Do most people prefer tight bass or non tight bass?

@tannoy56, my hearing checks great, and my "preferences" are, what they are. Tubes are not the best for me, when we are talking about bass slam, bass detail and bass control. I did state it is all subjective, and I do not appreciate your nastiness, however, I suppose you wanted a heated argument. ENJOY! MrD.

The big ported 12 inch woofers on our Northcreek crossovered with custom Northcreek woofer zobel circuit Matrix 801 S2 speakers got tighter and go about a half octave lower going from a Jon Soderberg modified Threshold Stasis 2 with 250 watts per channel to custom built 140 watts per amp KT77 monoblocks.  The bass became a lot more textured as well.  And started blowing my pant legs around from 15 feet away.  And everything else got better in fact. Better enough that I’ll never spend any money on the system again for anything other than KT77s and an occasional cartridge.  

I want my bass to sound accurate.  I want a well recorded string bass to sound what I can hear live sitting close to a jazz trio, I want an electric  bass to sound like an electric bass, I want a pipe organ to sound like a real pipe organ in a real hall.  

Other than that, we are talking damping factor/speaker interaction.  They need to be matched perfectly whatever the combo.

End of discussion so far as I am concerned.

I prefer bass that is accurate to the recording.

The problem is you can't tell whether or not the recording is realistic.  You can only tell if the sound produced by your system is realistic.  And that means compared to live.