How much Boom Boom do you like in your bass?

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I'm a latecomer to this thread - just been on two weeks' holiday! Lucky me.

Anyway, we have a reference for bass and that is in the not so obvious midrange too! Most midrange instruments - for me, especially piano - have harmonics in the bass range. If your midrange (or any instruments for that matter) sound wrong, there is always the possibility that you've got the bass wrong.

Yes - we all love fast, punchy bass - but that is a side effect of getting the bass right. In order to get it right, listen in not so likely places.

Case in point - once I was listening to a flute solo and realised I had not turned my sub on!

Actually, this is very, very wise, Adam. Check this guitar recording of a few chords played on my Gibson SJ200 Custom Cutaway I posted in Jeff's DOTSM thread ages ago. Point is, it's from 0 - 22.05KHz. Just look at the bass energy it produces! And look how low a frequency it goes down to. In fact, it covers the whole audible spectrum.:eek:

I'm sure some will be pretty surprised to see that.

The 2nd is from 0 to 4KHz of the same chords - a zoom in on the low frequency content if you like. And yes, the room was extremely quiet when recorded. The guitar is a big bodied jumbo, so it'll knock out more low frequency content than most, I guess. But I was a little surprised by how much.

I think this outlines the need for a good sub (unless your main speakers go really low anyway)... just imagine the graph for a real bass/double bass/what have you.
 

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I was gonna say, I have some dinosaur eggs and dung that I have to periodically take down and polish. After that they look really great, you could even say they shine!:D
 
The problem is all of those digital processors and parametric EQ's completely butcher all the dynamic subtleties that you get with really high end gear.

Every DSP based system I've ever heard has been pretty lifeless.
Jeff, I find your comments very interesting, considering that you have listened to a large number of different systems. What I find particularly interesting is the comment about dynamic subtleties. I am theorizing here and may well be wrong, but is it possible that those digital processors optimize the response for frequency sweeps, which are essentially concatenated sine waves, missing the fact that music is anything but steady-state sine waves.

What we need now is for you to visit Jonathan's man-cave.

BTW Justin, I don't like "Boom Boom" in my bass; I like "Thump Thump". I find it very satisfying to listen to a marching band and experience the thump in the chest from the large drum.
 
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BTW Justin, I don't like "Boom Boom" in my bass; I like "Thump Thump". I find it very satisfying to listen to a marching band and experience the thump in the chest from the large drum.

Bernard, do you not mean David? It's his thread...
 
Hello,
Today I picked up a Depth to replace my broken Paradigm Subwoofer I had alluded to a few pages back. In a word, wow. Truly an outstanding transducer. While I am sure the "i" upgrades make it only better, I could not be more pleased.

If the changes had been as transformative as the Descent vs Descent i (one amp vs 3 amps), I would have gone for the revision with the attendant added cost. Going from a ported beast (Servo 15) to a comparatively tiny sealed brick of a thing at first was disconcerting. I honestly cannot believe how good it sounds.
Cheers,
ML
 
The problem is all of those digital processors and parametric EQ's completely butcher all the dynamic subtleties that you get with really high end gear.

Every DSP based system I've ever heard has been pretty lifeless.

Jeff, I find your comments very interesting, considering that you have listened to a large number of different systems. What I find particularly interesting is the comment about dynamic subtleties. I am theorizing here and may well be wrong, but is it possible that those digital processors optimize the response for frequency sweeps, which are essentially concatenated sine waves, missing the fact that music is anything but steady-state sine waves.

What we need now is for you to visit Jonathan's man-cave.
...
Well, Jeff is invited to visit when he’s in town for CEDIA, so hopefully he’ll be able to report back his impressions (good, bad or otherwise) of my setup.

Jeff, I’ll agree with you that Parametric EQ applied across the entire band is not the greatest. It solves many, many problems, but then adds some new ones, such as phase shifts at many points in the spectrum.
Even my $5K DriveRack 4800 speaker processor, which does better than most parametric EQ’s is no match for a phase-coherent EQ process based on FIR processes (e.g. Audyssey).

I would contest the ‘lifeless’ part, as if one is indeed fixing serious room modes, it will sound quite different, with much less room-induced overhang and ringing. These changes can be interpreted as being ‘less’, well, because they are indeed less ringing and less resonance build-up.

Bernard, as for whether its music vs tones, I’m sorry, don’t buy that. No science to support that contention. Please read up on modern multi-frequency tone burst measurement process.

Now, a user running the Stereophile (sine) test tones and using an SPL meter to try and manually adjust an EQ will never yield good results.

What does yield good results is:
  • A multi-point measurement process that takes 6 or more measurements of each speaker in the room and applies advanced algorithms to integrate the overall room response into the filter coefficient calculations.
  • A ‘filter’ that is effective in both frequency and time-domains (implies an FIR-based corrector)

In practice, the above results in over 90 individual measurements (10 mic locations X (7.1 speakers + paired rears)) feeding into the room analysis model. No manual process will ever support that.

Trust me, I tried; I used to do six measurements of three speakers (18 measurements) and try and correct based on the modes I would ‘see’ in the charts. So I was more attentive to this than most, yet the automated Audyssey Pro results are miles and miles ahead.

I cannot stand my system with Audyssey off. It lacks clarity and there are clear room and speaker resonances that ‘smear’ the results.
With it on, the cohesion in spectrum and time, as well as the astoundingly accurate soundstage (2ch or multichannel) makes listening a real pleasure.

I’ll trot out my favorite analogy on this topic. Room correction is much like eye correction (using Glasses). It vastly improves one’s ability to see. And just like I listen with Audyssey on, I watch movies with my glasses on as well. Both for the same reason, I can perceive more of what’s ‘there’.
 
Jeff,

Sounds like a good opportunity to profile Jonathan's room in your magazine!


Since the room impacts 25-50% of the sound, you can get ahead of the mainstream audio media with this.

I am sure many would love to hear your thoughts on Jonathan's room with your reference gear such as the act 2 or burmester, with and without the correction stuff in the chain.
 
I am definitely going to try and do that when in Atlanta. We have an upcoming article on the guy that has the custom made bubinga CLX's that are on the MartinLogan site. He spent quite a bit of time on room issues, associated gear and setup.

Seriously, it was the most musically realistic system I've ever heard.

I was very fond of the Meridian active speakers, as you may recall, we gave them product of the year last year, because in my awful living room the DSP processing did amazing things and that is what most users are up against.

Meridian and Sonicweld make two of the best active systems I've heard, but the nuance that you pay for with gear at the end of the spectrum really gets lost when chopped up in a bunch of processors. It's like the difference between great digital and great analog. Digital gets really close, but in the end, well recorded analog still wins at the end of the day.

So, I'll be curious to give it a listen....
 
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