Massive Audio DC12

A serious woofer from a serious supplier, they even brag about using aviation grade aluminium in their custom cast chassis and I have never seen that before. Mind you, this is the same company that also adhere to the CEA standards for their wiring kits as well as their amplifiers and that’s another thing I do not think is represented elsewhere on the UK market. The subwoofer is constructed on the heroic scale and uses a set of triple stacked extra strong 40 Oz Y40 bigger-shove Ferrite magnets to get a really, er, massive shove on the cone for SPL purposes. Despite the big frame and mighty dual 2.5 inch coils on the product, the chassis is in fact quite skinny versus many others and has a bizarrely low mounting depth for such a beast of a driver. With Chromed top and bottom plates on the fat magnet for looks as much as anything else and also featuring posh binding post style terminals, this is a woofer that would be delicious mounted bottom-outwards. The luxuriant rear magnet ornamentation and the rubbery girdle the Ferrites wear, make it a shame to hide the thing at all.
The front has a thick rubber gasket piece that bears a Massive Audio logo but I found that without much manipulation of this piece when installing, it was rather easy to break it away from its rubbery home. As it is a metal badge with skinny leg bits behind it to bind it into the rubber, I couldn’t replace it, so do take care with this bit of cosmetics as it is surprisingly easy to harm given the rugged nature of the item overall. The cone looks woven and is a parabolic peak rather than finished with a dust dome and has a smart Massive logo badge on it in shiny plastic.
It was tested in a new sealed enclosure from Acoustic Wood, with rounded insides and acoustic foam liner. These use Neutrik Speakon gas-tight wire connections and so the box offers nil excrescences as per normal speaker cups and simply cannot be shorted by loose spanners in the boot.
– Frequency response: 20Hz to crossover- Power Handling: 600w RMS (1.2kw max)
– Woven face parabolic cone
– Powder coated die cast chassis of 6041 high density aviation grade Aluminium
– Large Santoprene rubber gasket
– Dual 4 Ohm voice coils
– Nickel plated 4mm binding post terminals
– Woven Silver plated tinsel leads
– Four-layer voice coils, 54mm long on reinforced Aluminium former
– Voice Coil Diameter: 2.5 inch (64mm)
– Mounting depth 165mm
– 120 Oz high energy Y40 Ferrite magnet
– Efficiency: 91.5dB 1w/1M
– Fms: 32.5Hz
– Qes: 0.616
– Qms: 5- Qts: 0.548
– Vas: 38.0 Litres
Review by Adam Rayner
This woofer took me quite some time to ‘get’. It looks incredible, an easy ten for build and you’d really want to enclose it in one inch Lexan or Perspex – and the cost of the woofer wouldn’t make this seem silly. One Big Thing we are going to have to get really used to is that stuff made and bought and sold in US Dollars is going to be getting more costly now that the exchange rate has been so rubbish for so long. Of course the likes of Vibe and Genesis who sell in Sterling to the Americans are slightly better off. That said, so much international speaker business is done in Dollars that the weak pound will still make prices look higher. The same has got to apply to stuff sold in Euros and the whole approach to my Value For Money Scores may well have to be adjusted to avoid the Pensioner-Value ‘Oooh that’s dear Lovey!’ feel.
I was a bit under whelmed at how easy it was to permanently pop the Massive logo from the front rubbery bit so re-iterate that you must take care with your one. I played a whole load of different material through it and ran it on the PowerBass XA3000D bass amp, good for three kilowatts and able to blow lesser woofers right up and give quite serious shocks to unwary and stupid reviewers. I was guilty of stuffing absurd amounts of power up it and found that yes, I could overload it with the amplifier and make it flap a tad but then calmed down a bit, re-read the specs and played some Bass CD stuff. For the woofer is built like a brick outhouse but has only medium power handling. Medium in these days of super-weapons-grade of course as over a half kilowatt RMS and 1,200 watt speak power handling is by no means low. It just means that most woofers with huge coils and weighty cones will be less efficient than their low moving mass, highly compliant and wobbly cousins. It takes a real engineer to make a speaker that can both biff and take the power as well as playing loudly from each watt it gets when not spanked hard.
And that is the story with this speaker. It has a six hundred watt power limit and if you are in the real world – without a battery bank like the Iceman’s and alternators big enough to defibrillate a cow, then the real wattage you will have available will be unlikely to be as huge as I was using with the surfboard-sized esoteric amp. It plays with great authority and weight and can track a bass line with ease. I did find that there were some notes that played a bit better (even in the sealed enclosure) than others, as revealed by the More Bass More Boom, More Bottom CD from Power Supply (the one with the bloke holding his bleeding ears on ) and they played a bit louder than others as the mad track wibbled and wobbled up and down.
It liked ‘real’ SQ bass (Focal’s Spirit of Sound #6 disc) and it held the melodies well. It was brilliant as a deep wobbly Bass CD type thing and in the end I actually decided that a twenty hertz subsonic filter was a bit too high to let me hear what this very able woofer was capable of. So, while the XA3000D is a beast, I’m after trying a new Vibe Black Death amp to see if that might be a better bass reference item.
In the meanwhile, the Massive DC12 Is a truly strong woofer that can hit you in the kidneys harder than you would expect for the amplifier power you have. It may not be weapons grade but it looks utterly delicious and you can run it at 500 watts all day and your mates will think you have a cool kilowatt.
One big slice less price and it’d get a point more for VFM and that’d take it into the Talk Audio Recommended section, so apart from price, well respected.
Sound Quality 8.0
Build Quality 10.0
Power Handling 8.0
Efficiency 10.0
Value For Money 7.0
Overall rating 8.6