Issue 80 / January 2003
Loudspeakers: Alón Thunderbolt
This is one of the very best subwoofers, and also one of the best bargains in subwoofers. Its bass is deep and powerful enough to be used impressively in a home theater application (e.g. with Alón's own Lotus Elite), and its bass is also accurate enough to be used seamlessly in a critical music listening environment (e.g. to supplement the Exotica's bass).
Selling at just $1695 (per channel, including dedicated amp), the Thunderbolt has the moxie to shake your house better than most other subwoofers, and as well as powerful subwoofers selling for several times its price. That already makes the Thunderbolt a bargain. But where the Thunderbolt really outshines other subwoofers is in the high quality of its bass. Most other subwoofers, even some expensive ones, are one note boomers, with poor musical definition, and also excessive temporal overhang that actually obscures the rest of your music that follows in the shadow of each bass transient. In contrast, the Thunderbolt has excellent definition. As it accurately tracks each musical bass transient, it follows the breathing of that bass note, without imposing lingering colorations or obscuring boominess of its own. It is a revelation to hear music's bass energy revealed with such full power, yet with such intimately revealing finesse.
For example, when you hear a live large orchestral bass drum hit, you first feel the dramatic kick in your stomach, and then you can hear the drumhead breathe as it vibrates in and out after the initial hit. The Alón Thunderbolt lets you hear and track each pulse of this live drumhead breathing, and thus makes the drum bass much more realistic than other subwoofers that obscure this natural live breathing with their own lingering one note boom. We're reminded of the sound of the Citation 16 power amp, which had a unique bass quality that no other amp has ever quite replicated. True, live musical bass transients are at once full yet also dry and tight, at once powerfully impactive yet also delicately defined. The Citation 16 captured this elusive combination of live bass properties just right, and so now does the Thunderbolt.
The Thunderbolt employs a 12 inch driver, with very heavy duty construction but with a very light cone. This combination allows the power amp to control the driver more precisely, to achieve the high definition bass (and it also increases driver efficiency, thus giving the power amp more dynamic headroom for powerful bass). The bass response is rated as extending down to 24 Hz, as abetted by a vented enclosure. Most other vented enclosures degrade bass quality, since their steeper cutoff slopes in the frequency domain imply worse ringing overhang (hence poorer definition) in the time domain. After hearing such high quality bass definition from the Thunderbolt's vented enclosure, we would guess that the port tuning is deliberately broadband, which technically is a mistuning according to the Thiele-Small textbook, but which actually in practice yields better quality bass and also more impactively impressive bass, because the port response has much less of a peaked, steep sloped character than the official Thiele-Small port tunings do (we discussed this topic and showed corroborating measurements in IAR issue 35).
To get high power, deep bass and also high quality bass usually requires a very large bass enclosure, but, as subwoofers go, the Thunderbolt is quite modest in size (16 x 16 x 20). That makes this subwoofer product a quadruple winner. Convenient size, bargain price, powerful deep bass, and outstanding musical bass quality. Whatever the brand of your main speakers, the Alón Thunderbolt is a subwoofer you need to try with them.