Pioneer TS-W259S4 Ten Inch Subwoofer
Product Details
Manufacturer: Pioneer
Website: link
Typical Selling price: £79.99 (Car Audio Direct £69.99)
Available as a ten or twelve and with single or dual voice coils, this is an inverted-dome subwoofer with a very stiff cone made from a composite. It has a wedge shaped profile and is a front dish bonded to a back conical part. The surround looks like crinkly leather and is a very high performance material that Pioneer call Fiber (sic) Reinforced Elastic Polymer. It is very bouncy. The tinsel leads look suitably heavy duty for the power rating, although there is always a mad ‘˜Peak’ rating expressed in the thousands of watts on all Japanese subwoofers. This one is described at 1,200 watts peak!
A good looking product with a pressed steel chassis and handsome magnet boot/casing, it is rated at 350W RMS, so I happily partnered it with the Clarion APX1301E recently tested and found to be a good clean bass monoblock. It was tested with current favourites Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the mad Bass CD called Bass Boom Bottom, that has offensively ridiculous bass notes on it, designed to turn woofers inside out, playing from the Pioneer DEH-P88RSII resident reference CD deck.
– Frequency response: 20Hz to 280Hz
– Power Handling: 350w RMS
– IMPP (Injection Moulded Polypropylene) Composite Seamless Cone
– Surround: Dual Layer, Fiber Reinforced Elastic Polymer
– Pressed Steel chassis with plastic boot affixed by Allen headed bolts
– Single 4 Ohm, 1.5 inch (40mm) voice coil on Aluminium bobbin
– Push type terminals
– Recommended Enclosure: sealed 18.4 to 35.4 Litres
– Mounting depth 141mm
– Double-stacked, high power magnet with extended and vented pole yoke
– Efficiency: 92dB 1w/1M
– Fms: 38.2Hz
– Xmax: 8.6mm
– Qts: 0.84
– Vas: 0.5 Cu Ft/14.02 Litres
Editor Review : Pioneer TS-W259S4 Ten Inch Subwoofer
I had one of those scary moments when testing this woofer! There was a ‘clack’ and then sudden bass silence and as the Product manager of Pioneer UK was coming round the very next morning to collect this very woofer for an in house Pioneer installation project (all very hush-hush but I now know it has one of these woofers in it!) I was more than a little bit fretty, before finding out that it was simply a case of the speaker wire coming out of the socket on the back as the box was giving it some Brownian Motion around the carpet.
For this is a low cost yet very strong woofer. It isn’t about super tight nil-overhang classical reproduction, it is about balls-out energetic music. The sort you might play from some Pioneer DJ equipment. I played some old kicking stuff from a yonk ago from when they used to really over-produce the music and also some plain old offensive woofer-bursting stuff.
And while the woofer is rated to 350W RMS, I did feed it with a 300W rated amp that is good for 400W at two Ohms, so there may well have been some low modulus of impedance issues where, at certain frequencies, the nominally four Ohm coil may look lower in Ohmage. However a modulus of impedance graph is unlikely to appear on any makers’ website, so without some powerfully costly test and measurement kit that TA cannot afford, we’ll have to guess at that. But I did smell hot voice coil and I did feel some warmth through the front of the cone from the hot voice coil after testing. ( I so would have been toast if I had killed it but it’s fuggin’ run rrright in now!)
However, what is no guess is that this woofer is a bit of an animal.
It held nicely onto the lowest notes, playing the whole of the stupefyingly silly Woofer Excursion Test Track #6 from the Bass Boom Bottom CD and was good and musical with Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s most overproduced excesses.
I enjoyed it a lot and so will you. For the price this isn’t absurdo-bargain but it really truly is a big bad powerful beast and a Pepperami job of a ten.
Efficient, loud, clean, long travel and no bottoming out, ever.
An easy Talk Audio Recommendation.
Overall 8.8
Sound Quality 8
Build Quality 9
Power Handling 9
Efficiency 9
Value For Money 9