You don't lack bass, you have too much treble
One of the biggest surprises in audio and acoustics is how damping a room with treatments makes small speakers sound so much bigger. Yes, you get a broader, deeper soundstage but you also seem to get a lot more bass, more power, more extension!!
What's going on?
What happened is your room was too bright. The overall balance was too heavy on the mid and treble so as a result your systems balance was off.
For this reason I often suggest before A'goners start chasing bigger and bigger speakers, that they think about the room first, add damping and diffusion and then go back to thinking about the bass.
Not saying you don't need a bigger speaker, but that some rooms may never have a big enough speaker in them due to the natural reflective properties.
About Bass ... I had 20 hertz bass in my headphone...I hear bass through my body because of skelton resonance ... Unlike any other headphones i listened too... I had clear 50 hertz with my small speakers with no inflow of bass in the mid frequencies... Very good bass ...But no deep bass ... I think the balance between frequencies matter as much than going from 50 hertz to 20 but with no good balance... I live very well with my small speakers... For sure it will be better with a bigger set of speakers or with sub.... But i listen in nearfield and i cannot put bigger speakers on my desk nor wish to accomodate a well coupled sub... I felt no frustration in this situation because the speakers are so well balanced and good on all others acoustics factors... But for sure my AKG K340 beat my speakers at the end... but i dont felt any evident defect when i listened my speakers ( i use them more than the headphone which are reserved for sacred listening ceremonies.) My key word is then more "balance" than "bass" ...
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...and I'll vote with @jkf011 , ultimately. Too much I relate to the 'basser's that cruise about, megawatt subs up to anything loose in the ride rattling... Great for one's GI tract, I'd guess...not my problem, tho'...🤷♂️ Dial them in to what seems to fit the mix and/or program. I can dish out plenty, but know when it's 'quite enough, thenkewu....' Been around enough garage bands, gone to enough concerts, rattled enough glassware...😏 @mahgister 20hz in your 'phones? Take care there, Rock'nRoller.... ;) Better off making self a tactile bass shaker suit..... "See the man vibin' down the street....'citing all the windows he meets... Mahg's the Bassman....vibin' all the fans..." (Appropo....playlist just brought up N. Youngs' Rockin' in the Free World....*L*) |
my K340 is an hybrid with two dedicated cells and with an internal grid of 5 Helmholtz tuned resonators separating perfectly among other effects bass and mids and making this phone to give deep bass without flowing interaction with usual bass.. Not only that but i modified and optimized them with 6 mods... The main one is i put inside and outside anti resonance materials and dampers of two kind to comnplement each others ... By bone resonances i feel deep bass with my chest and feet... is it 20 hertz ? i did not measure it but i listen big church organ music of Bach and some organ go down 8 hertz... I am pretty sure i hear then 20 hertz or near it with my feet ... I disliked all headphones i bough... Save the K340 i like a lot after 6 months of intensive studies about it even with the original paper of the founder of AKG who design it... I spoke with Kennerton representant about hybrid headphones as the K340... Because i asked them how they will build one... They said it is too costly to design right because of the research implkied, too costly to make and too litlle profit... This design complexities is the reason it takes me time to improve them so much that they are my audiophile reference now not my small modified speakers so much i love them ..
By the way if the recording make it possible i hear the soundfield out of my head...Not inside my head...
My best to you my friend ...
