One thing I’ve noticed when upgrading my audio system is that when I have really good bass, I’m happy. If the bass is top notch, I can overlook less-than-stellar treble or so-so midrange. The opposite does not seem to be true. Sure, I can get tremendous enjoyment out of a high-fidelity playback of a flute or other instrument that doesn’t have much bass impact, but when I switch to a track that has some slam, if my sub/woofers don’t perform, I’m left wanting, and I am inclined to change the track. When my subwoofer game is top notch, there is something extremely pleasing about tight, powerful, and accurate bass response that easily puts a smile on my face and lifts my mood in a matter of seconds. Maybe it all boils down to the fact that bass frequencies are heard AND felt and the inclusion of another sense (touch/feeling) gives bass a competitive edge over midrange and treble. I am not talking about loud bass (although that can be really fun and has its place), but the type of bass that gives you a sense of a kick drum’s size or allows for the double bass to reach out and vibrate the room and your body. I propose to you that bass and sub-bass should be optimized first and foremost, followed by treble and midrange in order to maximize enjoyment. Thoughts?
Musical enjoyment is a highly personal thing. Bass is a good place to start with a new set of speakers, yes. But you are implying that it is of greater overall importance. That is where it gets personal.
What I was looking for first in my pursuit of great sound has changed for me drastically over the last fifty years. In the beginning bass and slam were of great importance to me. My priorities now are in approximate order: tonal balance, great rhythm and pace, undistorted treble, mid range bloom, low noice floor, accurate bass… something like that. I want sound that is musical… I chased great slam for a long time and then realized it was artificial and was screwing up the bass. Treble fooled me for a couple decades. I heard high frequency distortion at live concerts, in cheap and expensive audio systems for decades. I slowly realized I was trying to get the distortion right (as in how I heard it in rock concerts in the 70’s). I started listening to actual acoustical instruments like cymbals and drums and to my utter surprise found out they did not sound like what I thought… cymbals sound like brass… a whalin trombone has a unique bite at the beginning of each note when heard live… which is now reproduced accurately in my system. Bass is part of the equation, no question, but for me just one of the pieces.
Btw, you can see my system by clicking on my user ID.
While I enjoy good bass, somewhat sloppy bass or preferably "less" deep bass are much easier for me to tolerate than sloppy upper midrange or treble, so its the first thing I’d sacrifice if I couldn’t have full range high fidelity across the whole bandwidth. I’d take a nice clear little pair of Proacs or Rogers LS3/5As with limited extensio, but dynamic bass over a full range Cerwin Vega or some other boom box any day. Most rooms don't handle massive deep bass very well anyway.
I hear a lot of systems with gobs of lousy flapping bass....especially in car systems, unfortunately that also have grundgy mids and highs, but as long as its loud and overpowering, plenty of folks seem happy and impressed with it. Just not my cup of tea. Boils down to preference.
For me it's the blend. I can give up the very bottom if the there is some bass and the midrange is clear and present and the highs not being dead and lifeless... in the beginning. That's the starting point. From there I can adjust the speakers location, and add a sub if there is no other way and change some cables as a last resort.
Getting the bass right is important and difficult. In the long run your satisfaction would fade if you couldn't achieve a good balance with the other frequencies.@ghdprentice I know exactly what you mean. A system can be tuned to sound wonderful to an individual's preference (which is fine) without being true to what instruments sound like in reality.
It really is. There are so many factors that go into it that are above and beyond the other frequencies. Room acoustics are very challenging at low frequencies and then there’s the challenge of controlling a speaker cone that is putting out massive wattage without it sounding distorted or “sloppy.” Gobs of power and ridiculous amounts of capacitance coupled with high quality drivers seems to help quite a bit.
No bass is not the most important frequency. I have heard many large panel speakers without the low frequency drivers turned on. They still sound pretty good.
Until I resolved the bass I was never satisfied and suffered greatly from listening fatigue.
The addition of a distributed bass array was life changing. Bass is now "real". It's not bloated or uneven and it provides a blissful foundation to all the rest.
propose to you that bass and sub-bass should be optimized first and foremost, followed by treble and midrange in order to maximize enjoyment.
