Audio designer Roberto Dell Curti has built a subwoofer that does not shake the room. Rather, the room is part of the horn subwoofer, and no doubt it can shake the whole house. Underneath his impressive home theater setup, the ground has been excavated and in its place two horn channels 21 feet long running 3 feet deep give home to the beast labeled the Real Total Horn. Each channel is powered by eight 18 inch woofers, giving a total of 16 woofers that are pumping thousands watts of energy into the massive sound chambers.
Is it effective? Well, the biggest horn sub in the world can hit lows down to 10Hz, and create a virtual wave of sound energy while doing it. And if at some point we read that Italy has broken off from the mainland and floated away, I think we might know the reason why.
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The First Subwoofer
The first subwoofer was developed during the 1960s by Ken Kreisel, the former president of the Miller & Kreisel Sound Corporation in Los Angeles. When Kreisel's business partner, Jonas Miller, who owned a high-end audio store in Los Angeles, told Kreisel that some purchasers of the store's high-end electrostatic speakers had complained about a lack of bass response in the electrostatics, Kreisel designed a powered woofer that would reproduce only those frequencies that were too low for the electrostatic speakers to convey. Infinity's full range electrostatic speaker system that was developed during the 1960s also used a woofer to cover the lower frequency range that its electrostatic arrays did not handle adequately.
The first use of a subwoofer in a recording session was in 1973 for mixing the Steely Dan album Pretzel Logic when recording engineer Roger Nichols arranged for Kreisel to bring a prototype of his subwoofer to Village Recorders. Further design modifications were made by Kreisel over the next ten years, and in the 1970s and 1980s by engineer John P. D'Arcy; record producer Daniel Levitin served as a consultant and "golden ears" for the design of the crossover network (used to partition the frequency spectrum so that the subwoofer would not attempt to reproduce frequencies too high for its effective range, and so that the main speakers would not need to handle frequencies too low for their effective range)
source: wikipedia