CES 2014

At the CES Unveiled event last night, Prescient Audio showed a new super-slim 12-inch woofer for use in car audio, DIY projects and the company's upcoming line of freestanding and in-wall subwoofers.

The driver has 11mm of linear excursion (or Xmax) in each direction, which means it can, as subwoofer enthusiasts put it, "move a lot of air." Yet at just 2.25 inches deep and 8.1 pounds, the woofer's roughly a third the depth and weight of a typical high-performance 12-incher. A company rep told me the driver's compact configuration allows the use of a smaller enclsoure without sacrificing performance.

So how'd they do it? By using what the company calls the "largest voice coil in the world." As with a dome tweeter, the voice coil's at the outer edge of the driver. The coil is suspended in a large, ring-shaped magnet (the silvery part you see on the raw driver at left).

Prescient Audio is currently developing a line of subwoofers to be launched in Q2 of this year. The see-thru show model in the picture ywill be offered in a standard MDF enclosure, likely with a 1,000-watt amplifier built in, and will measure about 14 by 14 by 8 inches. There'll also be a square-shaped in-wall model in its own 36 by 14 by 3 inch enclosure.