The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), in 2006, has released a “standard Method of Measurement for Powered Subwoofers”. This standard aims to create a reliable testing method and a rating procedure to let manufacturers and customers compare powered subwoofers in an simple way.

The CEA standard is built upon a tone burst sequence performed at various frequencies and levels, until a certain distortion threshold is reached. While the test is intended for powered subwoofers, the same burst test can be applied to a broad case of electro-acoustic devices such as non-powered subwoofers drivers, tweeter drivers and compression drivers.

Despite being available since late 2006, the standard has only recently gained popularity in the audio community, at least this is what we can see from the support requests from our clients base. Starting from the CLIO 10.31 software release a set of tools specifically designed to perform tests according to the standard are included into our software.

In this application note we will show how to perform maximum output measurements according to the standard in a reliable and repeatable way using CLIO FW-01 hardware and CLIO 10.31 software.

MEASURING MAXIMUM SUBWOOFER OUTPUT ACCORDING ANSI/CEA-2010 STANDARD