Speed limit 60. The maker's specs for my mini monitors say 65Hz. My room bears this out. Grizzly? Not with a sub. Alas, the Dynaudio S18 here isn't a cardioid but typical omni radiator. That involves all room boundaries equally. It means maximum reflective returns. Translation? It's clearly slower, fatter and bloomier than the ground floor's big sound|kaos. Think wildly more room than direct sound. As theoretical foresight predicted and practical hindsight confirmed, less not more omni bandwidth coming off dual force-cancelling sealed 9½" woofers was cleaner. Giving the sub a full octave less to play with was decidedly better. Rather than 120Hz which I tried first, i ended up with 6dB in at 60Hz. The speakers covered their full potential bandwidth but still were blind to anything below. They experienced no stress from demands they can't handle. That's an active high-pass filter's whole point after all.

In belly-up mode for easy access to the four filter freq sliders, the display auto inverts to be right-side up again.

Here going down not up was the winning ticket; twenty cycles lower than my previous fixed 80Hz value. It was the exact opposite from the big system which delighted in more not less sub cover. What was good for the gander the goose shat on. Ripol and conventional bass had opposite preferences. The new Gradient Box simply shrugged its shoulders and adapted. Its remote-controlled LP attenuator can fine-tune the sub's output beyond its own manual setting by ±12dB from the seat. 'Bypass' runs the speakers full range to enable instant with/out-sub A/B during speaker reviews. FlexiFi.

Once the freqs had been decided on, the box stood on its rubber bumpers again, sliders hidden away out of sight. Its big display is easily legible from the seat.

Sometimes obeying the 60km/hr speed limit is the smarter play even in Hertz. It's back at having full control over multiple options. It's why designer Pál Nagy calls this a smart crossover. It makes anything less, well, cough… must I really spell it out? Finally, did I mention that subwoofer phase, subwoofer mono/stereo, A/B filter freqs, display brightness, night mode, standby, +3dB or +6dB/20Hz and RCA/XLR inputs all switch by remote? The Gradient Box double-teams as a quite loaded two-input preamplifier. Its all-analog signal path packs 0.5% precision Susumu thin-film resistors, ultra low-noise BurrBrown input FET operational amplifiers and metallized polypropylene-film capacitors matched to 1%. It's really rather the package and me a happy punter. Never mind that Pál's website still doesn't show it. This problem solver is real, available and hot to trot. Of course if there's no demand, you'd expect it to go away, eventually. In which case, snooze to lose. Having secured two units, on smart xovering I'm all set no matter what. Global warming is a whole other thing. Nobody knows what the next few years will bring…