The Bass is the place!!

[DaveyF]

That's an excellent question Frank, and one that I'm also interested to learn from the masters.

Bob,I'm no master,lol...but I do think that the sound of electronica in the bass is not the way to determine the quality of the bass reproduction.
Instead, I would nominate a good upright acoustic bass ( as played in a lot of traditional jazz) and the sound of the bass drum and even more so...the kettle drum. Hall ambience can also be a determinant. As to a recommended recording, that's a little tough, as I have not truly heard any totally realistic system in this regard. Could this be because there are so very few truly realistic recordings of the sound of real bass? (As referenced to in my OP) Perhaps?

 

[NorthStar]

Many masters here @ WBF Davey. And I agree with you, some great acoustic jazz music recordings, like from the ECM record label, and other labels with great upright acoustic bass players... I know some of the names, some of the recordings...I just want the masters (you included) to dig in their music library and enumerate some of those they enjoy for the bass.

Classical orchestral music too, some from Reference Recordings contain powerful bass.
And there must be some members lovers of organ music...Bach and others.

And to get down low and dirty...of course synthesizers from electronica, alternative, new wave, funk/punk/rap music. ...Demo stuff like Sex is the Bass.
And finally the music scores from moving picture soundtracks...some can get down to five, three, even one Hertz! ...I don't think anyone here, or over there with sixteen large subwoofers in their state-of-the-art home theater rooms can cleanly get that low...perhaps around ten Hertz, with few decibels down.

Hey, it's your thread, and the title is The Bass is the Place!! And look @ Amir, how high he's flying with a room 98% larger than Mike's room! That's concert stadium/planetarium hall size here, with penthouse headquarters on top to sleep in and eat steaks and drink cognac and martinis.
But let's fly realistically and observe some common sense, like Mike's room, Gary's room, David's room, Rodney's room, Jack's room, Steve's room...

:b

 

[leyenda]

Bass from headphones can not shake your butt from your chair. ...Or lift the dress of your mistress.

Gary has two subwoofer columns; each with six drivers. He seems to have the goods; if I want to listen to say Pink Floyd - Wish you Were Here, I'd like to feel the bass impact in his room. Guy's need no headphones. :b ........

I think our definition for good bass is entirely different

 

[fas42]

People might be amused by this, but I find the classic tracks by Boney M to be very good as a test case - there's a visceral intensity to the disco bass here which I find highly addictive, but I have noticed this sometimes is poorly rendered - no guts to it ...

 

[Rodney Gold]

Try anything from Yello , Hans zimmer

As to upright bass .. well in real life , its far more diffuse and less "resolving" than most recordings portray it.
Here is a tidal playlist of mine that has some great bass tracks
idal.com/playlist/4700e3a8-3659-457e-a2ee-69624282b431

I think bass is far more critical for those that dont have an exclusively classical diet..

 

[Mike Lavigne]

this one will challenge a system.....as much in the mid-bass and lower mids for impact, snap, linearity and cohesion......as in the middle and deep bass. it requires lots of headroom to do it with ease. and you have to anticipate the volume settings or you can do some damage.

 

[audioguy]

Achieving extended clean, tight bass is not magic. Proper placement, and depending on room size, move enough air (i.e. big drivers) and a bit of EQ/room correction/DSP. The single best (practical) place to put subs is in the 4 corners but other locations can work equally well. But from many, many rooms that I have been involved in, placing dual subs up front (which looks great) is seldom if ever the right place. A much better (but less attractive to the OCD nature) if using only two subs in one in each diagonal corner of the front and rear of the room. But this also requires DSP to set delay and trim levels.

As you can see from the following (black line and no smoothing), I have no issue with low extended bass. I currently have dual Seaton Subversives in the rear (4000 watts driving four 15 inch drivers) and 4000 watts driving two 18 inch subs up front. This is the curve I use for music. For movies, I have my version of the Harmon Curve. (The RS20i allows me to have a set of Dirac filters assigned to an input).



There is no such thing as too much great woofage!!!!

[As an FYI, the room is about 3400cf - 19 x 22 x 8]

 

[Rodney Gold]

That sure is a whack of woofage and wattage...
Listening to Dafos right now..Tidal .. you are my hero. Its recorded at a pretty soft level.. currently on track 3 ..waiting for the torture test...
Edit : listening to psychopomp an gates of dafos at insane levels.. the system copes real well and has plenty more to go .. my ears and neighbours wont take more...the room however is throwing up some rattles at the very high volume very low frequency stuff ..

