SATORI 6" MW16TX-4 TeXtreme Cone Woofer - 4 ohm

I have tried a lot of drivers over the years, mostly disappointed with them all, but this one stands head and shoulders above everything.

OK, I've got your attention, and you may have read some of my other reviews. I never use expletives with junk and save any expletives to those only praise worthy. These drivers are truly praise worthy.

I had an issue with my existing 12" cardioid woofers where the speed mismatch to the planar midrange drivers was just off. The 12" woofs were just way too slow and sounded muddy compared to the rest of the system.

I searched for low mass woofers to try to better match that of the other drivers and came across these. Their sensitivity also drew my attention and long story short, I opted to build a 4-driver vertical array using four 6.5" drivers per speaker [eight total].

I modeled the enclosure after the KEF "The Reference" system using two separate chambers [two drivers per chamber] and "stacking" them together to make one large floor-standing array.

Physical constraints limited the box height to 30 inches so the enclosures are deep, but not wide or high. Speaking of the enclosure, I tried a 4x4 test arrangement first using 3/4" MDF and that proved to be wrong.

These drivers easily flexed the cabinet creating a need for additional bracing. In the final cabinet design, I used two laminated layers of 3/4" MDF and a lot of internal 1.5" bracing as did the above mentioned KEFs.

The result was far better than what I anticipated. You really do not realize how much bass distortion your ear is used to until you hear that distortion minimized as it is with these drivers. That fat flabby sound is reduced by at least two orders of magnitude making bass as pleasant to listen to as a high quality ribbon driver is in the midrange.

The price is high but here you do indeed get what you pay for. The transients are breath taking and the low frequency response is the same.

Note that these drivers take a longer than usual time to break in. I've been running them now for about two months and last week they finally settled down.

I've use a 3" dual-flange port in a 40 liter enclosure [remember there are two woofers per enclosure, not four] tuned to abut 24Hz [9" in length]. There are eight 2" dual-flange holes in the 1.5" internal bracing and generous insulation using a combination of poly around the port and 4" thick blue jeans in the not-ported half of the cabinet.

These are crossed at 250Hz using a 4th-order Bessel network, external, with a hand-tuned Zobel. The overall appearance of the design closely resembles that of the old Infinity Reference 1-B. Having a separate woofer enclosure allows one to phase match the woofers to the rest of the system, an added bonus.

Am I happy? The rear-port works great and the appearance of the four vertical drivers is sweet. The sound is much better than the old 12" drivers with vocals, stringed instruments, and double bass taking another step toward reality. Percussion like the bass drum on Patricia Barber's "Regular Pleasures" is the best I've ever heard.

Using four drivers brings the power handling up to about 240W with a nice 4-driver gain in 1W sensitivity.

In short, I believe you will really like these drivers. When properly broken in, the sound is stunning.