Aaron SW-200
Active Subwoofer
Aaron’s
smaller
subwoofer
proves very
competitive at
the price
By Gavin Womersley
Audio & Video Lifestyle Magazine
68
audition
equipment review
V i t a l S t a t i s t i c s
Dimensions:
315 x 445 x 460mm
Weight:
23kg
Price:
$999
Distributor:
Betetec Industries Pty Ltd
17 De Havilland Crescent
Ballina, NSW 2478
Telephone:
(02) 6686 0277
Facsimile:
(03) 6686 0285
Website:
www.aaronhifi.com.au
T
hese days, m
ost people
are aware that being
‘Australian’ is a fairly
loose term when it
comes to manufactured
goods. Does it mean
that the company was
founded here, or does it mean that the
goods are made within our boundaries
or that ownership of the company is
wholly Australian? Many of the
manufacturers of the products I have
reviewed are widely regarded as
Australian, but in fact only an
increasingly shrinking number of them
are actually being made here.
Aaron loudspeakers, based in sunny
Ballina on the northern NSW coast, is
one of those companies that still
manufactures locally. The 25 year-old
company is Australian owned and all
engineering, testing and some of its
manufacturing is performed at the
Ballina factory. While many Aaron
products are still made here, the
subwoofer for review here is assembled
in China. The design and engineering
and choice of components are all done
here though, so you can still call the
SW-200 subwoofer an Australian
product.
The SW-200 is the smaller of
Aaron’s two new active subwoofers, the
other being the larger SW-400 which we
recently reviewed in
Audio & Video
Lifestyle
magazine, issue AVL-145. It
features a single 10-inch (265mm) long-
throw driver with a very large 3kg
magnet. Powering the driver is a 150
watt continuous class B amplifier. The
SW-200 is ported at the rear with one
large port designed to minimise the
‘chuffing’ created by rapidly moving air
as it exits the cabinet. Aaron states that
the enclosure is well braced and uses
cabinet walls of varying thickness,
designed to minimise the cabinet
resonances at certain frequencies. Pretty
much anything will resonate at the right
frequency but if the device is made with
walls of varying thickness the
resonances should be far less significant
as only one part of the enclosure may
resonate at a certain frequency rather
than the whole unit. The subwoofer’s
exterior appears of good quality with
the review sample coming in a high-
Reproduced courtesy of Audio & Video Lifestyle magazine
