Alpine SWE-815 Active Subwoofer With Wired Remote Control
Product Details
Manufacturer: Alpine
Website/To Purchase: link
Typical Suggested Selling price: £119.99 (CAD £110.00)
In a Nutshell
A very well made, cute and adorably complete active eight inch cone driver subwoofer, with a wired remote control offering gain, crossover and phase-flip, featuring great ease of use and installation. Very good looking with its metal mesh grille cap over the amp and its robust port blocker piece and also the part used to hide cables to the rear. Neat and yet very robustly put together.
The Alpine SWE- 815 active subwoofer system makes far better, bigger bass than it looks like it should be able to, by far belying its size. It has depth and ability and that crucial melodic quality that so few subwoofer systems seem to manage. No boomp-boomp one-note-wonder, then this is an accomplished performer and represents astonishing Value For Money
Overall 9.2
Sound Quality 9
Build Quality 9
Power Handling 7
Efficiency 10
Value For Money 11.. Darn it! In the Spirit of Spinal Tap, this is an 11/10.
Description
A classic trapezoidal active bass box. SWE-815 has a bigger base panel than top, so it won’t topple in your boot (although you must always secure a bass enclosure well in any boot usage) and features a small built in amplifier that hides under a metal mesh grille in a recess on the top. This amp has a wired remote control that features a volume knob, a knob to adjust the crossover point of the woofer system between 50Hz to 125Hz and a simple phase-flip switch. (This can be useful and faster than trying to connect the system with the channels re-wired to try it the other way to see if results improve. Funny things can happen with bass phase and sometimes a phase-flipped bass versus the rest of the system actually sounds best due to the car’s acoustics.) This remote feels solid, has a nice blue LED when live and its controls feel like they will last. There is a very long cable to connect the remote and once installed up front on the supplied sticky-backed 3M pad, you peel off a layer of thin plastic to reveal a superbly shiny front panel.
Very Alpine
The tiny wee box amplifier is in fact from the Japan market small subwoofer sector and lives in a recess in the carpeted enclosure, under said metal mesh housing that forms the rear edge of the whole unit. The front edge at the top has the Alpine logo embroidered into the carpet at a low stitch count but still looks good. The unit comes with a significant loom set of wires that plug in alongside the remote control wire and both are then installed unseen, as there is a carpeted runnel in the rear drop of the box, complete with a tough carpeted piece of wood with industrial Velcro fitted to it, to take the wires off to boot-floor level, hidden. There is room for the power wires, the remote wire and an RCA cord to connect to the signal inputs. Incidentally, you can also connect speaker level wires to these RCAs but you would have to solder the RCA plugs onto the speaker wire feeds to connect.
A simple fold-out install manual with nil how-to-use instruction is all you get. It is thought you’ll experimentally twiddle the two knobs and flip the phase switch until it sounds good. I did. The driver looks tough and lives under two bar-style grille-things and lastly, a slot port is built solidly into the very fabric of the box rather than a flimsy port tube and features beneath the driver but wearing another carpeted slice of wood with two webbing straps affixed that, rammed home, serves as a solid and effective port blocker. You can choose ported or sealed use. The late Chris Brown of Alpine’s tech department loved sealed boxes over ported ones and would have approved of this approach, I am sure!
Alpine UK tell me they are impressed. Let’s go see if we are
Editor Review : Alpine SWE-815 Active Subwoofer With Wired Remote
After a long time reviewing, you know certain things. You know that of course, all marketing folks’ jobs is to tell you that everything is awesome all the time and to have all of their stuff all over the press all the time, all positive. This is of course, impossible, but ‘you work towards it’ This means that you lot and especially us lot, (the professional reviewers) tend to think it’s a Profumo case testimony of ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ about marketing material and just take the lot with a tablespoonful of salt, let alone a pinch. Mind you, to digress a little, we could rate brands by the pinch-of-salt rating, thus BassFace is the full tablespoonful as to wattage claims and Alpine’swell strong in Nipponese Umame flavour, but never fibbed about or overblown of claim. Alpine are consummate at the reality anyway and don’t need to show off or puff it up. So, lo-salt!
All of which is a typically long winded preamble to the fact that I know the Alpine guys are a bit thrilled with the SWE-815. Itching between their shoulder blades with wanting to rave about it but wishing to avoid like hell, the negative force this might affect a tester with. (i.e. my fat self) Now, I know it aughta be a genuine £140 worth, yet is offered on the direct Alpine site at £120 and £110 at Car Audio Direct so in fact, at the actual going rate, the unit is pushing for an eleven out of ten for VFM! Fact is, the remote is bloody brilliant and smooth enough and with a long enough wire to be able to thumb-twiddle it and adjust on the fly between, say Jazz and Reggae or Rock use. I discovered I had a deep cock up of phase in my test speaker array versus the sub bass system’s phase, as I flipped the phase switch on the remote to find the bass suddenly exploded, got deeper and richer and above all, gained girth. I could have re-wired my test speakers, a massive set of super-magnetted ancient Vietas with tiny compression horn tweeters and cone mids over fat six-by-nine cones but the switch-flip was far easier. Now, these make a large bass of great tightness of their own and were running upon a pair of one hundred watt channels of a brand new Soundstream Ref 400.4 amplifier and that’s lots of lolly. But nonetheless, as I could dial up the SWE-815’s crossover point then zoom from all the way on before distortion to nil in an easy-sweep second, I was able to hear exactly what the eight inch cone in here was doing.