 

[sbo6]

you are welcome to come over and listen. bring your most demanding bass tracks. be critical.

but i'm not going down the measurement path with you. we all know how much you enjoy it.

which is not to say i'm afraid of measuring and making things even better. my speaker designer has asked me to do that but I've not got around to it yet. mostly the reason is that i'm so happy with what i'm hearing. and I spent the last year tuning my room and i'm in 'enjoy mode' right now and am in no hurry to get back into 'critical listening mode'. I posted 5 or 6 threads over the last year or so about my room tuning efforts. I put a huge amount of work into it.

I did not intend to be rude with my response and I apologize if it came across that way.

Mike, not to continue to harp on this but I agree with Amir in that your system is top notch; I'm a bit surprised you wouldn't want to measure to see what you can do to further improve your bass. Measuring is not the enemy just 1 very important tool in your toolbox to help get better sound.

Also, Amir had a good point (someone else said it too I think) - very good bass is subjective and ruler flat response does not = good bass. But "creating" a house curve is difficult and the region from 50Hz - 150Hz is very musically sensitive (too much = bloated, too little = thin bass). In my experience even with subs it's a compromise of your seating position, speaker position and of course your room's response. With subs, my experience has been - fix 1 freq area, meddle with another. It's a balancing act, there is no magic spot in the room for all low frequencies. More subs do help balance this and DEQ obviously helps, but in the small rooms we have, it's almost impossible to "fix" any room modes unless you knock down a wall and even that's not a guarantee. And I'm also not convinced DEQ doesn't add some "badness" with all it's manipulations. Maybe it outweighs this with a flat line, not sure.

 

[audioguy]

It's a balancing act, there is no magic spot in the room for all low frequencies. More subs do help balance this and DEQ obviously helps, but in the small rooms we have, it's almost impossible to "fix" any room modes unless you knock down a wall and even that's not a guarantee.

I see that differently. Properly placed subs can very effectively provide fairly even seat to seat response with appropriate delays and levels set [a time consuming measurement process] - but two subs up front won't work. And while I recognize that Mike is not a measurement guy, he won't ever be able to achieve the most optimized bass response without it - but he seems perfectly happy with no measurements and it is, after all, his room and his system. And who knows: maybe the bass response measurements in his room are really good.

 

[microstrip]

this one will challenge a system.....as much in the mid-bass and lower mids for impact, snap, linearity and cohesion......as in the middle and deep bass. it requires lots of headroom to do it with ease. and you have to anticipate the volume settings or you can do some damage.

From the same authors, less known, but also fabulous. Track 3 listened loud will fill your room in an unbelievable way. And the boxed LP includes some fabulous art work.

 

[ack]

To what do you attribute this phenomenon? (Other than simply that it is easier to hear close up.)

Untreated room, I am sure, exciting room modes. Also, I have yet to hear any ported speaker reproduce articulate bass the same way sealed enclosures do, and room treatments are not going to fix that.

* * *

What I have learned from my speaker auditions is that to reproduce bass ideally, and to achieve all of the desired benefits in sound-staging and ambiance and scale, a system needs big drivers and height -- either woofer towers (e.g., Evolution Acoustics, Genesis, Pendragon) or big drivers mounted low and high (e.g., Arrakis). And if there are still undesirable low frequency room nodes then maybe even a JL Gotham or two sprinkled around to even things out. (I think the distributed bass concept makes sense to even out room nodes, but I do not think that three or four single-story subwoofers will achieve the ambiance and scale of the tall woofer towers.)

Yes, I am a big fan of large bass radiating designs, but as long as they can be tuned to the room (all the ones you listed support that, plus Wilson that I can think of)... and it's also what I have partly done with my speakers (to tune the bass response to the room).

On another note, MikeL posted about Dafos yesterday... you have to listen to this RR LP.

 

[FrantzM]

Achieving extended clean, tight bass is not magic. Proper placement, and depending on room size, move enough air (i.e. big drivers) and a bit of EQ/room correction/DSP. The single best (practical) place to put subs is in the 4 corners but other locations can work equally well. But from many, many rooms that I have been involved in, placing dual subs up front (which looks great) is seldom if ever the right place. A much better (but less attractive to the OCD nature) if using only two subs in one in each diagonal corner of the front and rear of the room. But this also requires DSP to set delay and trim levels.

As you can see from the following (black line and no smoothing), I have no issue with low extended bass. I currently have dual Seaton Subversives in the rear (4000 watts driving four 15 inch drivers) and 4000 watts driving two 18 inch subs up front. This is the curve I use for music. For movies, I have my version of the Harmon Curve. (The RS20i allows me to have a set of Dirac filters assigned to an input).