Depends on type of music, listening position, music only or also HT duties. For me mid bass and midrange are more important followed by the other two. For most of the music I listen to there is very little information in sub bass and my age limits high frequencies.
I now have 5 subwoofers in my space. Four for the swarm (distributed bass array) and one for the HT. This sounds counterintuitive, but the results speak for themselves. The swarm is controlled with an inexpensive MiniDsp 2x4, which sets the crossover frequencies and distributes the signal. The only downside, outside of cost, is running all the additional cables.
Interesting. I’m a detail freak and bass doesn’t come into the equation for me. Don’t get me wrong, it can’t be missing and it can’t be boomy, but it’s not something I listen for.
Use the above methods to get the bass right and you will be surprised at the improvement in those "details".
Oh wait, sorry, other bass discussion. Use the below methods.
room modes, which are what we hear as lumpy boomy etc bass. But the solution to room modes is multiple subs. Once you understand this and change from the old-school two locations mentality to a DBA suddenly a huge amount of "room problems" goes away.
The next biggest source of "room problems" is the room being made to vibrate by speakers physically coupled to it. This creates resonances and ringing that ruins a lot more than just the bass. When floors, walls and ceilings are all being made to vibrate by physically coupled speakers it smears and colors all up and down the audio band.
The solution to this "room problem" is to decouple the speakers by putting them on springs. This is impressively effective, as has been demonstrated many times.
If the goal is improved bass response then both of these should be done first, long before any of the other suggestions. DBA and isolation are whole orders of magnitude better than anything else you can do. The improvement you will hear from doing these goes does indeed greatly improve bass response, but also goes far beyond that one thing.
DBA, Townshend Podiums and Pods, huge improvement in detail resolution and bass control.
This by the way will also reveal why it is not so much "a" frequency band, but whatever band has the worst most colored resonance. DBA and isolation greatly reduces these revealing a huge amount of hidden character.
We all differ in this narrow field. My priority is a midrange that is real, alive and clear. Main speaker bass down to 30. I don't think a sub has much business playing above 32-34 ever. Treble that is clean and silky with no jagged edges- there's enough of that in recordings. I'm sensitive to brightness and don't appreciate the trends of speakers having what I'd describe as a hyped up atmosphere in the mids and treble. Long term that makes me listen less. The presence region is the most difficult to get right for me.
My monitors have been with me 20 years and they’re keepers. But they do not dig deep enough.
Well there is no way to tell if my speakers go down lower than yours, or if I’m just satisfied with less. But does show how silly it is for folks to argue about equipment given we all want different things.
90% of the brains processing power is between 500Hz-15kHz. The region that processes sub-500Hz looks more like an afterthought, barely any brain tissue dedicated to it. So, the 500Hz-15kHz would be universally the most important frequency range, and is key for natural sound, because that's where our brain is the busiest. There's so few audiophiles who aim for natural sound - most go for controlled / processed sound, so nobody really cares about this region where 90% of the brain tissue is concentration on. What each of us perceives as key aspect is highly personal.Bass certainly has a special role, as its perception is also through the body (internal organs resonating) and not just the ears. Makes for a big added layer of experience, for good or worse.
What a balance we must achieve to please ourselves. And on top of that, mood matters, damned age matters now, then there is the environment for listening. Assuming that all goes well I can't top the experience. But it is just about anywhere in the audio spectrum (except treble, which I just don't hear well anymore), it has to be right for me. Midrange can make me cover my ears, 'bad' bass loses my interest, and even noise if it is too high makes me walk away. If it don't sing, I'm walkin'.
I think many have this right. Because the room is in essence a bass instrument the variables involved make accurate bass difficult to achieve. cd318 is also very right. "most systems don't even try." This is for good reason. IMHO no bass is better than bad bass.
