design. There is no apt control to speak of, and the rear panel controls scream the 1990s. Although it costs a little less than the SB-3000, we believe the latter is superior.
Svs Sb-3000 Vs. Svs Sb-1000
Here at The Master Switch, the SB-1000 subwoofer from SVS is a regular component of our testing setup, which we use to assess various pieces of equipment. Really, that ought to make everything clear to you. It costs less than half as much as the SB-3000 but still performs very well. Although not quite as weighty as other models, the sound is reliable, and the features are rather basic. The actual subwoofer is devoid of an app control or digital control pad.
It still has excellent bass that is clear and crisp. Comparing it to the SB-3000 in a head-to-head test, it is evident that their designers are one and the same. Since the SB-3000 uses a different Sledge amplifier configuration than the SB-1000, it is clear that the latter subwoofer is superior. However, it might be out of reach for some people due to its high price, and if you want to enjoy an SVS subwoofer without having to sell a kidney, this is a great starting point.