REL Acoustics No. 25 Subwoofer – Gloss Black & Longbow Wireless Transmitter

From experts REL Acoustics comes this fine example of its No. 25 Subwoofer. It is in very good condition and is supplied in original factory packaging complete with Longbow Wireless Transmitter (normally sold separately). It also comes with remote control unit, manual, mains cable and our regular three month warranty.
REL Acoustics Say….
No. 25 commemorates and celebrates our quarter century of building the finest sub bass systems, while pointing to the future and our next 25 years as it employs our most advanced design, engineering and craftsmanship.
No. 25 combines the power of an ultra-reliable 1,000 watt amplifier, with a lightweight and perfectly balanced carbon fibre 15” driver. All this is controlled by our legendary filter sets and proprietary crossovers with 2 separate parametric equalizers permitting remarkably flat in-room response, while maintaining the speed and resolution for which modern RELs have become known.
We want our customers to enjoy all this performance without being limited to only a few room locations, so we built-in our legendary LongBow™ wireless receivers into every No. 25. This design utilizes zero compression, resulting in stunning dynamics and bass extension without being tethered to a cable, while delivering sound quality comparable to our competitor’s hardwired designs. It’s just another example of how we strive to offer complete and thoughtful solutions.
No. 25 marks a new standard in cabinet execution, both for its physical beauty and the manner in which it manages the critical back wave propagating from the rear surface of the massive 15″ carbon fibre piston at its heart. The shape of No. 25 is designed to disturb and cancel much of the incredible force created by the inward stroke as No. 25 reloads for your music or film’s next set of demands. It is necessary to keep this back wave as silent as possible, while allowing the driver to “breathe” without compressing dynamics. The curvilinear cabinet walls deflect, diffuse and dissipate these waves into smaller cross plane waves. Minimizing rear waves that eventually emerge as comb filtering — noise that cancels the primary bass — is what creates clear, purposeful bass that strides into a room with tremendous energy and clarity.
Comprised of 30mm thick Australian MDF, transected by hardwood spars that break up common mode resonances within the top surface of the cabinet and down its sidewalls, our bracing is not unlike the spars in a ship’s hull. Some may view this as excessive, but these are the lengths our design team goes to deliver the finest subwoofer extant, fully fitting of the title No. 25.
When we experience bass in real time out in the world, it occurs with height to it. It strikes our sinuses, it kicks at our chest cavities, it rumbles along the floor conveying power authority and majesty. Our Reference Line Arrays permits bass to emerge more naturally, adding a height component in how it propagates throughout the room. The bottom unit reinforces the deepest overtones, creeping and rumbling across the floor to produce room shake. The middle location provides crisp attack and articulation of kick drums or any transient-based event. The unit imparts the flutter and shimmer of all manner of instruments floating in air. Making Reference Line Arrays the Holy Grail of the REL experience and is only available with our Reference products.
Since 90 percent of the energy produced by a system resides in the bass regions, Reference Line Arrays are the magic element missing from so many otherwise state of the art systems. This air, transparency and, of course, effortless power that Reference Line Arrays convey can’t be imagined, it can only be experienced in person.
It takes huge power to invest the No. 25 with the shattering dynamics of which it is capable. The rugged beast of a 1,000 watt NextGen3 amplifier that powers No. 25 has already proven itself in the field in one of our previous designs, making us comfortable with not only its startling sonic performance but also its reliability.
However, No. 25 is no mere exercise in excess, but rather a thorough exposition in the art of rendering sub bass, totally, completely and with great deftness in tonality, expression and dynamics. It is this ability to not merely play loud, but to bring to life the contrast between loud and soft passages that makes REL owners so passionate about our designs. After all, dynamics are not merely the ability to play loud, but to bring to life the contrast between loud and soft passages in music or film. Ultimately, this is what makes the No. 25 the addiction it quickly becomes.
No. 25 has a heart of pure carbon, as we opted for a cone material that is stronger than steel, yet incredibly light. Carefully woven from pure carbon fibre, No. 25’s 15” cone structure weighs 70% less than a 10” cone of just two years ago. This combination of incredibly light weight coupled to remarkable structural integrity is what gives No. 25 its combination of speed and power.
Yet another benefit of the weight reduction strategy we employ is that it permits near-perfect dynamic balancing of the driver, yielding ideal behaviour throughout its incredible 4” of fore-and-aft stroke.
Begin your relationship with REL Reference by simply picking up the remote; feel its heft, how its rounded contours fit gently in the cup of your hand. This is a carefully wrought system improvement that encourages the sort of finely detailed decisions during set-up necessary to achieve the perfect balance to the ultimate system owner.
REL Reference models employ remote control in order to assist and increase ease of initial set-up. We do this knowing that once properly set, the owner will likely use it rarely during the remainder of their ownership experience as RELs truly can be set-up correctly to reproduce all forms of music and film without resorting to cheap parlour tricks like turning bass up for movies and down for music.
Specifications:
Type: Closed box, front firing woofer
Drive Unit: 100mm long throw, carbon fibre cone with inverted carbon fibre centre cap
LF Response in Room: -6 dB at 15 Hz
Input Connectors: High Level Neutrik Speakon, Low Level stereo RCA, LFE RCA, LFE XLR
Output Connectors: High Level Neutrik Speakon, LFE RCA, LFE XLR
Gain Control Range: 80 dB
Power Output: 1000 watts (RMS) Ultra High-Current Power Supply
Phase Switch: Yes, 0 or 180 degrees
Amplifier Type: Next Gen II Class D
Wireless Capability: Yes – REL Longbow™ transmitter [required] – sold separately
Mains Input Voltage: 220 – 240 volts
Dimensions: 540 (H) x 736.5 (W) x 762 (D) mm
Net Weight: 76 kg
Longbow Wireless Transmitter:
Introducing LongBow™, the easy-to-use, zero compression, ultra-high quality wireless system that frees your system from placement limitations imposed by conventional cables.
LongBow permits very fast, uncompressed bass to be sent wirelessly within the same room approximately 45 feet (somewhat dependent upon room clutter). Conventional wireless systems operate by hugely compressing the sound, shipping the compressed digital bitstream through the air and then expanding it back to its “original” form. The results are a noticeable lag in speed (engineers refer to this delay as latency) and an un-involving quality which often suffers from thinness. LongBow upgrades the digital pipeline from 16 bit to 24 bit, then ships over un-compressed 48kHz signals. Eliminating the compression/expansion chokepoint and using audiophile grade A/D encoders results in fast (typically about 80 percent faster than traditional Bluetooth or Wi-Fi systems) rich, natural bass.
Our engineers didn’t stop at creating the industry’s best-sounding wireless delivery system. The team developed LongBow with both high level AND .1 channel simultaneous delivery so that REL Theatre Reference performance can be maintained even when using our wireless delivery system. This approach produces the rich, natural, warm bass REL theatre systems are known for, along with the devastating punch of great .1 dynamics. Wirelessly. Shifting back and forth between music and film sound requires NO switching of inputs, altering subwoofer settings or the like.
Perfect Pair™ – most people find fiddling with computer pairing frustrating, so our designers tasked our engineers with reducing pairing to just two simple toggle switches. Total set-up time? About 10 seconds to enjoy high performance bass, freed from the restrictions of cables.