I have no problem enjoying music with no bass but you can not reproduce the "Live" experience without it. One can argue about the best way to achieve accurate bass but many residential spaces preclude making accurate bass and at best you might be able to get it at one location in the room regardless of what equipment you use and how you set it up. Using multiple subwoofers definitely helps but you still have the entire room and it's contents vibrating at various low frequencies screwing things up. Room control helps but it can not overcome poor room acoustics and items resonating and buzzing. For fun get a test record or CD and play a 40 Hz sine wave. Turn up the volume and listen to what happens. The lower you go the more items will join the symphony of buzzing and rattling. Items ringing add a higher frequency halo to it. This is usually masked by the music so you only hear the loudest problems under the right circumstances. It took several months to stop my theater screen from acting like a tambourine. Tip of the day, get a roll of butyl glazing tape from your local glass company. You can stop any rattle with it!
Even the most intelligently designed rooms will have some problems. If you want to know what your situation is like take snapshots of the room at various locations with a measurement microphone. You can get a mic and a complete computer program for $300. It is the best tweak you could ever buy! Ideally you should get the same frequency response at the various locations. What you will get is wildly different curves. 10 dB swings are the rule and 20 dB swings are not unusual. This will happen even with a swarm system but to a lesser degree.
Unfortunately, there is no acoustic treatment that can overcome a bad room and the best solution is to limit low bass so that exaggerated low frequencies do not overcome the midrange. IMHO there is no one most important part of the audio spectrum. Midrange sibilance is every bit if not more aggravating than bad bass. I personally can't stand a system that is too bright. Old age will fix that problem. But, I have to say that hearing a system with great bass is great experience. You get that same rush you get at a live concert when the band lights up.
I look at it this way, low frequencies are less harmful to your hearing than high frequencies. That's why the majority of people lose some of their upper frequency hearing as they age. Hence, at 67, I favor bass. A little more bass, less treble, I can therefore keep a decent volume up and not get hurt by the high frequencies as much. Win, win. Just me.
bayliner, I have not considered that one frequency or even a set of frequencies are more harmful than others. A new thought to me, but I would be curious as to where your source for this information comes from. I would like to read about it more.
I love bass but I can't stand bloated mid bass. It makes sound unlistenable for me. I'd rather miss the bass. But what I value most in sound is clean attack and even more clean decay at all frequencies. Plus I need dynamic linearity, accurate level changes whether they are small, medium or large changes in level with out compression. I value these factors more than linear frequency response although I see no reason to have it all. Finally if you need to pick a part of the frequency band that is most important, it's the mid range. No experienced audio man really questions this.
This question is much more complex than it is being given credit for.
Two examples, from the extreme opposite ends of the spectrum. At the extreme low end, really good bottom end reproduction improves the sense of envelopment and improves the sound well up into the midrange. This is the case even when there is no discernible low bass present. I heard this when first going from one sub to 4, and again when putting all my subs on Townshend Pods. In particular with the Pods I distinctly remember being surprised because I was expecting and listening for low bass but what hit me instead was the greatly improved imaging and envelopment. What was surprising was the low bass I had put the record on for hadn't even started yet.
Something similar also happens at the extreme high end. There the addition of Townshend Super Tweeters would seem to only affect from about 15kHz and higher. But yet in this case clear improvement is heard well down into the midrange, and even some pretty low bass sure seems to sound more tight and articulate with greater clarity.
For these reasons I think it is overly simplifying to talk about frequency bands as if they can be viewed in isolation. They can, of course. But only by discounting a lot of really significant phenomena such as these.
"
90% of the brains processing power is between 500Hz-15kHz.
"We evolved listening to sounds in nature that had consequences for us - the voices of prey and predators, the sounds of weather, and the human voice. Hypothesis: we developed music-making in the same frequency ranges.
I have made it a point in the past year to visit people across the country who have different/better home systems. This week I am in Minneapolis. One thing I learned is that the people who spent time getting their bass array set up properly- 2+ subs powered by separate amps-were also the people who had the best overall sound.
Duuurrrrr... Obviously bass isn't the most important frequency band. If you don't believe me, try playing any music with all the bands above say 120Hz filtered out. There won't be much music.
I personally can't stand a system that is too bright. Old age will fix that problem.
Same here. I was hoping old age would help with that, but at 61, my hearing on that top octave is poor, but I'm still pretty sensitive to grungy sibilance, and sloppy treble. Must be in the 5k-10k region b/c I can still hear that! ;-)
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