If you’re a fan of action movies or dance music, you’ll probably be familiar with sub-bass. The moment in those James Bond explosions that thuds through your chest in the movie theatre? That’s the product of a large subwoofer, a tuned pipe housing a speaker working somewhere just above the lower limit of human hearing, in the tens of Hz.

But what about sound below the range of human hearing, below 20Hz? You can’t directly hear infrasound, but its presence can have a significant effect on the experience of the listener. [Mike Michaud] was interested in this phenomenon for his home movie setup so built himself an infrasonic subwoofer tuned to 17Hz. Since the resulting cabinet was rather large he disguised it as a vintage UK police telephone box that you’d hardly notice in his basement theater. 

A resonant 17Hz speaker horn is a rather inconvenient size for a home theatre, at about 25 feet long. Fortunately there is no need for the horm to be straight, it can be folded into a more convenient enclosure, and that is what [Mike] has done. He used a design published by [lilmike], which folds the horn three times into a more manageable size.

Speaker cabinet construction requires attention to the choice of materials as well as to the driver unit itself, so [Mike] goes into detail on the materials he rejected and his selection of a particular brand of subfloor ply.

He rates the resulting speaker as incredible. His driver is rated for 500 watts but he only has an amplifier capable of serving 100, even with that power he fears for his basement windows. He describes the noise made by the feet of the robots in War Of The Worlds as “little earthquakes” and the general effect as very menacing.

We’ve featured quite a few subwoofers on Hackaday over the years, though with the exception of this rotary device they have mostly been for more conventional sub-bass applications. Here for example is another folded horn. So if sub has become rather run-of-the-mill for you all, how about using it to be entertained by this vortex cannon?