Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

At this price, what you will find essentially is two types of introductory powered subwoofers: one is built for home theater, and one is built for listening to music. And this is fine, because there are basically two types of listeners: one who mostly wants to listen to music for home parties and such, and another who mostly wants to listen to blu ray movies with high fidelity sound. The subwoofer built for music will give you that "thump, thump, thump" bumping sound you hear when listening to hip hop or pop music. At the introductory level it will have more of a "one note" sound, but will have a kick to it. The subwoofer built for home theater will give you more of a crisp sound to it, which will allow you to hear movie special effects such earthquakes, lightening, explosions, trees falling, the "wop, wop, wop" of a helicopter, etc with high fidelity. The lower the volume is the higher quality the sound will be, and at the introductory level you will not get a kick to the "thump, thump" sound in music. This Yamaha subwoofer is clearly built for home theater. Why is that? For starters it's only 100 watts, and dynamically tuned so it starts out at only 45 watts. Also, it has Servo technology, which has a feedback mechanism to give you more crisp sound. Granted, it's not particularly advanced Servo tech, but nothing else even close to it's price range has Servo. The frequency response goes all the way down to 25hz, which means it can give you a lower tone than anything else in it's price range. It also has two input jacks in the back instead of one, and is of a relatively small size. Unlike most subwoofers, it is magnetically shielded so it can be used close to a TV. It only has two types of crossover setting's, with the recommended one being at 80 hz- which is ideal for home theater (where a sub made for music has variable crossover settings because crossover will be much more involved.) This kind of explains why there are two types of reviews for this product. Some people love it and some people hate it. If you are using it to listen to Dr Dre you are going to be disappointed, and you'd be better off with Onkyo's introductory sub or maybe even Polk's. But, if you are listening to a Transformers movie on Blu Ray with a 5.1 or 7.1 sound system, you will be blown away. If you want a sub that can do both movies and music well you will need to step up in price (HSU or SVS comes highly recommended on message boards.) Also, I know this has been beaten to death but speaker placement will make a huge difference in subwoofer sound quality. Speaker placement will make or break any subwoofer because of the ways the soundwaves bounce around and can cancel each other out. Like others here, I wish it had an auto on/off feature, but it wasn't a deal breaker. I just leave it on all the time.