SVS PB-2000 Pro Ported Subwoofer Review

While SVS has a wide range of audio products available, they are best known for their core business of subwoofers. They have five different tiers of subwoofer lines ranging from $500 models to $2,500 models. Ever since the release of their top dog 16-Ultra series, they have had an annual refresh of progressively lower lines of subs, aided by incorporating the technology developed for the 16-Ultras. We have followed this evolution of their subwoofers with reviews of at least one of their refreshes since the debut of the 16-Ultras from the 4000 series to the 3000 series, and now we have arrived at the 2000 series refresh with the launch of the SVS 2000 Pro subwoofers. In for review today, we have the PB-2000 Pro. The PB-2000 Pro isn’t just the PB-2000 with a few new bells and whistles; it is a total redesign. It has very little in common with the previous PB-2000 and features a new driver, new amplifier, new enclosure, and also a new price in a $100 increase. The question we will be asking with today’s review is how improved is the PB-2000 Pro over the PB-2000: is it just slightly better? $100 better? Or is it a major improvement in all areas? Let’s dig in to find out…

Appearance  

Appearance-wise, not a whole lot has changed from the PB-2000 to the PB-2000 Pro. Pretty much the only significant visual changes are that there are two ports on the front baffle instead of one, and the Pro uses a fabric grille instead of a sheet metal grille. The PB-2000 Pro is a fairly basic subwoofer enclosure, and SVS tried to make it more appealing by using a black ash woodgrain veneer on it and rounding the lateral edges. That does make it look a touch classier or at least a bit more interesting than a plain black box. The move to a fabric grille from a metal grille is a step up, aesthetically speaking. The metal grille of the previous 2000 model had more heft and did a lot more to offer protection for the front baffle, but it also made the overall appearance look a bit more industrial, and it wasn’t all that attractive. The fabric grille simply hides the driver and ports discreetly. 

The PB-2000 Pro is not a huge sub but it isn’t a small one either (by Audioholics’ standards, at least). If other household members are fussy about the furniture and interior design, it may not be able to have a place in an elegant living room setting. It isn’t an offensive piece and should be OK by more relaxed interior design standards. Since the PB-2000 Pro occupies a middle territory in both size and aesthetics, it is something that will be highly subjective on an individual basis. The PB-2000 Pro is not a bad looking sub as subwoofers go, but it isn’t quite beautiful either. Its appearance is very much in line with its product class. It looks fine.

Design Analysis

The design of the PB-2000 Pro is a lot like a slightly smaller version of the PB-3000. It has the same cabinet and amplifier design (albeit with less power), same operating modes, and the same user interface. The most significant difference seems to be the driver, where the PB-3000 looks to have a beefier driver, which is no surprise in a more expensive subwoofer. To go over the basics, the PB-2000 Pro is a vented subwoofer that has front-mounted ports and driver. It is natively a ported subwoofer but comes with port plugs and a DSP setting to be operated as a sealed sub as well. The PB-2000 Pro powers a 12” driver with a 550-watt RMS amplifier and uses two ports to augment low bass. For a more detailed look, let’s talk about the driver to start with, since it looks to be the most novel component here.

The previous 2000 series subs used drivers that were based on the Peerless XXLS platform, but the 2000 Pro line seems to be taking a new direction. The aluminum cone looks to be similar along with the double stack of ¾” thick magnets, but the top plate looks slightly different, and SVS now uses a stamped steel basket instead of cast aluminum. While stamped steel is normally thought of as an inferior basket compared to cast aluminum, the thickness of the steel in the 2000 Pro is substantial, so it could well be that SVS has been able to shed the cost of cast aluminum without also shedding its advantages as a basket material. Regarding the cone, aluminum is advantageous as a cone material not only for its lightweight and high stiffness, but it can act as a heatsink for rising temperatures from the voice coil. The cone attaches to the fixed pieces of the driver by a Nomex spider and large rubber-foam surround. The motor uses an aluminum shorting ring in order to reduce inductance thereby improving linearity. The backplate is bumped out for higher excursions before reaching mechanical limits.  

