Bass rant

In my experience bass from small woofers, like what you find in most stand-mount two-ways, never sounds realistic. It doesn't matter how low the speaker goes, if there isn't enough surface area moving you won't get that rich and visceral sound of an upright bass or percussion instrument. For me at least I think this inherent compromise in many modern speaker designs leads to a nagging dissatisfaction with the lower frequencies.

At some point I suppose I'll just have to pony up and buy a speaker featuring big transducers and big cabinet volume.

Ethanh - You won't have to pony up much because older designs that feature the design characteristics you outline are not much in demand. I used an old pair of JBL L-200 speakers as my woofer section. These can be found for $1000 to $1200 per pair and are the basis for a great system. If you do your homework and find some good horns with compression drivers for the top, you will be most of the way there. Look into it.

Elizabeth, I mostly agree with you. I do listen to news and sports on the car radio though.

I think it is important to draw a distinction between three different categories of people who "decry their system's lack of bass," and to resist the temptation to lump them together.

One would be the kind of person who has a high quality system, who typically listens to high quality recordings, and who might be an Audiogon member. In that case, typically the complaint is well justified -- having a system that can reproduce deep bass accurately, especially at high volume levels (when called for by the recording) usually comes at a considerable cost, in terms of money, size, practicality, saf (spouse acceptance factor), and sometimes accuracy in other parts of the spectrum.

A second category would be home theatre enthusiasts, who want to duplicate movie sound effects as closely as possible to what they hear in a movie theatre.

The third (and I think the most common) category would be those who listen to music on low-fi or mid-fi systems, or in automobiles with absurd subwoofer arrangements. In my experience and that of several friends who have very high quality audio systems, that type of person, upon hearing a high quality system that can cleanly reproduce bass which is both deeper and louder than anything they have ever previously heard, will invariably immediately ask "where's the bass?"

The reason being, of course, that what they are accustomed to hearing is over-emphasized mid-bass (with non-existent deep bass, or deep bass with very highly levels of harmonic distortion), and their knowledge of the sound of live music, especially unamplified music, is limited or non-existent.

Regards,
-- Al