18XR

The 18XR is a truly groundbreaking subwoofer. REDCATT team has spent countless hours creating something outstanding. Where the conventional sub-woofers stop performing due to the design limitations, the XR series just starts and shines. With huge excursion, high Bl, newly designed suspension system, we are giving you a product that will not limit you to achieve even your wildest sub-woofer dreams.

Motor Design
The magnetic design incorporates large neodymium magnets placed along the voice coil winding. This has allowed us to push the cone excursion to 52mm peak to peak. Unique gap venting ensures good air circulation and greatly improves the reliability of this driver. We have also developed a new technique for manufacturing deep copper caps.

The design further utilizes two, uncommonly large, spiders, spaced apart with spacer, hot-pressed tinsel wires onto the top spider, reinforced cone. The suspension is designed for large excursions. Large lightweight surround sports resonant control features that we fully FEM designed and optimized to provide the best possible performance under large excursions.

The 18XRX4-304B is an 18-inch sub-woofer and bass driver rated at 1200 W AES (2400 W continuous) into a nominal 4-ohm impedance, built around the patented XR (eXtended Range) radial neodymium motor system and featuring an exceptionally low free-air resonance of 21 Hz. Radial neodymium magnets are distributed along the full voice coil winding, maintaining the coil within the magnetic field through 17 mm of linear excursion (Xmax), eliminating the dominant source of harmonic distortion associated with coil overhang in conventional large-excursion drivers. A copper demodulation ring further reduces inductance to 0.54 mH, extending upper-frequency linearity and enabling clean crossover integration up to approximately 500 Hz. The double-spider suspension with spacer and FEM-optimised SBR rubber surround are engineered to provide consistent restoring force and constant cone geometry through the full excursion range.

The driver is rated for amplification of approx. 1200 W AES (2400 W continuous) into 4 ohms, with high-pass filtering in the 18-28 Hz range recommended for vented systems depending on tuning frequency. DSP control with excursion and thermal limiting is essential at sustained high-power operation. Sealed systems benefit from a Linkwitz Transform targeting fc = 21 Hz, Qtc = 0.707 to extend passive response to the infrasonic register, with the 17 mm Xmax providing sufficient mechanical headroom for the required bass correction.

The 18XRX4-304B is suited for a broad range of applications: professional touring sub arrays and large-venue PA systems, cinema LFE and screen-channel bass sections, large-format studio reference monitoring, high-end home cinema and audiophile listening room subwoofers, and high-power bass driver duty in large multi-way loudspeaker systems - anywhere that infrasonic-capable, low-distortion bass reproduction at sustained high output levels is required.