The Class-D amplifier now uses discrete 25 amp 600-volt MOSFETs along with the same 50 MHz Analog Devices DSP with 56-bit filtering that is found in SVS’s higher-end subs. It has been given a small 50-watt bump over previous 2000 series subs. The PB-2000 Pro has right/left and LFE RCA inputs as well as RCA outs in case you want to daisy chain the signal to some other device. It also has a USB input to power an SVS Wireless Audio Adapter for those who want to go wireless. As with SVS’s higher-end subs, you can control the PB-2000 Pro with the SVS Subwoofer Control app on either iOS, Andriod, and Amazon Fire devices.  With SVS’s Subwoofer Control App, the user can control the volume down to a single dB of precision, low-pass filter behavior from 30 Hz to 200 Hz down to individual hertz frequency precision and also with a choice of slopes of 6, 12, 18, and 24 dB/ octave, phase control from 0° to 180° selectable down to individual degrees (or you can just flip the polarity from positive to negative), room gain compensation response curve selectable from 25 Hz, 31 Hz, or 40 Hz with a choice of a 12 or 6 dB/ octave slope (this is very handy for taming low-end boominess for those who get a lot of room gain), and port tuning configurations. One neat thing that is especially easy to use with the SVS app is a 3-band parametric equalizer with which the user can adjust the bass response to their taste. It can also help tame peaks in the response that are produced by room acoustics. The PB-2000 Pro’s onboard control is the same ‘Intelligent Control Interface’ that was used in the 3000 series. It is fairly sleek and intuitive.

The PB-2000 Pro’s cabinet uses ¾” MDF for side panels and bracing with a 1 ½” thick front baffle. There are two window braces within the cabinet: one that supports the driver motor and one that supports the ports. Each port has a 3” diameter and extends pretty far back in the cabinet with flaring on both ends. The interior of the sub is lined with a thick layer of foam damping material. The feet are some wide plastic cones that probably wouldn’t be a good idea to set on a hardwood floor without some protection. The grille adheres to the front baffle with some rubber-coated grille guides; I had a difficult time trying to re-attach the grille back on the sub since the rubber grille guides kept on catching the plastic grille pegs. SVS might consider switching to plastic grille guides and metal pegs for an easier and more durable grille installation.  

While the PB-2000 Pro is a redesign of the 2000 subwoofer series, it is not at all a radical departure from anything that SVS has been doing recently. It is mostly a redesign with engineering cues taken from SVS’s higher-end subs. It is not surprising or unexpected but it is reassuring since these are proven good techniques for making a sub as we have seen in reviews of newer generation SVS subwoofers. Let’s see how this design formula plays out in practice by listening to the PB-2000 Pro…

Listening Sessions

The best placement for a single sub in my room gives me a relatively flat response for an un-EQ’d single subwoofer, with a window of +/- 4 dB from 25 Hz to 100 Hz with no broad dips in important ranges. This location trades low-end room gain for a relatively flat response, a worthwhile trade for my tastes. The receiver used was a Pioneer Elite SC-55 and the crossover was used mostly at 80 Hz. The music was sourced from Qobuz. As always, I will note here that since room acoustics have a huge effect on low frequencies, the way these subwoofers sound in my room at my listening position is not necessarily going to be the way they sound anywhere else for anyone else, so readers would do well to keep that in mind, and not just for this subwoofer in this review, but for any subwoofer in any review.

Music Listening

Famed prodigy organist Felix Hell (which is his Germanic birth name, not a stage name) can always be counted on for a lively pipe organ performance, and for an acoustic recording that actually uses subwoofer-band frequencies, I selected an album of his entitled ‘Heroic Proportions: Selected Works for Organ’. This album is a mixture of compositions old and new from composers from the USA and parts of Europe. I am not sure what unifies these selections or what criteria were used in their selection, but Hell performs them with his characteristic dexterity and enthusiasm, so anyone looking for a nice organ rendition of Bach BWV 552 or Barber’s Adagio ought to give this album a look. This recording was performed on the St. Mark Lutheran Church Organ in Hanover, Pennsylvania, a massive organ with 14,470 pipes and 238 ranks.  

