May the GoldenEar ForceField Be With You… | GoldenEar ForceField 30 Subwoofer

The $900 GoldenEar ForceField 30 Subwoofer with 1,000-watts of power, built-in DSP, and a downward facing passive radiator, all in a small 11″x16″x12″, makes for a small but mighty addition to GoldenEar’s line-up and potentially for your system. Check out our thoughts on how it sounded in the video above.

Show Notes:

We review it here as a woofer, where the intended application is to augment smaller speakers (e.g. stand-mount monitors) that may roll off in the upper bass especially when placed for optimal imaging (away from bass reinforcing walls). A woofer like the Forcefield 30 can fill in the mid-bass in such applications. Since “subwoofer” is what people have decided, in a bit of linguistic mangling, to call these speakers (and those designed to augment deep bass and those to be used for home theater sound effects) we’ve gone with the standard terminology.

To extend this point, as a woofer paired with the Golden Ear BRX monitors, the Golden Ear Forcefield 30 allowed us to gain 10db@90hz and 12db@70hz and 10db@50hz. This filled in the rolloff we experienced with the BRX alone and had the mid-bass level similar in magnitude to the midrange of the BRX. Below 50hz gains quickly became minimal, though this is not what we tried to achieve with the positioning, crossover setting and level setting we settled on in our musical tests. Output above 200hz was essentially unaffected with our setup.

While the Forcefield 30 has DSP on board, this is not room correction DSP. DSP is also useful for tuning the driver to the cabinet and for limiting driver excursion at low frequencies with high output (to prevent driver damage and to lower distortion).

Read more about the Forcefield 30 subwoofer here.

Ancillary equipment:

Bryston 3BCubed power amp

Sanus speaker stands

Audio Research Reference 6 preamp

dCS Lina streamer/DAC

dCS Lina master clock

Audioquest digital, line level and speaker cables

Shunyata Venom power director and AC cables

Vicoustic Wavewood diffusors

RPG bass traps