A very sweet and comprehensive package, this is one step up from the excellent bass tube that Fusion still sell so well since it is a classic design. This is another classic design, a green metallic dished-in woofer with fat surround, in a ported wedge box with a gas-flowed curvy outer port mouth but simple card inner port. There’s a natty laser-cut-surface Fusion logo panel inset into the very tight and neat carpet covering on the top of the box. The amp in the back is a specialised active-sub plate-amp with the box’ part number printed onto it and all the controls and connections on the same top surface as the cooling fins.
The woofer’s grille is a sturdy two-bar design and the terminals on the amp are at a neat 45 degree angle to aid connection. They are very good quality as is the thick power wire. You get a long piece of Fusion Superflow power cable, with a chunky fuseholder complete with fuse supplied as well as a terminated lump of the same wire in black to go seek an Earth with. A long green Fusion Audio Performance RCA cable is supplied, as are cable ties and a Molex plug for high level input with nice long labelled speaker wires to use to hook to yours to use as signal if you have no RCA subwoofer output from up front. The remote box is solid-feeling and the potentiometer within it feels smooth.How Well Does It Work?
This is a bonkers package for the money and works as well as kit costing twice as much barely a year or two ago. For one, the amp isn’t some piffling piece of poop, it’s a pukka job, with real meat and potatoes inside, just designed plate style. For another, the wire kit alone aughta be a thirty quid (at KEEN prices) accessory pack. Including a bass knob is all very well, but one with a seriously long and sturdy wire, and even a bit of Copper running up and down it to shine a nice bright green LED on the remote box? Mental VFM!
The device was run up with ‘˜real’ music and some silly bass CD stuff that the nutters so like. And taking into account that this is an instant solution and costs but £130 at time of writing, this is an amazingly cool piece of kit. It has that instant appeal thing going on, you open the box and finding all the cool stuff inside as well as the box and the warranty and instruction manual, is just brilliant fun for the buyer. The result is even more fun. It is limited in ultimate power to a slice of 150 watts and also the porting is just a card tube inside, rather than the expensive curvy port mouth on both ends, so as you go a long way below the port’s tuned frequency of 35Hz, it tends to chuff and whirr a little. But that was the track that says ‘warning, reduce volume levels, as the following tracks contain sub bass frequencies that may exceed the capabilities of your system’ It played all of it, just getting very low on output as it went stupid low. This is normal for a ported enclosure and you only port low at 25Hz like Ian ‘˜Iceman’ Pinder when you have watts by the thousand. This works well.I tried it on music and it rocked. It has a sweet melodic output that is soft and rounded rather than hard and biffy and yet has a rich fat arse end that I really enjoyed. I was even able to crank the Alpine speakers and amp on the current Kenwood test CD deck in the test rig and get the whole system, right there on my landing, playing loud enough to once again go get lost in Eighties Frankie Goes To Hollywood! The bass knob works a treat as do the gain and crossover frequency pots, which despite being fatty knobs are in fact best adjusted with a screwdriver as normal via the little slot in their faces.
It was tested way past what it is supposed to be for and did brilliantly, to the point that I think it is in fact truly Idiot-Proof and that you won’t blow up the woofer in this box on this amp, even if you act the giddy goat. A lovely BIG parcel to find under a Christmas tree and have installed by Boxing day teatime! This would be a perfect add-on to an OEM system and would lift the whole lot up in a way you mightn’t believe.
Overall 8.4
Sound Quality 8
Build Quality 8
Power 7
Efficiency 9
Value For Money 10
In A Nutshell
Twelve inch in a box with its own amplifier and wiring. Offers Fusion’s cool looks and engineering to present a real slice of easy-fit bass that will boom your world and keep its resale value a treat for later upgrades.