Some pipe organ recordings place a lot of emphasis on the lower notes and others go for a balanced approach or perhaps go easy on deep bass. ‘Heroic Proportions’ brings out the deep bass, and the PB-2000 Pro proved to be a good match for the lower registers recorded here. The bass wasn’t so elevated that it became dominant though, and the PB-2000 Pro managed to provide a strong foundation without overpowering higher frequency content. Now, of course that has a lot to do with system calibration as well as the recording, but the subwoofer itself is a necessary ingredient in that recipe in that it should respond evenly to all low-frequency content. The PB-2000 Pro does this, and it made ‘Heroic Proportions’  a pleasure to listen to. A good sub that is properly calibrated can give a pipe organ recording such an immense presence as though the listener’s room is a much larger space than it actually is, and the PB-2000 Pro was very capable in this respect. It transformed my normal-sized living room into the nave of a large church, which, of course, was the intent. A recording like this really need a capable subwoofer or seriously full-range speakers to reach its full potential, and my experience with the PB-2000 Pro tells me it did just that.

There aren’t many instruments that heavily delve into subwoofer territory to the extent that the mighty pipe organ does, but when used with emphasis on lower notes, the bass guitar can, and one group that does not ignore the low-frequency prowess of that instrument is Bele Fleck and the Flecktones. They also use an instrument called the drumitar which is an electronic percussion instrument that works like a drum pad except using fingers instead of drum sticks and is worn with a shoulder strap much like a guitar. The drumitar makes substantial use of deep bass as well, so that in addition to bass guitar, it tends to make Flecktones’ albums good for exercising subwoofers in sound systems. That was what I intended to do with the PB-2000 Pro when I selected their 1992 album ‘UFO Tofu,’ which is much like their other stuff: jazz music with a heavy inflection of funk and bluegrass.   

‘UFO Tofu’ (an anagram, by the way) is a great album to use for evaluating the musical dexterity of a subwoofer on account of its rapid variation in the bass guitar playing. The bass guitar playing had a very sharp attack and decay and could sometimes be a whirlwind of melodies, and the album often allows it to be the lead instrument. The PB-2000 Pro could track this fluid playing with aplomb. Every pluck and slide was vividly rendered, and the subwoofer executed these transients nicely. The bass playing could be such a torrent at times that I think some of these tracks would be very listenable with the subwoofer alone, although perhaps with a higher low-pass filter than the standard 80 Hz. Given the notational range in bass in ‘UFO Tofu,’ and often within the same track, a subwoofer with a less-than-perfect response would be giving too much prominence to a handful of notes while omitting others, so linearity is a must for an album like this. Happily, the PB-2000 Pro is anything but a one-note wonder, and the low frequencies of the bass guitar and percussion had a seamless integration with the rest of the system. The subwoofer was certainly present since few speakers were that capable in low frequencies, but I couldn’t tell where the main speakers ended and the subwoofer began. Again, this integration is a matter of calibration, but the subwoofer must be competent for that integration to be seamless, and on ‘UFO Tofu,’ the PB-2000 Pro proved to be extremely competent.

Dark ambient music can often make extensive use of deep bass, although it usually does so in an understated manner, so it is not the ‘in-your-face’ drops of much of electronic dance music. It is often used to convey scale of some sonic landscape along with other environmental noises. Such is the case with NERATERRÆ’s ‘The Substance of Perception,’ a 2019 release on the Cyclic Law label. The tracks on this album are different collaborations between the newcomer NERATERRÆ and other established dark ambient artists with names such as New Risen Throne, Xerxes the Dark, and Flowers for Bodysnatchers, and they probably aren’t familiar to anyone outside of this niche genre. The music here is as gloomy as one might imagine from the track titles: ‘That Which Shall Not be Witnessed,’ ‘Becoming the Nightmare,’ and ‘The Wicked Pulse of Conscience.’ It sounds like music from a horror movie that takes place in some haunted countryside or desolate alien planet. It is brooding drones and reverberant atmospherics and very rarely is there anything resembling a lead instrument.

