Packs a Lot of Low Bass Into a Compact Cabinet
NHT's B-12d 500-watt subwoofer packs a lot of low bass performance into a compact 14" cabinet. It's an ideal affordable high-end powered subwoofer for home theater and stereo music systems. The B-12b combines 23 years of speaker building know-how with NHT's best subwoofer technologies to deliver huge sonic bang for the buck.
Acoustic Suspension Design
The B-10d is an acoustic suspension system, which means that the box itself is sealed with no ports or holes that could compromise the sound. Acoustic suspension systems use the air trapped in the enclosure to control and damp the speaker’s movement, a bit like the shocks on a car. Many other speakers use vented enclosures, which rely on the speaker’s mechanical suspension and a tuba-like 'port' to produce deep bass. While these designs can sounds pretty great when properly designed, NHT believes that an acoustic suspension design delivers lower distortion, higher power handling, and tighter deep bass tones.
Very Compact Design
The B-12d powered subwoofer is a fairly compact 14" cube that's barely bigger than the 12" driver contained within. The size of the sonic impact on your system is more like a 48" cube; this thing sounds HUGE! Like all NHT Classic speakers, the B-12d comes beautifully wrapped in NHT’s signature 10-coat piano gloss black finish. The B-12d’s cabinet has no holes or ports that can interact with its surroundings making it ok to put it wherever it fits in your space (wall unit we’re looking at you.) It comes with four cool aluminum tippy-toes to keep it anchored to the subfloor when doing its thing on carpeted floors. NHT also include four rubber pads to keep it in place on slippery hardwood or polished concrete floors.
Inside the B-12d
There’s more technology and processing power inside the B-12d powered subwoofer than there was in Apollo 11. NHT uses a bone-crushing 500-watt BASH PWM (Class D) amplifier design with dedicated switching power supply. Unlike traditional amplifiers, the B-12d’s super-efficient design converts just about all of the electricity coming from your wall outlet to bass, instead of wasting it as heat, so you can rock out and stay green at the same time.
The speaker itself is a 12" long-throw, pulp cone design with a heavy-duty butyl rubber surround. Both the cone and the massive motor structure it’s attached to were custom designed by NHT specifically for the B-12d. This massive woofer creates some very high pressure inside the B-12d’s sealed enclosure, so NHT lined the interior cabinet walls with a 1mm thick sheet of aluminum to help hold everything together and eliminate any trace of cabinet vibrations.
The real voodoo can be found in the B-12d 's dedicated DSP engine. The DSP engine controls everything including a phase perfect equalizer for flat bass response and 24 dB octave low and high pass signal filters to keep out unwanted frequencies. NHT implemented a digital compressor and limiter in the DSP to maximize output and minimize any overload danger at the same time. Also in the B-10d’s DSP is a unique feature called DRC (Dynamic Range Control) that dynamically controls the amplifier current at all speaker impedances to insure that the B-12d slams at all bass frequencies. No rulers, microphones or math. NHT engineers have expertly programmed everything at the factory. As a result the B-10d subwoofer goes lower and plays louder with way better control than any 12" sub NHT has ever built.
Connections and Controls
It’s easy to integrate the B-12d with your current stereo or surround sound setup. The B-12d has LFE inputs for your receiver’s sub out, line inputs for your fancy two-channel integrated amp, and even an LFE out so you can cleverly add another B-12d in case you move to bigger digs or decide to get carried away on bass waves. There's a phase control for matching the output of your subwoofer with your main speakers, and the NHT exclusive Boundary control. This control lets you electronically 'move' the subwoofer where it sounds the best without physically moving it in your room.
An automatic power mode allows the B-12d to turn itself on and off when it hears a signal from your system or select "Always on" if you switch the power remotely. The B-10d 's smart, switching power supply automatically adjusts to deliver its full output anywhere in the world on a diet of 100v to 240v at 50 or 60Hz.
The Sound Quality
Like all NHT subwoofers the B-12d upholds the long-standing reputation of being musical and natural while playing either music or movies. It is tight, controlled, articulate, fast, deep and downright scary when the soundtrack demands it. If you’re shopping for a subwoofer that will seamlessly blend into your system, completely disappear most of the time, not dominate your room and always fool you into thinking all the sound is coming from your main speakers. | 
