Review

Seismix 3 Complete Review - Audio & Video Lifestyle - Australia

01 Apr 2001

If you feel a rumble in your guts, it’s likely to be one of two things. Either that vindaloo you had last night, or you’ve just switched on an active subwoofer. And when it comes to bass, Krix knows a thing or three about reproducing it – the oldest name in Australian loudspeaker manufacturing produces the huge subwoofers found in many a local cinema complex.

The domestic side of Krix’ loudspeaker operation is a little more on the living-room friendly side, including the baby of Krix’ subwoofer trio, the Seismix 3. At $1,500 it’s also the most affordable, although it’s design shares much in common with the companies bigger lounge room shakers, including the formidable Seismix 7.

The baby Seismix 3 is more in tune with the vast majority of active subs around, incorporating a 100 watt amplifier driving a single 250mm driver. It’s the sort of subwoofer design for the vast majority of living rooms and systems – designed to be easily installed and integrated with a wide variety of ancillary AV equipment.

Although the most compact of the Krix subs, the Seismix 3 weighs plenty and the level of craftsmanship is superb. The company obviously takes pride in its products – something that is reflected in the build quality of all its products. The Seismix 3 is no exception with good use of real wood veneer – it’s an attractively put together subwoofer box.

The Seismix 3 is typical in a lot of respects of active sub design – it can accept hook-ups at either line or speaker level, the amplifier has auto-signal power sensing, phase inversion and adjustable level control. There’s nothing here you won’t find on many an active sub, but there’s a fair bit that makes the Seismix a uniquely Krix product. The 250mm paper cone driver is a long throw design with a 63mm voice coil, wound on a Kapton former and the magnet alone weighs 3kg. In other words, you can give it some.

The amplifier section is rated at 100 watts RMS with clipping protection circuitry to avoid any undue driver damage. Like the bigger Seismix, the Seismix 3 also features electronic filtering with a high pass line-level output (if you want to add another sub, for example), and an adjustable 2nd order low pass from between 40 and 100Hz. This allows you to ‘tune’ the subwoofer with whatever loudspeakers it’s partnering, as well as harmonise with the room acoustics.

When visiting the Krix factory a while back, I had an albeit brief listen to the huge Seismix 7 in one of Krix’ demo rooms, and was struck by the sheer weight and agility for such a massive beast. The Seismix 3 demonstrates a lot of those qualities, but on a smaller scale. It’s not terribly happy straight out of the box, sounding very inflexible and tuneless. Both amplifier and driver need a fair bit of running in before finding their rhythm and it’s essential to play around with the tuning and placing options.

I first tried the Seismix 3 hooked up via the line level input, though soon switched to speaker level, which I found produced the best results. Bass is often referred to as ’non-directional’, meaning the human ear can’t detect the direction of very low frequencies. As a result, it’s thought you can stick a subwoofer anywhere in a room and it’ll perform quite happily, regardless of sound-influencing room boundaries and furnishings.

Some subs benefit from placement experimentation, and the Seismix 3 is one such design. It’s not as critical an issue with subs compared to loudspeakers, but with bass reflex designs such as this, definitely makes a difference. In my AV room, the Seismix 3 worked best in free space, firing forward toward the listening position.

Most of us think home theatre when you mention subwoofers, though I was keen to see what job the Seismix did with straight music first and foremost, before battening down the hatches and loading up a big sounding movie. I partnered it with an old, but still very capable, pair of Rega Elas – a transmission line wedge shaped floorstander, noted for their openness and midrange, although in need of a little help in the bass department.

They certainly receive plenty of aid from the Seismix 3, the sub smoothly descending into the lower frequencies these floorstanders simply can’t reach. Use it with club-style dance music and you get a healthy dose of added depth, and plenty of good-times drive.

The Seismix 3 added welcomed warmth to my system, in the form of controlled, subtle bass. This brings a greater sense of atmosphere and presence to orchestral or ambient pieces and extra weight to rock and dance tracks. Fed with the likes of Gomez’ smoochy number Make No Sound, the guitar-laden ballad and tenor vocals sound super smooth and rich. Listening to the Prodigy’s Charly is a sub workout and the Krix delivered the menacing bass lines with plenty of definition and clarity.

It’s a good idea with this sort of music not to get too carried away with the output levels on the Seismix, less is better and even at only quarter volume the sub still delivers bass-a-plenty. Move over to the more insistent tones of Leftfield’s Snakeblood from The Beach soundtrack and the Krix’s musical nature continues – the taut, precise rhythmic whump-whump of the trance-dance beat peppering your trousers with airwaves.

Both vocals and instrument are lent plenty of weight and substance to the easy-going tune. Load up something a little more raucous and the Seismix 3 copes well, but could do with a bit more extension with the heavyweight Pistol Grip Pump, from Rage Against The Machine. Here the depths aren’t truly plumbed, the Seismix seeming to ponder slightly with this sort of music, especially when the levels were cranked a bit above the norm.

Switching to movies also demonstrates, not a shortcoming of the Krix, but rather a fondness for certain types of movie soundtracks. It’s delicacy and subtleness in delivering bass works an absolute treat with more involving soundtracks, though don’t expect earth-quaking low frequencies with big sounding blockbusters – this sub is all about smoothness and control. Sure, loud action scenes are handled with substance and weight, but the deep bits in Gladiator or the sickening football bodyblows in Any Given Sunday don’t have the thump and punch of the Krix’s bigger brothers, the Seismix 5 and the Seismix 7, either of which, depending on your budget, would be better suited for this type of bass impact.

With this type of material the Seismix 3 tends to ‘wallow’ a little, when it should be slamming and crashing. The Seismix 3’s bass effect is more suitable with films that won’t have you worrying about the structural integrity of your home. Its AV performance has you perched on the edge of the seat, not forced back into it and with plenty of low end realism, the Krix Seismix 3 injects the vast majority of movies with enough guts and welly, just don’t ask it to rearrange any furniture.

One such film that combines both weight and bass presence is the re-mastered DVD version of David Lynch’s box office failure Dune. I’m a fan of is direction and Dune (for those of you who have never seen it) is a big scale sci-fi from the early eighties. Back then the soundtrack was Dolby Surround at best, but has been re-mastered in Dolby Digital for its DVD re-release. The huge visual feast is finally complemented by a suitably dynamic soundtrack – one that gets subwoofers rumbling. One of the opening scenes involves some very low information, but it's almost sublime bass, felt rather than heard. Here, the Krix shows the extent of its frequency revival and sure enough, its 250mm driver was sent into a controlled, air-shifting flap. And although it doesn’t descend as low as some, its presence is surely felt.

For systems that lack bass or could do with more low frequency control, this little sub could well be the answer. It’s not the most obvious of subwoofers and works best with music than manic movies. Best suited to a smaller listening room, the Seismix 3 does a fine enough job, however, id you’re looking for big-bass movie action, then the refined subtleness of the Seismix 3 subwoofer may not entirely suit the bill.

Rating:

Performance - * * *
Build Quality - * * * *
Compatibility - * * * *
Value for Money - * * *

- Audio & Video Lifestyle - Australia , Nic Tatham

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