MJ Acoustics subwoofer


Got this Kensington subwoofer last week and being playing with various settings and set-ups.

I have Shahinian hawk speakers which have beautiful deep bass and I’ve had MJ Acoustics Ref 100 mkii sub bought about 18 years ago, then upgraded it to another updated Ref 100 mkiii about 7 years ago. So I’m used to bass and playing with subwoofers, but I wasn’t expecting this Kensington beast to be so different. The bass it gives out is like nothing I’ve heard anywhere before. I was playing a scene from Terminator - Dark Fate and the bass went so deep, I wasn’t sure I was hearing it, but it was causing slight discomfort in my ears. It was surreal and I just burst out laughing, which is odd, because I haven’t laughed for a good 5-6 years. After playing with it for 1/2 hour or so, I went looking for my cat Mo and he was drooling, so not so good for him (I’ve never seen him drool).

This Kensington has two 10" drivers (top/bottom) that work precisely together. This combination works so precisely, that the cabinet doesn’t vibrate at all. Even blasting out, there’s virtually nothing to feel. There is a video online showing the sub in use with a glass of water on top, of the glass plate, with no ripples. I’m not a sub expert, but it must be this precision that’s part of the clean sound wave it’s pumping out.

The app that controls it is very useful indeed. It makes setting up so much easier. It has phase adjustments 0-180 in 1 degree increments and being able to adjust from the listening position, one can hear instantly the differences. I settled on 91 degrees by ear and then you can even see it on a graph too.

Bit of a long post, so I’ll just summarise my findings;

I have wood suspended floor, so I built a concrete base underneath the floor and finished it off with a 12" square granite plinth for the sub to sit on. All my hifi is individually like this, including the Hawk speakers. Like my hifi, this makes an absolute huge difference and particularly with a sub. Without it, the sub shakes the room to pieces and sounds pretty awful, with muffled confused bass.

I want the sub to integrate with the tv. I found any further than 3ft away and it just sounds detracted and wrong. Just slightly behind is best. Even 1ft in front sounds wrong.

Being close to the tv also means I can keep the cable length to a minimum. I’m using low-level rca cable for connection. On the mkiii I used to have 8m cable, but this caused it to clearly lag behind. I’m now using 1.5m Audioquest Husky cable and it’s superb.

I used to have problems integrating my subs properly. I always felt that there was the tv/music system and then there was a sub popping away with a slight gap in the mid-range. Tried loads of things, but never 100% right. However, this Kensington is a breeze. I really think it’s the quality of the output it’s giving that has more range and tone, and the way the crossover fades the signal, blends in much better.

I shouldn’t have, but I went and tried one of my Powerlines on it and damn annoyingly it was better. Gotta laugh, now I have this £650 extra to spend to think about. A pink Synergistics fuse makes it even better in the mains plug. Just goes to show, even with a sub, you still have power supplies inside to think about. I had a Chord Power Chord on it before, but it’s pretty rubbish. It’s been relegated around various bits of gear over the years and never been any good on any of them. Should just stick to PowerLine. Naim, you really got that one right.

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That looks a real beast! MJ was the first sub I ever bought, decades ago.

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How’s Mo doing?

Maybe they should rebrand to ‘Drooling Cat Acoustics’.

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If you have hawks I don’t know why you’d need a subwoofer!
Martin

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Mo’s doing absolutely perfect. I’ve never seen him drool before and so a bit shocked. It didn’t click at first, but I Googled drooling and a main cause could be stress due to noise. It was the same time as me playing around with the phase settings and lots of deep bass, some of which I couldn’t quite hear, but felt.

Went to the vet last week for his annual vaccs. They put him on the scales and said he’s 4.63kg and then carried on. He’s always 4.9-5kg so I said 4.6kg, that’s a big drop? I asked for a full blood sample just to check (and because of his fip treatment 5 years ago) at a cost of £220. Got home, weighed him on my hospital-grade accurate scales and he was 4.9kg! Checked with known weights and mine are correct, theirs are out. Never mind, he should have had a test anyway.

Mo few months ago.

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There is a well known naim dealer selling powerlines for £50 less than that🙂

Not massive. Enough for some cat snacks though.

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I’m using it for my av gear. It has the ability to use high level inputs for my Hawks and the low level for the av gear simultaneously if I wanted to. It’s something I haven’t explored yet, as I didn’t think the REF100 was really up to the quality level of my Naim/Shahinian stuff. I might play with this in the future, but with the sub/cables/hdmi/4 pink Synergistics Fuses/plugs, I’ve spent enough recently.

Yes I saw those. Still, I wish I’d never tried it tbh. Annoying when something easy to change, clearly produces a better result for a few hundred quid. Wish it was a grand then I’d definitely say no.

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Nice! Glad to hear that all is well with him.

We adopted a cat who was initially terrified of the TV. However, loud music never fazed her at all.

Never the less, I try to moderate the volume when she hangs out in the main system room. Especially as she often plops down, directly to the front of one of the loudspeakers, to groom herself.

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