First, I tried it sealed and loved the sound. SWE-815 is tight and yet has an easy depth and simple authority that absolutely belies its size. Modern amp and driver engineering and a bloody brilliantly designed box-to-match-the-driver things were going on – that much, Alpine have always been awesome at. (If ANY of you can name the car Glasford Daly drove, I will sort some sort of bloody prize out for you, as long as you can give me the year and how he was famous in the Sunday papersbut it was the Eighties and it was Alpine-related.) The bass has a quality not normally got from an eight of any sort less than a USA exotic £500-for-just-the-speaker sort of thing. It can hold a melodic bass line and still retain dynamic ability to get a bit louder within its own limits, of course. It is beyond tempting, like seeing how fast mum’s car will go, to try the limit but if you find it, you wind back and leave some headroom. Then, you get bass accurate enough to use for a low power/cost sound off SQ system, and that is quite a statement.
For the money, you get amp, box, speaker, fittings and that remote control. And you get a deep, rippling, grippy bass that has genuine audiophillic edge to it. It is melodic and can hold any tune that depends upon a low end component, as so much pop does. Especially that Dubstep ‘˜ting. I was a bit concerned that the ridiculous power and scale of the hugely bigger boxes with more watts up them, would make a mockery of the small SWE-815 subwoofer and yet I was just plain wrong to fear that. If you swiped the gain down to zero in a moment, after a little experimental set up, you could feel and hear the whole scale and weight and literal excitement level reduce as the sub system stopped joining in. And when it dialled back in, it was lovely. Bigger, like better gravy with your prime rib of beef.
I reset the levels on the big old amp I was using and cranked the sub output up a tad on the test rig’s head unit. Played some more bassy material and removed the SWE-815’s port blocker. Now while you could genuinely hear a little more superb edge and lower detail with the port blocker in place and the box thus playing sealed, there was that 3dB gain a really well designed port can bring to the party. This one is well designed and it does get louder.
The SWE-815 houses an eight that thinks it’s a ten. Yes, you can find a limit to the envelope of performance and make it complain but that is the act of an idiot hooligan and so help me, I am an utter expert in Idiot Hooligan Weapons-Grade woofers. This is the PERFECT first add-on easy bass for any OEM car system, whatever it has right now. You can solder speaker tail wires to a set of RCA plugs and ScotchLok the wires on any speaker in the car if you like to feed the bass into the system and that remote cable would be long enough for a limo! It’s easy to fit.
SWE-815 has a sweet ‘˜proper-audio’ sound and feel and is cute as a puppy for all its compactness. In fact, remove the metal grille carefully it too is on Velcro strips attached to the carpet and you will see the ridiculously tiny Japan-market small-sub amplifier that really is delivering the potatoes into the lovely, efficient driver. It all adds up to a superbly balanced high quality package with far more scale and weight of bass than you are actually paying for. Hell, I would love to hear a bank of six, three along each flank.. I wonder if Atsuhiro at Alpine can persuade his engineer chums in Iwaki City to make a multi-gang remote that can boss six SWE-815s all at once? The only thing is, I do like the sound better ported than port-blocked, myself, so with a large sorrowful apology to the spirit of the late Chris Brown, (Alpine mid 1970’s to mid Noughties) whom I deeply respected and adored the irascible edge of, my favoured application is not the sealed one. I can see him tutting at me, now
Easily Recommended, in fact, it is a Talk Audio Best Buy. And yes, Chris, sealed does sound posher, just not as loud
FULL Specifications
– 8in (20cm) Customised SWE-843E Subwoofer
– 300W Peak Power Handling (100W RMS)
– Heavy Duty Subwoofer Grill
– Frequency Response: 34Hz – 1.5kHz
– Impedance: 2x 2 Ohms
– Sensitivity: 91.0dB/W(1m)
– Built-in MXE-M150CKD Amplifier
– 150W Max Power
– Wired Remote Controller for Volume, Crossover Frequency (50-125Hz @-12dB/oct.) & Phase Setting
– RCA & Speaker Level Inputs via same plugs
– High Quality Bass Reflex Enclosure
– Optimum Wedge Shaped Design
– Removable Port Plug for Sealed or Vented Operation
– High Output Slot-Ported Design
– Dimensions: 288mm(W) x 291mm(H) x 253mm/363mm(D)
In memory of Chris Brown, car audio industry figure, Alpine employee and influential automotive acoustician, who was a major cog at Alpine UK before he was taken from us far too early. He loved a sealed bass box. He should still be here