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@mijostyn very good points. I have bass traps in the corners behind my speakers, they actually help greatly with the room. I've listened with and without them and the really help I also use a Krell KBX electronic balanced crossover designed specifically for my speakers (incorporates some wave shaping circuitry) with low and high adjustments that I use to tune slightly. Trying to get the flat response first and then adjust slightly for effect. I am sure that I can do more. Room treatment is hit or miss with no refunds if you miss and most are seriously ugly. But, sometimes worth a try. I know McIntosh labs actually have a equalizer that might help that has balanced in and outputs. I am looking into that or some other. But, I'm pretty much "there" with my system otherwise. I just replaced the panels on my Martin Logan Monolith III speakers and upgraded the woofers to the Pearless woofers. Nice! Those speakers are still outstanding and with the Krell crossover, I don't hear any gaps or timing issues between the panels and the woofers. I'm sure subwoofers may help, but I don't feel I'm missing anything. Especially when I go to my dealer friends and listen to my music on their equipment with subwoofers. But, one never knows whats in the future. I've tried subwoofers added before, and couldn't dial them in correctly to the extent they weren't hurting the sound more. But I know there are some really nice subwoofer systems out there. Also, My Audio Research REF 10 pre-amp is simply outstanding an well no, not changing that anytime soon. Thanks for the suggestions, enjoy
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Another side of the same coin: If your system is well-balanced and you add subwoofers thereby extending the response an octave or more on the low end, the net result may no longer sound balanced. In this case, it can make sense to flex your DIY muscles a bit and add a rear-firing tweeter whose response is tailored to filling in the top octave where your main tweeter is beaming. In my opinion. Duke |
@audiokinesis My favorite all time speakers, the Snell A/IIIs used that trick, also contributed significantly to imaging. |
@erik_squires, Omigosh yes, what a brilliant-in-concept and magnificent-in-execution speaker the Type A/III was! In 1988 or thereabouts I submitted a DIY construction article to SpeakerBuilder Magazine that was essentially a variation on the Type A format, but unfortunately they weren’t interested. |
@mahgister *S* Just wanted to register some concern, but thought your usual approach to items audio would prevail... Having had some 'sudden surprises' with headphones over my times, I've taken to initially park them 'off ear, dj style' if doing something novel. Beats throwing them across the room...*L* Best & better back 'atcha', J |
Really kind of surprised at some of the nay-sayers on this thread. I may need to reword some of my original points. Point 1: The room and speaker placement choices act like tone controls. That's not all they do, but this is a very important point. The size of the room and the speakers in them play major roles in the perceived balance between bass, midrange and treble. Point 2: Balance is what matters, not necessarily absolute levels. Point 3: I've heard modest 2-way systems with ~ 7" woofers transformed by room treatments in smaller rooms. This isn't just theory, it's practical experience that good room treatment was a wonderful idea. Point 4: There are other ways to solve your lack of bass, including of course adding a subwoofer. This thread is not trying to claim there is only one way to deal with an issue, but I specifically asked the reader to "think about" room treatments early rather than late in their process. |
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@fynnegan Room treatments can be removable and are able to be customized to blend in with the décor if need be. Even a nice thick rug on a bare hard floor can make a difference. I think anyone who loves great sound owes it to themselves to learn about and implement room treatments, you won't believe how much it will improve the sound of your system. |
@fynnegan It is absolutely true that we don't all get to build a room just for our stereo, but I think many of us have at least some options in choosing to treat or add curtains or rugs. My point to this discussion was to inform readers of how the speaker room interaction matters above the bass frequencies so they'd hopefully expand the choices they can make to get better balance. |
@minorl The problem for most audiophiles is they have no idea what they are listening to. They have no reference. The best thing you can do is invest in a usb microphone and an acoustic measurement program. Then when you get a equalizer you will know exactly what to do. If you get a room control system it will do it for you and probably do it better, certainly much faster. Digital processors can also determine launch times and correct delays. ' I do not care for a flat amplitude curve and most people don't either, but the right curve is not far off flat. We have been dealing with target curves for 30 years now and we know what suits most people in residential situations and that is a boost below 100 hz and a slow cut above 1000 Hz so the 20 kHz is down between 6 and 12 dB. This is a good starting point for most systems. The problem is that if you do not have subwoofers the low end boost can really increase distortion in most woofers at volume. Full range drivers are at severe risk. @erik_squires When you limit reflective sound in any room the sound obviously becomes more localized to the speaker. The speaker gets sonically smaller. If you treat a room by hardening the walls and removing the carpet, then yes, you can make a speaker sound larger. That would be an odd approach that few of us would take. My suggestion to you is to put the carpet back down. |
For the record, I'm not just spouting theory from books or an AI app. I've heard this work many times. You are missing almost all the context from the title of the thread and the additional context I added in other messages. When I say that absorption can make a speaker sound bigger I'm specifically talking about their bass output. Says so right there:
The common acoustic absorber has two functions and you are only thinking about one of them, which is about reflections and imaging. The other function, perhaps the most researched and most important is in providing band-limited absorption to the total energy in a room. This function is why high end panels have charts of Sabines vs. frequency. If you can hear how wide and tall your speakers are then you probably need new speakers. So, now that we've established I'm not actually talking about height, width and depth of your speakers but how much bass they seem to put out (see title of thread, again) you need to consider that most acoustic panels are limited to the mid to treble ranges. So, then what happens when you take mid and treble energy out of a room? You end up with more bass. It's like taking out the veggies from a stew until you only have the meat left. Is there less stew? Sure, but now it's beef stew and that's better than it was before. As also mentioned, so before you go that route, this is not the only approach possible. I mention it to help A'goners consider multiple options. Since taming coherent reflections is also a good thing, this approach may have multiple benefits.
