The new B-12d subwoofer is a compact, smart and affordable high-end powered subwoofer for home theater and stereo music systems that says you're dead serious about sound. It combines 23 years of speaker building know-how with our best subwoofer technologies to deliver more sonic bang for the buck than any twelve-inch subwoofer NHT has ever built.
Like almost all NHT designs, the B-12d is an acoustic suspension system, which means that the box itself is sealed with no ports or holes to spoil the fun. Acoustic suspension systems use the air trapped in the enclosure to control and damp the speaker’s movement, a bit like the shocks on a car. Many other speakers use vented enclosures, which rely on the speaker’s mechanical suspension and a tuba-like “port” to produce deep bass. While these designs can sounds pretty great when properly designed, we prefer the lower distortion, higher power handling, and tighter deep bass tones that an acoustic suspension design offers.
What should a great subwoofer do for your system? It should relieve your receiver of the effort needed to drive deep bass through your main speakers – therefore allowing it to sound better, run cooler and last longer. It should reduce the overall system distortion by handling the lowest frequencies and leaving the midrange and high frequencies to your other speakers. It should improve the system dynamics. It should seamlessly integrate into your system and simply disappear - all the sound should seem to come from your main speakers. It should occasionally scare the hell out of you. The B-12d does all this and more with ease.
Outside
The B-12d powered subwoofer is a fairly compact 14" cube - barely bigger than the 12” driver contained within. The size of the sonic impact on your system is more like a 48" cube. Like all NHT Classic speakers, the B-12d comes beautifully wrapped in NHT’s signature 10-coat piano gloss black finish. The B-12d has no holes or ports that can interact with its surroundings making it ok to put it wherever it fits in your space instead of the other way around. It comes with 4 cool aluminum leveling cones to anchor it to carpeted floors. For those with hardwood or other kinds of slippery floor surfaces, we also include 4 aluminum floor protectors to slip the cones into to keep it from doing donuts.
Inside
There’s more technology and processing power inside the B-12d powered subwoofer than there was in Apollo 11. Lets start with the 500 (bone crushing) watts of really smart, efficient power. For the techies, we use a PWM (Class D) amplifier design with dedicated switching power supply. Unlike traditional amplifiers, the B-12d’s super-efficient design converts just about all of the electricity coming from your wall outlet to bass, instead of wasting it as heat. Rock and be green at the same time.
The real voodoo can be found in the B-12d 's dedicated DSP (digital signal processing) engine. This DSP is factory-programmed with both a phase perfect equalizer and phase perfect 24/dB octave low pass and high pass signal filters. We also utilize a unique feature in DSP called DRC (Dynamic Range Control) which dynamically controls the amplifier current at all impedances ensuring maximum output potential at all frequencies. We’ve also used the DSP to implement a compressor and limiter in the digital domain. This allows us to maximize output and minimize any overload danger at the same time. Rocket science for sure. Bottom line? The B-12d subwoofer goes way lower and way louder with way better control than any 12" sub we've ever built. Time to upgrade.
The speaker itself is a long-throw, pulp cone design with a heavy-duty butyl rubber surround. Both the cone and the massive motor structure it’s attached to were custom designed by NHT specifically for the B-12d. As you can imagine, this massive woofer creates some very high pressure inside the B-12d’s sealed enclosure, so we lined the interior cabinet walls with a 1 mm thick sheet of aluminum to help hold everything together and eliminate any trace of cabinet vibrations.
Backside
Everything you need to integrate the B-12d with your stereo or surround sound setup can be found around back. The B-12d has LFE inputs for your receiver’s sub out, line inputs for your fancy 2-channel rig, and even an LFE out so you can cleverly add another B-12d in case you move to bigger digs or decide to get carried away on bass waves. There's a phase control for matching the output of your subwoofer with your main speakers, and the NHT exclusive Boundary control. This control lets you electronically "move" the subwoofer where it sounds the best without physically moving it in your room. An automatic power mode allows the B-12d to turn itself on and off when it hears a signal from your system or select "Always on" if you switch the power remotely. The B-12d 's smart, switching power supply automatically adjusts to deliver its full output anywhere in the world on a diet of 100v to 240v at 50 or 60Hz.
The Sound
Like all NHT subwoofers the B-12d upholds the long-standing reputation of being musical and natural while playing either music or movies. We’d describe it as being tight, controlled, articulate, fast, deep and downright scary when the soundtrack demands it. Add a second B-12d using the LFE output for pants-flapping, goofy grin on your face results. If you’re shopping for a subwoofer that will seamlessly blend into your system, completely disappear most of the time, not dominate your room and always fool you into thinking all the sound is coming from your main speakers – stop searching and start buying.
The Company
Let’s not forget that you’re buying an NHT subwoofer and that means all sorts of things. It means you care about getting the best speaker value for your hard earned money. It means and you care about quality craftsmanship and high-end performance. It means you’re ready to join our family of fanatics who love music, movies and the best gear that produces them. Welcome to the club, now tell your friends. Now Hear This!