Bass is nearly a constant in ‘The Substance of Perception,’ but it is not a detached or separate element from the rest of the sound; it is a part of a whole. For the effect of this sound mix to work, the subwoofer must blend in naturally and it needs to have an even tonality. The PB-2000 Pro was able to provide this to my ears. Low frequencies here take the form of distant rumbling, reverberant thuds, and slowly undulating drones. They are an integral part of the overall soundscape, and the PB-2000 Pro supplied this vital spectrum of the sound without calling attention to itself. It provided a solid foundation to these compositions but in a balanced manner, and insofar as deep bass can be textured, it gave these low frequency sounds a ‘graveliness’ instead of just a blurry rumble. In my listening, the PB-2000 Pro helped to make these eerie sonic environments into visceral settings that would have been much less effective without such adroit low-frequency capability. I think that most listeners of this type of music will be using headphones, but there is a tactile quality to bass in a loudspeaker sound system that would be missing in headphone use that makes this music much more rich and vivid. The PB-2000 Pro delivers that physical sensation proficiently along with its superb aural performance.  

For music where the use of bass is anything but subtle, I found an unusual album with profligate use of low frequencies in HKE’s ‘Into Your Heart.’ HKE is one of the many stage names of David Russo, an enormously prolific artist in the realm of vaporwave, dreampunk, and otherwise experimental electronic music. ‘Into Your Heart’ is very much on the harder end of the spectrum of this area of music, and I say ‘area’ as opposed to ‘genre’ because whatever is happening here is larger than the word ‘genre’ can encompass. The sound on this album is like an experimental downtempo with a large helping of deep bass, as if someone merged ambient house music with dubstep. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, just think somewhat minimal electronic music with massive bass. I decided to use this album to evaluate the PB-2000 Pro since the bass is so over-the-top here that to play this album at loud level would surely tax the limits of the sub, thereby allowing me to get a sense of its limits. 

I can happily report that the PB-2000 Pro delivered the goods for raw output as well as tight control over the results. When those kick drums hit, I could feel it vibrate my sofa. It had a surprising amount of muscle for a medium-sized 12” model. I expected performance along the lines of the PC-2000 that I reviewed back in 2016, but I don’t remember it hitting as hard as this, not that the PC-2000 was a slouch. This is punch-in-the-chest level bass. The electronic basslines produced by the PB-2000 Pro were so thick that you could cut them with a knife. The weight of the bass that this sub could produce seemed implausible for its size, and I checked to see if I had accidentally left another subwoofer on; I hadn’t. This bass felt so palpable that it was like the footsteps of a brontosaurus. ‘Into the Heart’ was a lot of fun to hear on such a capable subwoofer, and I think that anyone who likes bass-heavy electronic music will enjoy what the PB-2000 Pro can do.

Movie Watching

In the last review that I wrote, I used ‘Guardians of Galaxy’ as a movie to evaluate the subwoofer under review. For the sake of continuity in these reviews, I watched ‘Guardians of the Galaxy 2,’ but perhaps not just for the sake of continuity but also because I had not yet seen it and wanted to find out what happens next. Most if not all readers will know of this film and why, as a comic-based interstellar space adventure, it serves as a great subwoofer fodder. Deep bass is plentiful, and one scene that was really brought to life by the sub is when our heroes’ spaceship crash-landed on the forest planet. That was far from the first explosion that the PB-2000 Pro used to shake the room. The climactic battle was also a massive bass fest that could give a hard workout to any subwoofer, but I felt the PB-2000 Pro was very much up to the task. All of the explosions, laser guns, rocket boosts, and assorted science fiction noises were given the requisite subterranean growl of deep bass as well as the punchy mid-bass that was demanded of the sound mix. In addition to all of this was Tayler Bates’ orchestral score as well as the film’s famous mixtape music that is a selection of pop, rock, and funk from the ’70s. The PB-2000 Pro delivered a clean reproduction that kept the music bass distinct from the effects sounds, so there was never any confusion or muddiness between the various low-frequency elements. As with the first ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ I enjoyed the sequel, and a lively sound mix like this one really benefits from a good sub like the PB-2000 Pro proved to be.  

