When long time forum supporter, publishing king, and general Pro Audio Industry guru Mark Herman suggested he would be able to get me a pair of "these crazy McCauley super subs that you have to hear" I naturally expressed interest. At the time I had a little too much on my plate, but I let the idea germinate in the back of my head until I thought we were at the right point in time to start Test Drive up, something Mark and I had been discussing ever since it was apparent SoundForums.net was going to be successful. Mark put me in touch with Daniel Casado over at McCauley so we could talk.
On the phone with Daniel, I explained what the idea behind Test Bench was going to be and expressed interest in having the M421s in time for the 2011 SFN Expo. I was warned about two things: Don't try and use this subwoofer in too small a room, and make sure there is nothing to rattle off shelves. The former doesn't really make sense to me, but as someone who is used to big low end I have experienced the latter and expected to experience it with a sub claiming 1m calculated output of 155dB! I assured Daniel that I would be using the M421, which he was going to supply a pair of along with Lab.Gruppen FP14000 power and associated cabling, in all sorts of rooms as well as outdoors. Satisfied, apparently, Daniel and I made shipping arrangements to deliver the cabinets and amplifiers to Asbury Audio in New Jersey, a company I do a lot of work for and a company in a convenient location to move the cabinets on to other providers once I was done playing.
[ATTACH]155966[/ATTACH]To familiarize you, the M421 is an approximately 23"x72"x44" cabinet weighing 486lbs. A beast to be sure, but I was promised it would be an easy two man move. Casters are attached to the rear of the enclosure, generous handles are provided all around, and the sides are covered in "interlocking skids" that appear to be teflon or some other slick composite material. The paint, they call it "weather and wear resistant ProCoat™ polyurea hybrid finish", is excellent... rough, but not so much it takes your skin off. The skids keep most of the wear off the paint, and the finish seems to take a lot of abuse. The damage from the box's trip up from Texas is all chunks of wood removed, not much finish damage.
Inside the box are four 6" voicecoil 21" cone neodymium magnet drivers "custom made for McCauley by another company". I am familiar with the driver from "another company" that these are based on, and it is absolutely state of the art. Each is capable of eating up 6KW peak power according to the input panel on the subwoofer. The same input panel claims 2KW AES power, and the spec sheet says 3KW. The whole box is rated for 12KW continuous, 24KW peak so I guess the 3KW per driver number is the one to take seriously. In any case, the box can (and probably should) take power from the largest amplifiers on the market today. The drivers are arranged isobarically, and then coupled to an "FEA optimized acoustic transformer", or a horn to you and me.
Frequency response is claimed as 20Hz - 85Hz -3dB, and 16Hz to 120Hz -10dB. That is an extremely impressive specification, and achieving those sorts of numbers passively even in a box this size is a Big Deal™. Maximum output is stated as 143dB peak measured at 4m, probably to avoid the effects of the cabinet's size on the measurement. That number back-calculates to 155dB at 1m which is crazy loud. Just one or two of these cabinets ought to be able to handle thousands of people for most any genre, and with that kind of power density scaling up to arena performance is child's play.
