West Coast Customs B104S

21st January 2008 Adam Rayner

A sealed ten inch chassis subwoofer enclosure with black carpet cladding, painted wooden top and bottom plates and four curved bars over the driver instead of a traditional speaker grille. The speaker connections are bright plated squeeze terminals, will take a good quality speaker cable and are found on the back in a plastic terminal cup. There is a steel badge panel hammered neatly through the carpet into cut outs in the woodwork near the terminal cup that bears the name of the product as well as the rating ‘400 watts’. This does not appear as any value for nominal power handling rating in the manual, which states 250w RMS and 500w as the peak power handling, so this figure is within the stated parameters.
The cone is a slivery colour with a large flat dust dome bearing the West Coast Customs by Orion logo. The top plate is finished in a quality paint coating with the West Coast Customs by Orion logo painted onto it. It is wedge shaped and could easily be stacked with others of its model to make an array. It is compact and not very massy compared to some bass boxes so may be considered by the weight conscious.
– Frequency response: 30Hz to 250Hz
– Power Handling: 250w RMS (500w max)
– Sealed enclosure
– Pressed steel chassis driver
– Synthetic surround
– 4 Ohm impedance
– Bright plated 4mm squeeze post terminals in own cup
– Bar style protection (four) in lieu of traditional grille
– Efficiency: 86dB 1w/1M
– Stated output 108dB to 114dB SPL
– Measured close up @ 121dB
– Dimensions 342(w) x 355(h) x 273(d) mm
– Mass: 9.8kgs (22lbs)
– C/W Piece of heavy duty speaker cable and four corner security brackets with self tapping screws and manual
Review by Adam Rayner
This little spud is cheap enough for you to be able to buy a bank of six of them for the money just one of the fabulous Kicker L7 boxes I recently tested costs. Just think about it, Mad Mike grinning like a character from one of his beloved Alfred E Neumann comic books over a row of six of these puppies. All aimed just a bit sprayed out because of the sexy wedge shapes they form and then six sets of ten inch motors all hooked up though one sod off great surfboard of a West Coast Customs or Orion HCCA amp and let loose. They would de bone you as while on it’s own, this is not a major event, what it is, is musical and capable.
A sealed box is always the very best way to get the deepest and tighest performance from most normal subwoofers and so while a well tuned ported box can work well, if you want to drop a note even down past the normal resonant frequency (or FS) of your wobbly driver, then a sealed box is the best way to do it.
I hooked this box up to the perfectly ridiculous PowerBass XA3000D mono amp and having wicked the gain back to really-rather-careful, I proceeded to play a whole bunch of stuff through it. Still cutting the lovely Focal CD The Spirit of Sound #6 to a spiral and in particular some dude called Willie Bobo, (track 8) who is a funkmeister and Salif Keita (track 9) singing in French with an African style just makes me jump around like an idiot flapping my arms.
The bass power was nothing like the ï¿½400 box I had unplugged to plug this one in but I was impressed. For a truly affordable sum, you get a slice of real bass. It’d be gorgeous in a really small car on its own. Pretty impressive in a pair in most normal installs and as I said earlier, deadly serious if you had six.
And part of it has to be that brand.
You just know they wouldn’t put their names ot rubbish and chose Directed to be carriers of the WCC flag. I am a sad case and a true fan see the interview with Mad Mike of Pimp My Ride fame elsewhere on this site so I do think this is a cool idea.
The speaker didn’t like it when I gave it some real power (errm nearly a thousand watts but briefly, only briefly) but I can tell you that the rating is a careful one and that the speaker lets go only very gradually, so you’ll get warning of an audible kind without hurting it and without a sudden loss of life if you do overdrive it.
Fact is, the real sub killer is an amp going into square waves with a subwoofer that could handle loads more if it was only clean power. No sane person would put his WCC-B104S on a 3 kilowatt amp. I did, it lived and loved it. Also, a given is that the sound will get sweeter with the breaking in, or gradual softening of the tough yet flexible foam suspension.
So no world shaker but plenty mad value for the money and if you do pile ’em up, they will hear you coming.
Sound Quality 8.0
Build Quality 9.0
Power Handling 8.0
Efficiency 7.0
Value For Money 10.0
Overall rating 8.4