Condor Powerhouse-1

A 12 inch dual 4 Ohm voice coil subwoofer with dual sets of bright-plated screw-down terminals that will accept large diameter speaker wires as well as banana plugs. It has an enlarged upper roll suspension surround and is designed for high linear excursion. There is a big plastic injection moulded trim ring with silver paint on it for use over the chassis once installed. The magnet is massively constructed, housed within a chromed casing held on with twelve Allen headed bolts. The back plate has an aperture for the magnet vent, which is mesh protected. There are model, voice coil description and power handling decals on the base of the magnet. The voice coil lead out wires are woven into the heavy duty linen bottom spider suspension, which is a high power handling feature. The cone has no dust dome and is lacquered Aluminium with a protective anti-corrosion coating underneath. The chassis is a cast type with sturdy construction and a dark grey powder coating finish. It arrives with a technical specifications sheet giving Thiele-Small parameters and specifications but no installation suggestions.
– Frequency response: 28Hz to 1000Hz
– Power Handling: 500w RMS (1kw max)
– Aluminium cone with lacquer coating
– Dual 4 Ohm voice coils
– Voice Coil Diameter: 2.5 inch
– 100 Oz magnet
– Efficiency: 90dB 1w/1M
– Fms: 28Hz
– Qes: 0.68
– Qms: 5.46
– Qts: 0.61
– Vas: 45.2 Litres
Review by Adam Rayner
A speaker that rides on the shoulders of giants. By which I mean that without having to do much R&D at all and having a keen understanding of what makes for good engineering, the people at the Condor manufactory have produced a subwoofer that looks a million bucks, handles power like it is a third generation mafia Don, is dripping with sage-nod-inducing features, yet frankly costs flap-all for what you get.
It has a big magnet. It has a wide 2.5 inch set of voice coils to shove the watts up – two of them, both four ohm – so the sub can look like two lots of ‘normal’ subs for a double-bridged and ‘Y’ lead connected four channel amp. Or it can look like 8 Ohms so you can spank all your gains to the max and drive it like a brute through it’s input stages by running the coils in series. Or you can do the trendy thing and run the coils in parallel into a mono amplifier and show said amp a mere 2 Ohms, thus sucking watts like a drunk sucks the last drop of Monster Get Drunk Fast lager from the can. This, incidentally is a fast route to a knackered car’s electrical system as a general principle. (We may even use this sub for an experiment into this.)
Meanwhile. I hooked her up and checked out the BASS. First on an inexpensive Condor Magic 1000 amplifier which you might think is the matching product as it says a thousand on it. (Sells for £113 or £120 with the ProPlus JLX12 sub-in-a-box, which is a mad deal) Then on a Rockford Fosgate Punch P325.1 mono amp that is actually sold as a package with this woofer. An odd mix? Well, this sub can use a half kilowatt and the Magic 1000 is in truth a 2 x50w RMS product, whereas this subwoofer can punch (geddit?) way above its weight for price. So packaging this subwoofer at a mere £113 with a quarter grand amp and selling the set for two hundred notes is a no-brainer.
On the relatively lowly Magic 1000 though, it rocked! It tracked the bassline a treat, dropped when it was asked made some decent air-shifting lows and all without any real running-in. There was some degree of buzzy colouration going on when trying the madder drop-throbs on the Revenge of the Pink Boom Bass CD version of the Pink Panther track I tried off the Boom Tube album. It’ll go better once the linen and that fat top roll surround have had a chance to soften up. I was impressed at how musical it was at normal bass lines. I fired it up on the Rockford and found I had to set the crossover way low as otherwise that buzzing suspension really got in the way of the sound. You can hear the woofer is a tad outclassed by the Rockford amp.
Powerhouse-1 is just expensive enough to allow inclusion of the engineering the bass head needs (love that metal cone) but cheap enough to know you have paid for nothing else. Like those woven-in coil lead out wires they call tinsel leads. It isn�t a virtuoso and has the odd sonic flaw but it is one hellacious bass maker and although it didn’t really like the Rockford amplifier, it can handle the raw power. A bargain for the results-oriented buyer who just wants as much actual throb for their money as they can possibly get.
Sound Quality 7.0
Build Quality 8.0
Power Handling 9.0
Efficiency 8.0
Value For Money 9.0
Overall rating 8.2