My wife and I enjoy entertaining friends in our home from time to time. Since I've spent countless hours over the past year renovating my house, I really enjoy showing it off. When we have our friends over, it's almost comical how we all try to one up each other with tales of our newest cars or latest electronics. It's never mean spirited and I rarely come out on top because most of my friends are very successful well-off people with plenty of gadgets, but I had a secret weapon laying in wait at a recent barbecue. While everyone was riveted by my Mitsubishi WS-65611 65-inch HDTV as they watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, there was a monster in the corner that caught them off guard.

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The creature lurking in the corner was a new Canton AS50 subwoofer that I had standing by to impress to my friends. With the flip of a power switch, the thing came to life and added a new dimension to my home theater. The demonstration during Harry Potter was a huge success and gave me a sense of pride in my home theater.

Unique Features
The AS50 is a new import to America from German loudspeaker company Canton. The speaker has been heralded in Europe and, after an upgrade, it was delivered stateside this past January. The sub enclosure is constructed of a one-inch thick medium density fiberboard for maximum suppression of cabinet vibrations and comes in either a subtle black matte finish or a more prominent beech wood and silver combination. The hefty little bass reflex box has a forward firing 12-inch subwoofer mounted above a port on the front panel with all connections and controls at home in the rear. Controls for volume level, phase adjustment and a variable crossover frequency are placed high on the cabinet's rear panel for straightforward access when fine-tuning is required. The AS50 also has a power button and toggle switch to choose between a constant powered on state or standby mode where the subwoofer awaits an audio signal before coming to life.

The AS in AS50 stands for Active Subwoofer and it comes packaged with a 100-watt amplifier and crossover system able to reach frequencies down to the threshold of human hearing, about 20 Hz. Canton included their exclusive SC Technology in the subwoofer, which uses computer aided analysis and an active electronic filter to optimize the transmission range. The SC circuitry adjusts the amplifier's response curve to compensate for the driver and its housing for optimum linearity. The result is an ideal response across the frequency range and limited over excursion. The efficiency of the design translates into a heavier load with increased clarity. In other words, it has more bass and less distortion.

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