My Sub Is Bigger Than the Box His Whole Home Theatre Came In

I'll start with the setup, because it's the whole point of this post.

A 12 inch Mobile Authority sub.

Two random speakers.

One Chinese-made amp, the ZK MT-21.

All of it together didn't get past 10k.

And let you know, this thing rocks the entire house.

I'm low-key a professional upstairs neighbour.

The challenge

A friend of mine came over talking about his brand new home theatre.

He was confident.

He said it could go blow for blow with my DIY system.

Now, to be fair to him, he's rocking a Sony DAV-TZ140.

It's no slouch. It's a real system from a real brand, in a real box, with a real warranty.

But come on.

My sub is bigger than the box his whole system came in.

That's not a spec. That's just a fact.

The setup

The DIY rig isn't complicated.

Source (Bluetooth / aux)
          │
          ▼
     ZK MT-21 amp
      │         │
      ▼         ▼
 2 speakers   12" sub

The amp is the interesting part.

It's a cheap Chinese board-style amp, and it has Bluetooth and aux built in.

The amp cost 1,500 bob.

That's it. That's the brain of the whole system.

The rest of the money went where it matters for this kind of sound: the 12 inch driver.

A big driver can move a lot more air than the tiny drivers packed into an all-in-one box. Nothing fancy, just physics.

The playlist

We didn't just play one song and argue about it.

We picked tracks that stress a system in different ways: deep sub-bass, heavy 808s, and vocals that go low enough to embarrass small speakers.

Here's what we ran:

1. Wine and Kotch by J Capri
2. Napoleon by $uicideBoy$
3. M.A.A.D City by Kendrick Lamar
4. Big John by Geoff Castellucci
5. In My Room by Frank Ocean
6. Where Have You Been by POODEE
7. No Hands by Waka Flocka Flame
8. A Milli by Lil Wayne
9. Stoned by Kahu$h

Notice the range.

Trap and drill bass. A West Coast classic. A bass vocalist that goes way down there. Some smoother stuff in the middle to check the mids weren't total mud.

If a system can only handle one of those, you find out fast.

The verdict

By the end of it, he came around.

He accepted that sometimes DIY is better than bought.

Not always. I'm not saying throw away your store-bought system.

But when someone tells you a 1,500 bob amp and a big sub can't compete with a boxed system, it's worth running the test.

The lesson isn't really about audio.

It's the same lesson as everything else I build.

Buying a finished product gets you a finished product.

Building it yourself gets you exactly what you care about, at the price you can afford.

I cared about bass.

So I put the money into bass.

A note to my neighbours

I'm a responsible neighbour.

We ran this test on a weekday at 12pm, when most people aren't home.

And to anyone who was home and heard it through the walls: sorry. That was us.

The good news is you now know what the neighbours upstairs are listening to.