For something that has a much more grounded sound mix but still promises lots of low-frequency content, I picked up the new WW1 movie ‘1917’ on Blu-ray. I had not seen ‘1917’ yet, but a big Hollywood war movie is bound to have a lot of bass, and upon viewing the movie, it very much did. For the first half of the film, most of the low-frequency content is relegated to Thomas Newman’s music score, which partly uses synthesizers to produce deep bass drones for an atmospheric effect that accompanies the orchestral elements. The music was effective at creating tension, and when moments of action occurred, they were sudden and startling, providing a good demonstration of the dynamic range and transient behavior of the PB-2000 Pro. There is a mid-movie plane crash in particular that gave the subwoofer an opportunity to flex its muscles, and the PB-2000 Pro did not disappoint. It produced a satisfying low-end crunch that was felt as well as heard as the plane smashed into the ground. Other notable bass scenes were a large fire consuming a cathedral that generated a deep ominous rumble, and the climax that took place under a hail of artillery shelling. In each instance, the PB-2000 Pro supplied a convincing reproduction of those epic scenes. ‘1917’ attempts to create immersion by having the movie be unbroken by any edits, so it seemed as though it was filmed in one long take. One key ingredient in creating this immersive ability is the realism of the sound mix, and a key ingredient in that is competent, lifelike low-frequency reproduction, which is an area where so many home theaters fall short. However, I can report that isn’t a worry with systems that use the PB-2000 Pro; it possesses both the sound quality and quantity that can handle a large-scale exercise in heightened realism such as is found in ‘1917.’

SVS PB-2000 Pro Subwoofer Conclusion

The SVS PB-2000 Pro was tested using ground plane measurements with the microphone at a 2-meter distance in an open setting with well over 100 feet from the nearest large structure. The sub was tested with the woofer facing the microphone. The temperature was recorded at 79 degrees with 60% humidity. The subwoofer’s gain was set to maximum, phase was set to 0, and the low-pass filters were left off.

The above graph shows the measured responses for the PB-2000 Pro for both its sealed operating mode and ported operating mode. As is usual for SVS, we see a nice flat response, although it does have a slight tilt toward the low-end. One nice feature is the response stretches out past 200 Hz in both operating modes and past 300 Hz for the sealed mode. This gives users a lot of flexibility in crossover choices. The advantage of this is not just that it could meet the low-end of loudspeakers with low-end roll-offs in high frequencies, but in setups with multiple subs, higher crossover frequencies can be used to increase overall system dynamic range without incurring localization and also smooth out mid-bass room modes out to higher frequencies. We can see that the ported mode response begins to roll off at around 20 Hz and the sealed response rolls off at 30 Hz. Users should not allow that to give them the impression that ported mode only has slightly more deep bass output than sealed mode, which is not the case at all. The sealed operating mode will begin to compress deep bass output at much lower drive levels than the ported mode. This subwoofer fulfills its potential in ported mode and that is the mode it should normally be run in barring some odd circumstance.

CEA 2010 Results for SVS PB-2000 Pro Subwoofer

The above CEA-2010 measurements are short-term bursts that show the subwoofer’s clean peak SPL before heavy distortion sets in. Our measurements have been referenced to 2-meter RMS, which is 9 dB down from the standard requirement for the measurements to be shown at 1-meter peak. However most publicly available CEA-2010 measurements are shown at 2-meter RMS, so we followed that convention. The burst tests for the PB-2000 Pro are tremendous results for a ported 12” subwoofer. SVS reports that this is close to what they measured except at 20 Hz where they measured 1.6 dB more than what I was able to get. This measurement set is a major increase in performance versus the outgoing 2000 series, especially at 31.5 Hz and above, where there looks to be about a 3dB increase on average. That is a 50% increase in amplitude. The 2000 Pro series shows itself to be a lot more than just a facelift and a smartphone app for improvements over the regular 2000 series. This is a very welcome improvement because the mid-bass frequency range is where many competing subwoofers had a performance advantage over the regular SVS 2000 series. In the PB-2000 Pro, SVS has managed to close the gap against many of its competitors in mid-bass output.