Which is the opposite of what I'm recommending, but you do you. |
Brightness isn’t just caused by the equation of the speaker’s frequency response to room size and dampening ratio as Erik mentions, but also due to other forms of noise in the chain. This could be found through: - Poor resonance control in the speakers, rack, and components where vibration induces slurring, peaks, and nulls of certain frequencies. Great resonance control will result in much improved image solidity, making for more audible, impactful bass /and less noise through the rest of the frequency spectrum so sonics are more effortless and easier to discern. - Jitter and EMI are usual culprits that induce high frequency noise into a system to a point where people find their system to be bright, peaky, piercing, and /or fatiguing. In such case it may be improved by using better components or cables, or introducing technologies or accessories that are designed to lower noise floor. - Poor speaker and amplifier matching is a common challenge I see my customers and others face. Often times, people think their amps can properly drive a speaker just by looking at the specs. Some speakers require a lot of power, and it’s easy for many that are uninformed to look at the speaker sensitivity to the watts of an amplifier and be done with it. Sometimes they get lucky, but in most times, amplifiers cannot fully handle the impedance set by the speakers. Klipsch are great examples, since I know that while they claim to be of high impedance, many of them actually have an impedance dip in the midbass. Regardless, a few may look at the Klipsch’s sensitivity (say high 90s dB) and nominal impedance (usually 8 Ohm or greater) and believe a low power OTL amp would work well. Well, they’re wrong, as the OTL amp can’t handle the impedance dips, and this further makes Klipsch speakers sound “bullhorn-ish”. Sadly, even many solid state power amplifiers don’t deliver the high current needs to truly drive and control smaller speakers, which tend to be lower in sensitivity and lower in impedance. I’ve in many times guided customers to better amplification that simply wakes the speakers up to the point where no subs or larger speakers are needed. Case in point, Erik suggests a very good point on treating the room to address and optimize full-range frequency delivery, but it is one of many ways to address it. The whole system’s performance depends on any and all bottlenecks being addressed to a certain level. |
+1 to the OP and to blisshifi 😊 |
@erik_squires And just what do you think you are going to do about bass in any normally sized residential space? Most audiophiles know that bass below 100 Hz is poorly localized. The dimensions of the room are of primary importance followed by the number and positioning of bass/subwoofer drivers. After that it is all about crossover programming and digital signal processing backed up by a lot of power. Bass has nothing to do with size. Low bass is more about feeling, you either feel it or you don't. Most people don't. The initial impact of a bass drum occurs at higher frequencies. The vibration of the bass drum heads after that impact occurs at very low frequencies as long as the drum does not have it's damper on. On Brittany Howard's Jaime the first cut History Repeats has a beautifully recorded bass drum with it's damper off. You can feel the pressure waves after the initial strike tapering over about 10 cycles. I can see it in my windows in the right light. It is not something you hear. There is absolutely nothing you can do in a room to make this happen other than blow out a wall. The problem for most audiophiles is that most systems do not project the power needed to reproduce this kind of bass. What a speaker measures at one meter means absolutely nothing. Most audiophiles do not even know what they are missing because they have never heard a system reproduce low bass like this. In a 16 X 30 foot room It takes at least two 15" subwoofers each powered by at least 2000 watts. For really low distortion four 15" subwoofers. The same applies for Imaging. Most have never heard a system image at the state of the art because very few systems can do it. If you want BIG sound under all circumstances get line source speakers such a big Maggies or 8 foot Sound Labs. Line sources composed of multiple drivers like the old Nearfield Pipedreams do not work well. It has been tried many times without much success. Point source speakers always produce a small image as if you are seated far away, even the big ones. What you see affects what you hear. When listening for imaging characteristics you always close your eyes. Happy Saint Patrick's Day to all you Irish folks |
Wow, @mijostyn you keep arguing about things I'm not talking about so I'm going to just let you have that conversation over in the corner by yourself. Have a great weekend. |
