Vinyl playback - lack of bass?

Look at you manual again , you should be setting the cartridge to 1K resistance . J12 & J30

Also check your gain setting  , should be 60 or 66 db .

@tomrk Right on!  I think I had all the bass that could be had in a beetle with four Jensen 6x9's. lol  Yeah the groove thing is my basis and of course the RIAA EQ...this is what the sections in integrated are for, right?  Or standalones.  I guess the EQ is a constant?  Doesn't seem too cool really.  he he...thanks for the great info!  Ever noticed how some outlets boosts the bass more than original?  Like some radio channels and such?  Not true to origin but I like it.  Sorry purists!

@bbarten If you want an album with some good solid bass, listen to the Styx Equinox album (IMHO their best album), especially the song "Midnight Ride".  "Suite Madam Blue" is a great song as well.

And if you turn up the bass,  it's your system, it's your music, and whatever sounds good to you is the main thing.

bbarten, To answer what I think was a question, yes, the RIAA curve is the industry standard for recording and reproducing music on vinyl.  All modern phono stages to be used with magnetic cartridges contain an inverse RIAA filter in the signal path. You would not like to listen to the output of a magnetic cartridge through a simple amplification stage. The filter in a phono stage boosts the input bass frequencies and progressively attenuates higher frequencies to achieve a flat output response, so it probably is not the prime cause of an unsatisfactory bass response.

From Wiki: "The RIAA curve is an equalization standard used for vinyl records, where low frequencies are reduced and high frequencies are boosted during recording, and the opposite occurs during playback. This process improves sound quality, allows for longer recording times, and reduces noise from the record itself."

Attenuating the bass frequencies during recording permits the bass content to take up less space on the LP and makes it easier to track during playback, among other things.

@lewm

Because digital has a brick wall filter at around 22Hz, the response stops dead at the frequency.  ... digital goes very low until it doesn't.  This is not what happens in live music in any real world venue. I cannot get away from the fact that I hear what he was talking about.

I respect your analogue expertise, but your digital explanation seems to have a brick wall of its own!  Brick-wall filters have a very sharp cutoff ...

True, CD quality digital (Red Book specification) is sampled 44,100 times per second.  The highest sinusoidal frequency this can represent is about 22-kHz according to the Nyquist theorem.  To avoid digital artifacts above this frequency, early players did indeed incorporate a very sharp "brick-wall" filter at about 22-kHz to avoid a phenomenon called aliasing.  Smarter manufacturers like Philips expanded the sample rate on playback by creating four samples for every one on the disk.  Philips used a much gentler filter with much better sound quality even on their first players!  This is known as oversampling and is common today.

Of course, much higher recording sample rates are also used today (high-res) and these shift the filter requirement to much higher frequencies.

The ultimate digital format for playback is Direct Stream Digital which starts at 2.8224 MHz and only needs a very gentle low-pass filter to get rid of noise in the mega-Hz frequencies.

There is absolutely no technical reason why digital needs any low frequency cut-off at all. It can simply encode frequencies down to 0-Hz or DC!  So I think you have confused 22-Hz with 22-kHz.

Vinyl record playback systems, on the other hand, have to deal with all sorts of low frequency mechanical resonances which have to be kept below the human limit of audibility generally accepted to be 20-Hz.  I am sure you can list more of these than I can, but top of my list is tonearm resonance, then floor-borne shaking, bearing noise, platter resonance, chassis resonance, mounting board resonance, etc.  To avoid overloading speakers and amplifiers with inaudible low frequencies, analogue playback systems incorporate high pass filters a bit below 20-Hz.

Finally, when a vinyl master is made, the engineer tries to squeeze the grooves as tightly together as reasonably possible to make maximum use of the available 'real estate'.  Infrasonic frequencies would have very large excursions so are filtered out before even reaching the vinyl master.  So I would say "vinyl goes quite low until it doesn't"