# GoldenEar Secures Patent for Dual-Plane Inertially Balanced Technology



## Todd Anderson (Jul 24, 2009)

Sandy Gross is legend in the audio industry and a driving force behind cutting-edge speaker technologies that have delighted ears for decades. His latest (and newly patented) innovation called “Dual-Plane Inertially Balanced Technology” has proven to be impactful on both design and performance fronts, and GoldenEar Technology has wasted no time putting it to good use in a new line of impactful subs (dubbed SuperSubs) that require relatively small amounts of floor space. 

Last year’s SuperSub XXL ($2000) blew-up the low frequency landscape with an extraordinarily manageable form factor and tremendous performance output. I had an opportunity to hear it in action during CEDIA 2015 and left thoroughly impressed with the its controlled ferocity and build quality. This year, GoldenEar unveiled a second version called SuperSub X ($1250). According to Gross, the X version was born as a result of knowledge gained from designing and manufacturing the XXL. The SuperSub X is insanely small (12-3/4-inch (H) x 14-in (W) x 13-1/4-in (D) cabinet), but dishes out quality deep bass in spades; I was absolutely floored by its size and performance during a demo session at CEDIA 2016.

These subs are the real deal, folks, and their room-friendly cabinet sizes make them very desirable from an aesthetic and functional placement point of view.










Both the X and XXL are built around a “dual-plane inertially balanced” design that features force cancelling dual opposed drivers flanked by upward and downward facing passive radiators. GoldenEar says this force-cancelling inertial-balancing "preserves, conserves, and focuses all the energy produced by the transducers in order to effectively move the air in the room (rather than the box), as well as enabling full recovery of the finest details, rather than allowing loss and blurring due to wasted box movement.” A simplified translation is that the subs’ cabinets are rendered incredibly inert, even when taken to full volume. During CEDIA 2015, Gross demonstrated the XXL's inert nature by resting a nickel on its edge on top of the cabinet. The nickel never fell as demo sessions pushed the sub to high levels of performance.

The newly patented technology also affords the subs’ driver positions couple to different room standing wave patterns, making a single SuperSub nearly the equivalent of having two separate subwoofers. in addition, GoldenEar says the design’s downward facing passive radiator couples acoustic energy to the floor without injecting vibrations or movement into the cabinet.

The Abstract of the patent reads as follows: 

_A speaker system, particularly useful as a subwoofer, comprises an enclosure with one acoustic transducer facing to the right and one acoustic transducer facing to the left, which effectively cancels out transducer cone mass induced vibration within the enclosure. The enclosure also has one passive radiator facing up and one passive radiator facing down. The passive radiator facing down effectively couples acoustic energy at very low frequencies into the floor. The passive radiators each have a rather large area and high mass. The large, high mass, bottom mounted passive radiator will produce large amounts of enclosure vibration, and so to cancel this vibration, the upper passive radiator is of substantially the same mass and size. The resulting system will be vibrationally balanced on all axes, while simultaneously effectively coupling low frequency energy onto the floor of the listening room with good efficiency._

For more information about GoldenEar’s SuperSub lineup, visit www.goldenear.com.


_Image Credits: GoldenEar Technology_


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## JimShaw (Apr 30, 2012)

Boy, I would love to hear XXL.

Also the PB16-ultra

Todd, are you considering testing the above two in the near future?

Fine review of the GoldenEar subs!




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## theJman (Mar 3, 2012)

It's rather disturbing that a company could get a patent on something this common. Dual opposed subwoofers are certainly not new, nor are passive radiators, so how a combination of the two even qualified for consideration is baffling. You're only supposed to be awarded a patent for something completely unique or novel. Close derivatives of long established designs - or mashups of things that have existed for decades - shouldn't qualify. Given this, I wonder if someone will now be able to patent a subwoofer that has ports firing from both the front and rear of the cabinet. Seems as though it would be about as unique.


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## Todd Anderson (Jul 24, 2009)

theJman said:


> It's rather disturbing that a company could get a patent on something this common. Dual opposed subwoofers are certainly not new, nor are passive radiators, so how a combination of the two even qualified for consideration is baffling. You're only supposed to be awarded a patent for something completely unique or novel. Close derivatives of long established designs - or mashups of things that have existed for decades - shouldn't qualify. Given this, I wonder if someone will now be able to patent a subwoofer that has ports firing from both the front and rear of the cabinet. Seems as though it would be about as unique.


You're not the only one to hold that opinion, Jim. It certainly has created a wave across forum-sphere. My best guess is the uniqueness is predicated on the vertical orientation of the passive radiators. Ultimately, we'll have to see how the patent holds. What I do know is that the SuperSubs are heavy hitters. We need to get one in your hands so can deliver a full review!


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## theJman (Mar 3, 2012)

It's pretty unlikely I'll ever get my hands on one of them. I actually tried to get a ForceField 5 over 3 years ago, but that ultimately proved to be an exercise in futility. Email exchanges between myself and Sandy initially went OK, but then things got rather bumpy. For whatever reason all communication abruptly stopped; no more replies to emails, no longer answered my calls, no response to voice mails. Everything just dropped off a cliff. To this day I'm still not sure why.


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## willis7469 (Jan 31, 2014)

Jman, I'll sign a petition!!!


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