RE Audio RE-12D4

You know how often you see a legend on a product’s carton that states that the ‘specifications are subject to change’ as they improve and develop a product? Well, this is one such item. The carton shows a 4 inch or 100mm mounting depth product but the specifications in with the speaker itself show a 5.5 inch or 145mm mounting depth. You can also see that the double ferrite stacked magnet system shown on the carton illustration has been changed for a single one but with a hugely back-bumped and vented pole piece on the product that can be seen in the video in the archive.
This is a simple-looking pressed steel chassis subwoofer with dual four Ohm voice coils. Although very heavy duty the tinsel leads are not woven into the lower spider. The dual sets of connections are steel lugs and there is a gasket layer on the top of the chassis but not underneath. The magnet has a boot around it with RE branding and the back plate of the magnet is well chromed and very attractive. Packing is excellent and even includes a small self adhesive plastic patch to protect the shiny part on the base from being scratched should you put it down on any surface during the fitting process. The chassis is finished in matt black while the cone is an inverted concave dish. The carton says the cone is mica filled Polypropylene and it’s likely that this is still the case. It certainly looks so. Also the voice coil is described as eight-layer, which would make this a very high power device with a lot of metal in the gap. The logo of the company and the series is printed on the cone.
– Frequency response: not quoted
– Power Handling: 175w RMS (250 peak)
– Concave polymer dome less one-piece cone
– Pressed Steel chassis
– Upper foam gasket
– Dual 3.2 Ohm voice coils
– Twin sets of regular lug terminals
– Mounting depth 145mm (NOT the 100mm on the box product is redesigned)
– Efficiency: 81.2dB 1w/1M
– Fms: 20Hz
– Qes: 0.38
– Qms: 4.21
– Qts: 0.34
– Vas: 27.1 Litres
Review by Adam Rayner
This driver was hooked up with its coils in series as I prefer to be able to run the electrical test system of Odyssey battery and StreetWires cables with the gains cranked on the test amp, rather than worrying about sucking the system inside out. In the past I have also found empirically that with the test system, not being in a car with an alternator, I can get it louder and test harder with bigger gains than when using low impedances.
As a twin four Ohm coiler it can thus look like two Ohms or eight, depending upon whether you hook it up in series or parallel. The manual that comes with every RE Audio subwoofer is excellent and shows all specifications and also how to hook up in series and parallel and even a combination of both for the four-coil subs. The box requirements are clear and the whole is well written and easy to understand. I love their intro (which is also on the carton) “We understand the uses and often abuses in auto sound and engineer products for the real world…the durability to stand up to the extreme abuses of SPL competition.” Which pretty much says it.
This is their most entry level speaker and yet shows evidence of having been quite radically reworked if you follow the differences between the manual and that which is printed on the carton. The amplifier used was a Rockford Fosgate Power T600-2 bridged to run bass only. It is a clean amplifier which scored well and was measured at 746W RMS output but is a little less ridiculous than using the Talk Audio high power reference bass amp of the day, the JBL 24001, which might make it cough up its lungs at only a bit less than the four Ohm 1,700w point. The T600-2 was still well over-potent at four Ohms so was a good match for the eight Ohm load it was presented with.
The Acoustic Wood test enclosure was used in sealed version so as to hear the driver rather than a combination of tuned enclosure and driver. You can of course get as much as 3dB more if you go with an optimum ported enclosure but will sacrifice response in the frequencies below the tuning of the box. This is all well laid out in the manual.
I didn’t pansy about with art, I spanked its fuggin’ arse! Straight to the maddest Bass CD I have, which is “More Bass More Boom, More Bottom” by Power Supply and in particular the daft “Woofer Excursion Test” track, which is fuck all to do with music and all about booming and abusing your woofers.
The RE-12D4 loved it and moved in and out far enough to give a lover of speaker perve site www.realmofexcursion.com a thrill as the logos went three-D. The box was OK but I reckon it would have liked a bigger one as it wasn’t really enjoying the experience of the very deepest lows.
However, it goes in and out an heck of a long way and it drops and throbs like a bitch. Absolutely in the mould of its bigger and badder brethren, this is a bit of a star that isn’t well known. If you like your bass really bonkers, deep and fat with a good ability to withstand abuse, then you just found it.
At seventy nicker, it’s just costly enough to be a bit serious and I can tell you that I ran it so hard I could smell her coils (yum!) and it didn’t alter in sound or output one jot. It does get warm at the front of the coil if you really abuse it but if you give it only a quarter kilowatt as it asks for, it’ll boom all day.
The sound quality was pretty good with no purring nor one-noting. Instead it tracked the bass, even as it went to subsonic type signals and really moves air, only having issues when it couldn’t breathe as deep on its own suspension as a bigger box would have afforded.
I loved it, an honest hooligan product with no pretensions to efficiency, just begging to be shagged really hard right up its bits.
Sound Quality 8.0
Build Quality 8.0
Power Handling 9.0
Efficiency 6.0
Value For Money 9.0
Overall rating 8.0