How important is bass to you?

By "except the lowest bass" do you mean the bottom octave (20-40Hz)?

Onhwy61---Ha! One reason I asked Inna if by the lowest bass did he mean 20-40Hz, is that the lowest frequency produced by the standard 4-string bass (both electric and acoustic upright) is 42Hz, on the open E string. The output of many loudspeakers is already dropping like a rock at that frequency.

Nope, nothing missed Tostadosunidos. Just trying to clarify what people mean by "lowest bass", and make the point that many systems just barely play the lowest note of the bass, which at 42Hz is sure not the lowest bass. I asked Inna if by lowest bass he meant the bottom octave (20-40Hz) precisely because 40Hz is about as low as many loudspeakers play. Inna said no, that was too great a range, defining lowest bass as "below, say, 25Hz". Well, VERY few systems have much output below 40Hz, let alone below 25Hz. And you're right, subwoofers do provide those low frequencies, but they seem to be still out-of-fashion amongst Audiogon members. Inna's question asks about a frequency range that many (most?) Audiogon member's systems don't reproduce, not well or poorly, but at all! Or am I mistaken?---do many Audiogon members have a system with loudspeakers or subs that provide substantial levels of bass reproduction below about 40Hz?

Being a planar loudspeaker enthusiast, I've long accepted the fact that in my system subs are required to get full-range reproduction, or even to reach down to 40Hz or so, at adequate SPL and with low distortion. I'm not sure dynamic-speaker owners feel the same, though there is a case to be made that they should!

Every time I enter a club in which live music is already being performed, I am struck by how much more bass is in the room than what I hear in the listening rooms of audiophiles (including my own) and hi-fi shops. A lot of that is due to the multiple 15" woofers in the club's sound system of course, some from the club's room itself, as well as the SPL common these days. But it's more than that. Reproduced music rarely if ever has as much "body" as does live, sounding eviscerated. There is still a long way to go to fully replicate the sound of live music.

Citing the sound of live music heard through a sound-reinforcement system rather than purely acoustically raises the valid question of whether or not that qualifies as a standard against which to compare music's reproduction. Recordings after all are made with mics very different from those used in sound-reinforcement systems, for starters. But I think that is how most of us hear the majority of our live music. Besides which, live music heard acoustically also has more of that body I'm talking about.

Very few musicians are even close to being audiophiles, many of them liking loudspeakers that sound like P.A.'s. The JBL L-100 was popular with them in the 70's (the band house I lived in in '71 had a pair of Altec A-7's---our P.A.---in the living room!), most of them listening to music on their computer speakers now, not caring enough about sound to have even an entry-level true hi-fi. But they care a lot about the sound of their recordings, particularly that their part is high enough in the mix!

You're of course right Tostadosunidos. Live sound using P.A.'s is no standard against which to judge hi-fi. It was simple when hi-fi started, as the sound of live orchestras and jazz bands were mostly purely acoustic, orchestras in concert halls and jazz in small clubs without much sound reinforcement. Recordings were simpler back them too, intended to capture the live sound of those group's performances. Such recordings were an appropriate source with which to judge the quality of reproduction.

Comparing recordings of modern bands to their live sound is comparing apples to oranges. Recordings are now often created first, and live performances are judged by how closely they come to matching the recordings, the exact opposite of the old system. But even in comparing a good recording of a, say, Bluegrass group to their live sound leaves me with the impression that the singer's voice and the musician's instruments are but a pale, ghostly apparition, lacking the body and substance---the "thereness"---of their live sound. How much of that is in what the recording is missing? How much of that is due to too little bass? Or group delay/phase shift? Or any other cause? It's from everything! But if a loudspeaker's output is already dropping off at 40Hz, and/or it's output at 40Hz contains high levels of distortion, both of which are more common than we like to admit, attending to the bass in a system is a good place to start.

I'm with you 100% Tostadosunidos. Getting the low bass out of the main speakers improves their sound (less doppler distortion, for one thing), as well as the sub being better at bass to begin with (assuming it's a good one!). It's getting the integration between the speakers and sub(s) right that's the trick.

One musician who is surprisingly (to me, anyway) a critical listener with a real good system (big Wilsons, VTL electronics, VPI table with Lyra cartridge) is Henry Rollins. I wonder what he listens to on it (I know he's into Jazz), and if he uses his system to listen to rough mixes of his own recordings? He's a customer of Brian Berdan at Audio Elements in Pasadena.