SAS Bazooka BT1214

An earlier review started thus: ‘The original brand of Bass Tube. The Xerox, Frigidaire and Hoover of their world. We still talk about hoovering even when we use the Vax. There are eight and ten inch but no bigger (I have always fantasised about two fifteen inch Bazookas)’
And while my fantasy of fifteens is still a way off, they HAVE made a twelve and it looks mighty! The driver has a good fat foam surround and is very wobbly or compliant, with an inverted dust dome on what looks like a Polypropylene cone bearing the Bazooka logo. The grille is a solid-feeling open basket type again with the Bazooka logo, (lined up nicely  with that of the cone) so dead-on current trend. The case is the classic injection moulding, finished in a pleasantly textured black crackle with a pair of Bazooka branding badges on the flanks and a nice full-edge rubbery surround piece, again thrice branded, that covers the edges of the port and tube alike.
The enclosure is a good size, yet rigid and lighter than anything else on the market. The rear sports a dual-piece panel in the same design that allows for an active module to be fitted on other smaller models as this twelve has no powered version. Many of the Bazooka tubes are also available as active, or self-amplified types that you simply supply 12V and signal to. I confess that for the first time in ages, I was moved to perform a minor dismantling! I removed the screws and found that behind the high quality pair of Platinum coloured binding posts, there was a good thick internal speaker wire to go to the single voice coil and that the interior has a good filling of classic Luxbond acoustic wadding. The front of the tube has the opening for the full-length port, alongside the driver’s face. This is crescent shaped and sculpted alongside the main cylindrical enclosure.
The tube arrives with a pair of strong Nylon webbing straps with quality cinch-buckles and a set of stumpy stands, or ‘rests’ in curved injection moulded plastic to support and steady the strapped-down tube.
– Power handling 6 to 250 watts
– Efficiency 106dB @ 1w/1m
– Patented Bass Tubes® enclosure with front parallel porting
– Optimised for corner loading
– Water resistant enclosure with built in grille frame
– Platinum coloured binding posts
– Impedance 4 Ohms Single Voice coil (Dual Voice Coil also available)
– Frequency Response 30Hz to 1000Hz
– Magnet size 36Oz
– Voice Coil Size 2 inch high power/high temp
– Mass 28lbs
– 22.5 x 12.1 x 14.4in (572 x 307 x 367mm)
– Complete with manual, injection moulded mounting base pieces, straps and fixings
 
Review by Adam Rayner
Did you know that an earlier distributor of this product made a 150dB install in a small van with a stack of Bazooka tubes just to prove you can and that sound offs have been won with them? They can be tuned by moving them in or out of the corners of the back of your car, be it saloon or hatch, to adjust the horn effect of the loading. (There are boaty ones, too.) This meant that I absolutely had to provide some acoustic loading for the test I ran by messing about with positions against a wall for best output.
It was hooked up to the last item on the review tree, A Massive Audio Nanoblock N2 amp. This can supply improbable amounts of watts into low impedances, yet at the four Ohms that this product would ‘show’ the amp, was just about right for the fairly low 250w top power handling.
The Bazooka tube looks simple but is an engineering acoustical triumph. A genius idea of an enclosure and one that has been pathetically attempted to be copied over and over again by more and more makers who stupidly thought that merely being round was the key. Bollocks! It’s the volume of the enclosure versus its huge side-mounted parallel port and how it all exits the same place in perfect phase with the driver’s main output front wave style. It’s in the filling of Luxbond, it’s in the cubic of the internal box part versus the side port and its wide surface area.
Most of all, it’s in the empirical genius of SAS’ designers.
I straight way went to a stupid CD the Woofer Excursion Test track six from the now-fabled More Bass More Boom More Bottom, by Power Supply. Complete with all its daft warnings about ‘Premature system degragation’ (Sic) It was very interesting.
First off, this is a vastly efficient ported rather than sealed enclosure and as well as it being incredibly light in mass for what it does, it is a textbook-brilliant illustration of the benefits of Real Correct Porting. We all know that a well ported box can be 3dB up on its non-ported, or sealed brethren but few ever really get their nose rubbed into this fact.
The Bazooka Tube does just that.
For it is so madly efficient that just a one watt input will result in 106dB of bass! What that means is that instead of having a huge heater in your boot, you only need a 250w amplifier and you will boom and drop better than many chums with a half kilowatt! Of course, being so far up the tuned-ported route, the roll off below its admittedly very deep 30Hz declared bass extension and passband, is pretty fast.
This means that the really silly notes at the belly of the snake will be quieter but that’s to miss the point. My test rig does get a small amount of transport noise through it because it’s not in a monocoque (car body shell) and for the first time EVER since I have been doing this, the bass throbby part of the transport noise of the disc player I am using at the moment, a Sony SACD-capable deck called MEX-DV1000, made the room wobble ON NIL VOLUME!
This tube is absurd. I reckon it’d ruddy ROCK on just the 50W output of the fabled onboard MOSFET chip amps of many Pioneer headunits. It’s called Direct Sub Drive and this product is BORN for it! Of course, the corollary of this (as I sit back down at my keyboard a little embarrassed ay my own antics) is that one tends to want to spank it! I played Get Ready For This from a dB Jams Album made for dB Drag guys and it loved it. But I did spank it until I could smell voice coil and feel the warmth of the voice coil emanating gently through the front of the cone. Of course the Nanoblock never even broke sweat or deigned to feel warm at all.
It’s musical, rich, warm and yet tight and accurate but above all, it weighs a fraction and I mean like less than a quarter what this level of serious boomers’ bass aught to. A bigger magnet and a solid hugo-mungous box would be needed to make this much bass from normal less efficient kit and you would probably need that 500 watter I mentioned earlier as well. An absolute easy Best Buy for the Bazooka BT1214.
Sound Quality 9.0
Build Quality 10.0
Power Handling 7.0
Efficiency 10.0
Value For Money 10.0
Overall rating 9.2