Subwoofer Reviews

Setup

For the left and right front channels, I placed two Minis on 28-inch-high stands about 16 inches from the wall behind them. For the surrounds, I placed two more of them on stands along the side walls, about 3 feet behind my listening chair.

I liked the rubbery bottom on the Minis; it kept them from sliding around on the tops of the stands. But I didn’t like the concealed speaker-cable binding posts. The posts are under the speaker, and you feed the two legs of the cable through a couple of little holes and then into the binding posts. It looks nice, but who looks behind your speakers? And few males have hands small enough to get an easy grip on the concealed posts.

The Imagine C center has a curved bottom, and PSB supplies an angled rubber foot to keep it from rocking. This does allow you to point the speaker up if it’s on a low stand. But the wedge was too big to allow the Imagine C to sit flat on my center speaker stands, so I ended up propping it up with big blobs of Blu-Tak adhesive.

No such problems with the SubSonic 1. I just put it in my room’s “subwoofer sweet spot,” the place where a single sub sounds best from my listening chair, and plugged it in.

What was more challenging was getting a good blend between the subwoofer and the other speakers. Unfortunately, PSB doesn’t list a recommended crossover point in the Imagine Mini manual, so you’re left to your best guess. I started at 100 Hz, a setting that I figured wouldn’t stress the speaker’s little woofers. This made voices sound a little too thin, though, so I settled on 80 Hz.

The PSB Imagine C comes with a port plug that can be inserted to change the bass response. I originally thought the Imagine C sounded a little better with the plug in, but this system ended up benefiting from the extra upper-bass energy produced by leaving the plug out.