Loudspeakers

Rated by Wilson Audio at a notional 1.6kW, the beating heart of the Submerge is a Class D amplifier solution, with switchmode PSU, from California brand SpeakerPower. This fellow US outfit is a subwoofer amp specialist, boasting ‘some of the highest power output amplifiers ever made – up to 12kW’! The filter DSP is serviced by the popular ADAU1701 codec from Analog Devices, a 28/56-bit audio processor that includes two input ADCs and no fewer than four DACs. Analogue inputs to the Submerge are sampled at 48kHz before the audio DSP deals with volume, filtering, phase and delay (in that order) with adjustment from the user via an ‘analogue’ potentiometer interface on top of the cabinet.

The ADAU1701 is supplied with SigmaStudio software to ‘graphically configure a custom signal processing flow’ enabling, presumably, Wilson to expertly build its own filter shapes to suit the high-excursion, reflex-loaded 300mm bass driver. Note that the phase/delay pot covers both functions here – turn anticlockwise and it inverts absolute phase, clockwise is phase positive, before implementing a delay (in msec) as needed to integrate the subwoofer into the system. PM