I'm with Stringreen, "without bass there is no foundation." Yah, the midrange and highs need to be "right", that goes without saying but without good bass, you limit your music to small ensembles. No way a speaker that only goes down to 40 or 50 Hz is going to do justice to full orchestra or large scale music.
This "one-note" bass people often complain about is almost always coming from a ported speaker which are the most common. They're a design compromise and even the ones that go reasonably low fail to deliver good pitch definition.
The only good/great bass I've heard over the years has come from transmission-line or sealed boxes. Transmission-lines are usually relatively easy to drive but can be rather large and expensive to build. Sealed box designs are less efficient so need more power to drive them. Other than REL's, most subs that do good bass are sealed and have lots of power.
Good bass not only adds power and weight to music, it also opens up the soundstage and reveals small details and nuances that make a performance believable. If you haven't heard it then you won't know what I'm talking about and you can go on kidding yourself into believing that the midrange is all important but once you've heard what good bass adds to the music, you won't want to give it up.
This "one-note" bass people often complain about is almost always coming from a ported speaker which are the most common. They're a design compromise and even the ones that go reasonably low fail to deliver good pitch definition.
The only good/great bass I've heard over the years has come from transmission-line or sealed boxes. Transmission-lines are usually relatively easy to drive but can be rather large and expensive to build. Sealed box designs are less efficient so need more power to drive them. Other than REL's, most subs that do good bass are sealed and have lots of power.
Good bass not only adds power and weight to music, it also opens up the soundstage and reveals small details and nuances that make a performance believable. If you haven't heard it then you won't know what I'm talking about and you can go on kidding yourself into believing that the midrange is all important but once you've heard what good bass adds to the music, you won't want to give it up.