Testing for long-term output compression was done by first conducting a 20-second sweep tone where 50 Hz hit 90 dB with the subwoofer 2 meters from the microphone. We then conduct further 20-second sweeps by raising the gain by 5 dB until no more output could be wrung out of the subwoofer. These tests show us the long-term continuous headroom that the subwoofer is capable of. Here again, we see big improvements over the 2000 series for the most part. Whereas the PC-2000 was barely able to pierce 110 dB at any point, the PB-2000 Pro is able to maintain long-term output over 110 dB from the upper 20s to 100 Hz. This is about the same increase in headroom that we see in the burst test measurements over the regular 2000 series. There is some port compression that reduces respective low-end output at high levels versus nominal levels, but that occurs with almost all ported subwoofers. Other than port compression, there is not a major change in response shape. The performance here is overall very good and explains why this sub could hit so hard in my listening sessions.

The above graphs show the corresponding total harmonic distortion to the long-term output graphs. Essentially, they depict how linear the subwoofer remains for the corresponding drive level seen in the long-term sweeps. The quantity being measured is how much of the subwoofer’s output is distortion and is shown here as a percentage. The performance exhibited here is very good, with the PB-2000 Pro keeping total distortion not much more than 5% down to around 20 Hz even at the highest drive level which is as loud as I could push the sub. Basically, the PB-2000 pro stays as clean as a whistle down to 20 Hz. At nominal drive levels, distortion is not too bad below 20 Hz, but it does increase rapidly as drive levels rise. The good news about that is there is not much output at all down there since the sub’s own output drops off rapidly below 20 Hz, so it isn’t like you would hear lots of ugly distortion if you did playback content with strong infrasonic bass. On the whole, this is excellent behavior for a ported sub. 

The above graphs depict measurements of the constituent harmonics from the long-term output sweeps and are what the total harmonic distortion measurements are composed of for the 2nd and 3rd harmonics. These individual harmonics can give us a clue as to what might be the cause of some quirk or non-linearity. We are only showing the 2nd and 3rd here because they more or less reflect the higher even-order and odd-order behaviors, although higher-order harmonics tend to be much further down as a percentage of distortion compared to the second and third.

One interesting thing we can see in the differences between these distortions is that much of the distortion that occurs above port tuning seems to be due to induction, since the 2nd harmonic increases in quantity at a fairly even rate with the driver’s oscillation. That 2nd harmonic distortion quantity holds out pretty evenly to high frequencies indicating that it is not a function of excursion and so would not seem to be a matter of motor nonlinearities or suspension nonlinearities. Nonetheless, it is kept to very low levels and would not be audible. The 3rd harmonic is barely existent where there is not a whole lot of excursion occurring. The highest excursions will be occurring a bit above port tuning, and here we can see a little bit of odd-order distortion cropping its head, but it is a very low amount considering that is happening at the highest drive level. Again, it would be inaudible. We can see from these graphs that the PB-2000 Pro driver is a very well balanced design that has been heavily optimized. 

Group delay is the measurement of how much time it takes for individual frequency bands of an input signal to be produced by the speaker. It can indicate that some frequency components are developing slower than others or are taking longer to decay. It is generally thought that 1.5 sound cycles are needed for group delay to be audible at bass frequencies, although there is an argument that group delay should remain under 20 ms to be completely unnoticeable, but that is likely meant for mid and upper bass frequencies. In these time-domain measurements, the PB-2000 Pro puts up a very good showing that doesn’t exceed 20ms until under 40 Hz and doesn’t exceed one cycle until around the low 30s. In those deep bass frequencies, the higher amounts of group delay seen here will not be very consequential. The PB-2000 Pro manages to hold group delay to very low levels in the frequency regions where it matters. This is a sharp sounding subwoofer and these measurements explain why.