There is no such thing as too much great woofage!!!!

[As an FYI, the room is about 3400cf - 19 x 22 x 8]

OMG!
WOW!
KRZ!
SMH!!
WTG!!!!

Hey! I can field SMS shorthands too


Superb bass response. Any waterfall diagrams?

 

[Mike Lavigne]

That sure is a whack of woofage and wattage...
Listening to Dafos right now..Tidal .. you are my hero. Its recorded at a pretty soft level.. currently on track 3 ..waiting for the torture test...
Edit : listening to psychopomp an gates of dafos at insane levels.. the system copes real well and has plenty more to go .. my ears and neighbours wont take more...the room however is throwing up some rattles at the very high volume very low frequency stuff ..

it's a 1983 analog recording. the Lp kicks ass on the digital.....although the digital is also epic.

 

[ack]

From the same authors, less known, but also fabulous. Track 3 listened loud will fill your room in an unbelievable way. And the boxed LP includes some fabulous art work.

Yes, this is an excellent album; incidentally, I was recently marveling at the high frequency content of one of the tracks as transferred to CD on Stereophile Test CD3 - and especially the metal sound of the hi-hats... I have a sealed LP on order coming...

 

[ddk]

Mike, not to continue to harp on this but I agree with Amir in that your system is top notch; I'm a bit surprised you wouldn't want to measure to see what you can do to further improve your bass. Measuring is not the enemy just 1 very important tool in your toolbox to help get better sound.

Also, Amir had a good point (someone else said it too I think) - very good bass is subjective and ruler flat response does not = good bass. But "creating" a house curve is difficult and the region from 50Hz - 150Hz is very musically sensitive (too much = bloated, too little = thin bass). In my experience even with subs it's a compromise of your seating position, speaker position and of course your room's response. With subs, my experience has been - fix 1 freq area, meddle with another. It's a balancing act, there is no magic spot in the room for all low frequencies. More subs do help balance this and DEQ obviously helps, but in the small rooms we have, it's almost impossible to "fix" any room modes unless you knock down a wall and even that's not a guarantee. And I'm also not convinced DEQ doesn't add some "badness" with all it's manipulations. Maybe it outweighs this with a flat line, not sure.

I've been in Mike's room, bass bloat isn't a problem, at least its not noticeable. I don't see any real purpose for measurements in his room or mine, we can both hear what's right and/or wrong in our systems from room effects and since as you mentioned there's not much that can be done without major surgery. You can't fool physics and you can't make the room work like a concert hall by sticking things on the wall and diffusion with natural materials only takes you so far. IME DEQ is the worst possible solution and kills the sound in almost worse than anything else besides random acoustic treatment. Every time I came across it the system sounded dead and wrong and ended up pulling it out of the system. This happened even last Saturday at a buddy's place who was very adamant to even try turning the DEQ off for a second before. Last week was willing to give it a shot, the system opened up and came to life after removing the acoustic panels and DEQ from his room.

david

 

[amirm]

I've been in Mike's room, bass bloat isn't a problem, at least its not noticeable.

So what are the problems with his room?

IME DEQ is the worst possible solution and kills the sound in almost worse than anything else besides random acoustic treatment.

The only problem with that is that when we put the people behind a curtain so they can't see what is playing, they prefer application of said equalization to nothing. And they do so by a huge factor. Since we have become so anti-measurement and science here, I won't post it but the data is there contrary to our opinions (see some of the data here http://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...s/target-room-response-and-cinema-x-curve.10/).

 

[amirm]

There is no such thing as too much great woofage!!!!

[As an FYI, the room is about 3400cf - 19 x 22 x 8]

Most excellent response . Very well done!

 

[sbo6]

I see that differently. Properly placed subs can very effectively provide fairly even seat to seat response with appropriate delays and levels set [a time consuming measurement process] - but two subs up front won't work. And while I recognize that Mike is not a measurement guy, he won't ever be able to achieve the most optimized bass response without it - but he seems perfectly happy with no measurements and it is, after all, his room and his system. And who knows: maybe the bass response measurements in his room are really good.

What do you mean by "fairly even"? Tuneful bass from ~150 - 30Hz is difficult to achieve in 1 spot let alone multiple. What level of variation are you talking about?

 

[ack]

People might be amused by this, but I find the classic tracks by Boney M to be very good as a test case - there's a visceral intensity to the disco bass here which I find highly addictive, but I have noticed this sometimes is poorly rendered - no guts to it ...

OK that was amusing indeed; I have a friend who's a huge fan of Boney M; I'll let him know he's found his equal in Australia; and then you can then battle it out