Update: I’ve had the Sub 6 running for a few months now and it is stunning. It’s a perfect complement to the Evoke 50’s. Both for home theatre, where its presence is subtly but sometimes unmistakably felt in the weirdest places (the soundtrack for a reality cooking show, for example), but also obviously with music.
I have the Dynaudio Core Sub in my studio setup so I’m now familiar with how this sub technology works, and I have to say the Sub 6 is utterly fantastic. I am using the Evoke 50 preset, in the latest firmware for the Sub, and after speaking to Dynaudio I learned that this preset does not actually roll anything off in the Evokes. I had asked because I have a complicated setup with my Denon AVR and the Naim Uniti Nova functioning together (for TV/movies, whereas the Nova handles music exclusively itself). Because of that setup, and the fact that there was no way I could run audio out from my Denon’s pre-outs to my Nova’s pre-ins and then out the Nova’s pre-outs into the Sub 6’s inputs (to then send out to another set of pre-ins on the Nova, to drive the Evoke 50’s), I had to feed the sub and the Evoke 50’s directly from the Nova (the Evokes through the speaker wire, and the Sub 6 using the pre-outs). I was worried that the Sub 6’s Evoke 50 preset wouldn’t work because the Sub 6 wouldn’t be able to do the digital crossover to feed the Evokes because they were being fed in parallel.
Dynaudio told me that the preset doesn’t roll off the Evokes at all, because they’re designed to be full range and there was no good way to design a crossover for them that didn’t impede their performance. So the Sub 6 is merely an addendum to the sound. So I run the Evoke’s directly from the Nova, and use its pre-outs (sub-outs) to feed the Sub 6, a full scale (L and R) signal. The Sub 6 then crosses it over digitally and expresses the low end.
Interestingly, at low to moderate volume levels, the Sub does NOTHING. You can put your finger gently on the driver surround or driver itself and feel either nothing or the faintest of vibrations, barely perceptible even. And this can be with bass-heavy music. You have to turn it up to the point where it starts to get difficult to have a conversation in the same room, and then you feel the Sub working. Even then, it isn’t working SUPER hard (though it tends to do so when watching movies or really badly edited Youtube videos where someone has onboard audio directly from a GoPro strapped to the hood of a car in a drag race or something).
Setting the Sub up in this way isn’t ideal in terms of latency due to the DSP. I was worried that I would hear bass impact slightly smeared, but first of all, most drum sounds have a transient which is what our brains hear if there is any mismatch in timing, and the transient wouldn’t go to the Sub. Second, I feel that the sound is remarkably “together”. I can’t really tell it apart from my studio setup that includes two Dynaudio Core 47 monitors and a Core Sub, which all use daisy-chained AES-EBU digital connections, with everything crossed over digitally in the active speakers themselves. Because that full path is digital, the Dynaudio DSP does a bunch of fancy audio latency and distance compensation to get everything to hit at the right time. In the case of my Naim Nova plus Evoke 50’s and Sub 6, that’s not possible, because only the Sub 6 is using DSP, and it gets fed the same exact signal that’s going to the Evoke 50’s. But the latency is low enough (under 1.5 ms I was told) that it’s imperceptible.
And the combination of the preset with the Evoke 50’s is glorious. I spent a whole afternoon when my girlfriend was away A/B testing really bass heavy electronic tracks and I have to say, it was a subtle difference, which is great. It doesn’t slam you in the face, especially because the Evoke 50’s are nuts for low end themselves. But there is a subtle sense of more “darkness” in the room, a controlled sort of impact, that just makes the bass sound more expansive and rounded. As if the low end were emanating circles, but the circles are just bigger – and still with just as tightly defined borders as when the Evoke 50’s are being run without sub.
). In your profile I see that you play with Evoke 50 loudspeakers. The good thing about this sub is that it has built in presets for many of the modern Dynaudio speakers. These presets are basically cross over settings specifically for Dynaudio loudspeakers. If you select the setting for Evoke 50, the sub will automatically supplement your Evokes in the best possible way. And yes, connecting a good quality and correctly earthed stereo RCA cable from your Nova PreAmp output into the analog RCA inputs of the sub 6 should do the trick.
) and I love it. I have my Atom now connected to the Sub 6 using a stereo pair of RCA to XLR cables and the Sub 6 is connected to the power amplifier using a pair of XLR to XLR cables. Preset has been set to Contour S 3.4 LE and I have never ever heard a better sub integration than this. It sounds simply sublime.