Ascendo The28 SUB Squared PRO

The28 Squared exists because of a conversation between Ascendo's Geoffrey Heinzel and Trinnov's Arnaud Laborie about getting real bass into rooms that have no floor space to give. The answer was to abandon the round cone entirely.

The driver is a 28-inch flat panel built from layered rohacell and carbon composite, square rather than circular, with a cone area equivalent to a 32-inch round woofer. Four 4-inch voice coils on neodymium motors drive it. The flat panel radiates a planar wavefront rather than the piston motion of a conventional cone, and the square format means several cabinets can be stacked or ranged side by side with almost no gap between the radiating surfaces — which is the point.

That is what makes it a bass-array component first and a single subwoofer second. It couples cleanly up to 120 Hz, so it works inside Trinnov WaveForming, Dirac ART, and single or double bass array designs where the drivers have to behave as one source. It also runs well above the 120 Hz LFE cutoff, which lets it serve as a kick woofer rather than only a sub.

The cabinet is 300 mm deep and 122 kg, satin matte black, floorstanding. In a room where a conventional 30-inch subwoofer cannot physically go, this is frequently the only honest answer.