NS v.4 Historic Post

We mate these new platform frames to an all new, patent-pending (Application US20170339501A1 and US Patent Number D791740S1), neodymium-based motor structure featuring a hyper-extended pole and extreme clearances (allowing up to 4" p-p travel before mechanical bottom). The Nightshade v.4 features an enormous 45mm (1.77”) magnetic gap to ensure the coil is always under control. This motor drives a 3" diameter 4-Layer Flat Wire Aluminum Coil with an extremely long winding (3.15” long) wound on a thick aluminum former to incredible levels of excursion. We use 100% American made voice coils, each motor is hand assembled here in North Carolina by our team, and the final assembly of the parts into a complete product is also done here, in-house, with high strength US made adhesives.

The Nightshade v.4 features the longest coil of any 3” coil speaker we have made to date. Due to the extremely powerful motor of the Nightshade v.4 we could take advantage of an extremely long 4-layer coil – the 4-layer coil keeps the mass and inductance down while allowing us to use such a long coil for incredible linear x-max while the powerful motor allows us to achieve the level of BL we desired. The Nightshade v.4 has a full 25% more motor force than the v.3 model while shaving off over 30 pounds of weight!

With the introduction of the new light-weight motors we also incorporated several new cooling / thermal management features to push the power handling up to an enormous 3000-watts RMS:

1) The motor utilizes N48H Neo (heat treated). The entire motor would need to be nearly 250 degrees F before the magnet is affected in any way. This is nearly 40 degrees more than is required to boil water.

2) The Neo magnets are sandwiched between two aluminum plates which meet the air gap along their inner edge. These plates help carry the heat away from the gap and thus the magnets and voice coil. The bottom aluminum plate is cooled by the air going in and out of the holes around the motor. The top aluminum plate is cooled by the air-flow from the spider going in and out of vented spacer ring. These plates also serve as very effective shorting rings. The NS v.4 has the lowest inductance of any large woofer we have ever produced. Furthermore, our Neo magnets themselves do not directly come into contact with the “air gap” of the woofer like most Neo-Radial designs; meaning they will never be directly adjacent to the extremely hot voice coil. Instead, a flux distribution ring separates them from the magnetic gap.

3) That brings us to the vent ring itself (mounted between the frame and the motor). For the NS v.4 we developed and tooled solid cast aluminum vent rings. Thus allowing heat to more easily move through the aluminum “top plate” and into the vent ring and thus finally into the frame itself. Our “Sundown” frames are MASSIVE chunks of aluminum (e.g. Heat-Sinks) with the 18” frame being a full 10 pounds of metal!

4) Now let’s discuss the “active” cooling of the coil. As most people are aware a solid pole piece necessarily forces all of the air under the dust cap across the former as the woofer moves back and forth thus resulting in quick heat dissipation from the aluminum former. This air can then easily escape the side vent-holes of the motor and be exchanged with cooler air. Additionally; the “Sundown” frames features a “closed base” design which forces all the air movement from the spider to go through the vent ring creating a high velocity air stream across the top part of the coil. This type of cooling is used on everything we make from the SA series on up and has proven incredibly effective for the close to 9-years we have done it this way.

Please Note!!! The NS v.4 ships with our “red” spider pack which is very stiff. If you intend to do a direct swap from and X or a Z series woofer then you should consider ordering your NS v.4 with our “black” spider which is significantly softer and thus makes the NS v.4 perform better in boxes designed for the X and Z series.

Now for a bit of Nightshade history:

The first generation Nightshade was launched in 2008 and was our first subwoofer line on the market (we only sold amplifiers from 2006 up until that time). It was our answer to the requests by our Team Sundown SPL competitors for a woofer to mate with their amplifier in the SPL lanes. The first generation Nightshade was on the market for about 2 years; during which time we learned a great deal from first-hand experience in the SPL lanes as well as feedback from our Team – all of which lead to the next generation.

The second generation Nightshade came about in 2010 and offered massive improvements in terms of thermal power handling thanks to its much larger coil and its incorporation of a version of our cooling system (originally developed for the SA series). It also provided gains in terms of motor force compared to the first generation and was the first “big boy” motor we produced to incorporate shorting rings. To this day NS v.2 motors are highly sought after thanks to their incredible performance in both daily systems and in the SPL lanes. The v.2 was on the market for about a year and a half up until we launched the Z v.3 line in 2011. The Z v.3 was close enough in terms of performance that we wanted to push the Nightshade to the next level… at this point we began to work on the third generation of the Nightshade line.

We wanted the third generation Nightshade to represent something really special for both Sundown Audio and our customers. We started the development process by looking back to our “Monster” motor prototype from 2008 – which was our first and only motor up until the NS v.3 with a 250mm diameter magnet assembly. From there we added in all of the additional knowledge we gathered from the NS series and Z series development (all the way up to Z v.4 and X). The NS v.3 went on to achieve many SPL championships and to satisfy hundreds of bass-heads around the globe.

After the incredible success of the Nightshade v.3, we decided that the v.4 would need to be more revolutionary than evolutionary. The v.4 motor features an all-new Neodymium based motor technology that we started development on in 2015. The goal of which being able to offer significantly more powerful motors to our customers that are both more cost effective than typical Neo designs, much lighter than typical ferrite designs, and also more powerful than the motors they replace. Finally in early 2018 all of this hard work came to fruition with the release of the Nightshade v.4 subwoofer.

Features & Technology:

• Xmax = 40mm one-way by 70% BL

• RMS Power = 3000-watts

• Heavily vented motor structure

• Solid Design / Copper Plated 1006 Steel Pole Piece

• Patent-Pending High Flux Neodymium Motor Technology

• Innovative high-velocity cast-aluminum vented frame spacer ring

• Black Aluminum 3” voice coil former for superior heat dissipation

• High Temperature 4-Layer Aluminum Flat Wire Voice Coil (Made in USA)

• Dual aluminum shorting rings directly adjacent to the magnetic gap

• Spring Loaded Terminals

• Stitched-On Double-XL Tinsel Leads to prevent fatigue and failure

• Mega-Roll v.2 Surround Technology

• High strength, custom tooled & patented cast aluminum frame

• Optimized for small ported & band-pass enclosures