The above graph shows the effects that the ‘Room Gain Compensation’ control has on the response of the PB-2000 Pro. Smaller rooms can dramatically boost deep bass frequencies to the point where the bass sounds bloated. This is due to an acoustic phenomenon known as ‘pressure vessel gain’ but is more commonly referred to as ‘room gain’. Reducing the deep bass output can help achieve a more natural sound in these situations, and SVS has made it easy to do that with this control. Low frequencies can be reduced by 12 dB or 6 dB per octave slope at either 25, 31, or 40 Hz. 

Conclusion

Before bringing this review to a close, I will quickly go over the strengths and weaknesses of the product under review, and, as always, I’ll begin with the weaknesses since I am the kind of person who wants the bad news first. The problem here is that the PB-2000 Pro gives me very little to complain about. It benefits from years as an evolving design from the PB12-NSD to the PB-2000 and now the PB-2000 Pro, and all those years of refinements have added up to a very well-balanced and well-rounded subwoofer. If I have to complain about anything, it is that I wish it had additional finishes aside from the black ash veneer. The existing veneer doesn’t look bad considering the price point, but it is the type of finish that I see on many other lower-cost speakers. I do kind of wish SVS had used more imagination in finish options, but that would have hiked up the price, of course. One other nit that I could pick is that I wish there was a way to access all of the features available on the app on the sub itself. If for some reason the user can not access the app, they can only have control over the bare essentials of phase, volume, and low-pass frequency in the sub’s operation. Again, however, a fancier interface would have hiked up the sub’s price, and at $900, it isn’t something that most people can buy on a whim. It is getting perilously close to a thousand dollars which have to be a psychological tipping point in the cost-consciousness of many middle-class consumers. 

While I don’t really have any serious complaints about the PB-2000 Pro, I do have some serious compliments, so let’s go over its highlights. First of all, the performance is a big leap over the previous 2000 generation which wasn’t at all bad to begin with. Where the mid-bass output of the previous 2000 subs was fine but not spectacular, the 2000 Pro very much takes it up a level and sees on average a 50% performance increase in mid-bass frequency ranges while keeping the same deep extension and clean low-frequency performance that SVS is known for.

The PB-2000 Pro earns our ‘Bassaholics Room’ rating of ‘Large’ meaning that it should be able to handle a room of up to 5,000 cubic feet in size. All of this performance comes in an enclosure that has a reasonable size and weight, so it isn’t a big hassle to move around when you are trying to find the best location for it. The PB-2000 Pro also ups the ante by bringing in SVS’s subwoofer control app which allows extreme fine-tuning of any of the subwoofer’s parameters in addition to giving it a three-band parametric equalizer which could be very useful to combat the room’s destructive acoustics by eliminating room mode peaks in the response.

At the beginning of this review, we asked whether the 2000 Pro was worth the higher price difference over the older 2000 series subs, and the answer has to be a resounding yes, just for the performance improvements alone. For most of the subwoofer frequency band we see approximately a 50% increase in output, but we only see a 12.5% increase in pricing. Factor in the addition of the app control and nicer-looking industrial design over the previous 2000 series, and there are upgrades in nearly every respect for a minor pricing increase. You still get SVS’s five-year warranty and their exceptional customer support that they are known so well for. We can list the PB-2000 Pro as another winner in SVS’s portfolio of solidly engineered products. Those who want to try the PB-2000 Pro for themselves can do so at no risk since SVS offers a 45-day in-home trial with free return shipping if the user is not satisfied with the product for any reason. 

The Score Card

The scoring below is based on each piece of equipment doing the duty it is designed for. The numbers are weighed heavily with respect to the individual cost of each unit, thus giving a rating roughly equal to:

Performance × Price Factor/Value = Rating

Audioholics.com note: The ratings indicated below are based on subjective listening and objective testing of the product in question. The rating scale is based on performance/value ratio. If you notice better performing products in future reviews that have lower numbers in certain areas, be aware that the value factor is most likely the culprit. Other Audioholics reviewers may rate products solely based on performance, and each reviewer has his/her own system for ratings.

Audioholics Rating Scale

• — Excellent
• — Very Good
• — Good
• — Fair
• — Poor

Metric	Rating
Bass Extension
Bass Accuracy
Build Quality
Ergonomics & Usability
Features
Dynamic Range
Fit and Finish
Performance
Value