Bass, more or less?

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.

Greggdeering
Is 100% correct.

Getting excessive bass is very hard, most speakers that are well designed can accomplish it with the best match in electronics, but its more about the room environment. This is where you see people drop 50,000 on a pair of speakers and ask "wheres the bass"? Funny to me some people with this kinda money decide to go out and even attempt speakers of this money yet can't afford to or don't want to use a dedicated tuned room!

Honestly some recordings can be just "That bad" but its rare, and unless you are literally almost scared your bass can take the room down around you, you are not producing enough of it to represent full scale of what music is. Go sit in front of a drum set, if you think your speaker is not producing it with that authority, than its simple its not or the room is not. By the way there are many more variables like I said such as cables, source, matching, and all the way down to the recording.

Its actually interesting because I could take an old Beatles album and play it on some peoples systems, with virtually no impact, sounds good, maybe magical mids etc... But not like its concert capable.. Put it on my system, and its capable of putting you thru the backwall like a shotgun just went off! This is where you truly experience full range down low, no distortion, no bloat, just pure power and authority.

>Let me first say that I have a pair of Sonus Faber Guarneri that I have owned for several years now. I am driving them with a Mcintosh 2102 (100 watts per side). I recently read an interview with Sonus faber founder Franco Serblin in wich he made an interesting statement. He said "The search for perfect bass is futile, because if you want more you miss it and when you have it it disturbs you".

I disagree since building my Linkwitz Orions where the bass sounds natural and covers the whole musical spectrum. Yo Dipole bass is directional (theoretically no output 90 degrees off-aixs, -6dB @ 60 degrees, -3dB @ 45 degrees) and in-room measurements confirmed that they weren't stimulating my height mode. Power response is also more in line with the rest of the spectrum because they retain a directivity index of 4.8dB instead of dropping to unity with equal output in all directions.

Parametric equalization with conventional speakers helps a lot too albeit over a smaller listening area.

I'd expect the Earl Geddess multiple woofer strategy (deployed in the Audio Kinesis Swarm) and throw-catch double bass array (An array of woofers on the front wall spaced to create an essentially planar wave which is caught by a matching array setup on the back wall operating 180 degrees out of phase plus a time delay to accomodate transit time across the room).

The key here is "woofer" not "sub woofer" because you're trying to cover most of the modal region not just the last octave.

>I'd expect the Earl Geddess multiple woofer strategy (deployed in the Audio Kinesis Swarm) and throw-catch double bass array (An array of woofers on the front wall spaced to create an essentially planar wave which is caught by a matching array setup on the back wall operating 180 degrees out of phase plus a time delay to accomodate transit time across the room)

to meet or exceed what I get.

I need to edit more carefully.

Boomy inacurate base is tiresome; clean, tight, acurate base is not. In fact, it can be just as ingaging as midrange. You just the right speakers and poweer to drive them.