Bass Response and concrete floors

Using the floor to radiate bass is certainly one way of getting bass, but it is a LOUSY way to do it. It means you are driving resonance into the floor (or more accurately, driving the floor into resonance), and the frequency response and transient response will be horrible compared to being on a concrete floor. Be thankful, very thankful, that you have a concrete floor, and wish that you had concrete walls as well. In the meantime, buy a really high quality monitor like the C3, a really good set of stands, and a REL Stadium III; this combination will absolutely blow away the C5, not only in bass but in every other aspect as well.

Herman, they are selling you something, and that something is more bass ("warmth"), but you can't have it for free. You are still going to pay for it in loss of transient response and extra resonance. The fact that they want a slightly different kind of floor only means that they want to shift the resonant frequencies to a different spectrum. There is no magic here: wood floors resonate, concrete pads don't. Yes, some resonances are more euphonic than others, but that doesn't change the fact that they are resonances. Still far better to start with a nonresonant room (note that resonance and reverberation are two entirely different things; a room with good reverberation characteristics does not have to have floor/wall/ceiling resonances at all...) and use subs to create real bass. But I'm not surprised that Avantgarde has this approach; their horns resonate like crazy and I'm sure they are used to tuning their speakers for a (more or less) flat response in spite of the response variations the resonances create. But the time domain isn't fooled by this, and neither is the ear.

Abstract7: I would agree that bare concrete is suboptimal from an overall acoustics point of view. However, most concrete floors in homes or studios are going to be padded and carpeted, or covered directly with wood flooring without a subfloor (as mine are). Both these coverings work well. What is being disucssed here is the physical resonance of a suspended floor and the severe damage to frequency response and transient response that accompanies that resonance. There isn't a good-sounding studio in the world that has a flimsy, flexible floor. The huge advantage of concrete pads is that they drain the physical vibration of the loudspeaker cabinet into the ground, and prevent it from causing physical resonance of the floor/walls/ceiling. And that is all we're saying here. The reverberation characteristics of the room are a very important issue, but one that is totally separate from the issue of eliminating loudspeaker-driven, structure-borne vibration and resonance.

It is unfortunately little understood that the physical coupling between loudspeaker and floor can transmit MANY times greater sound energy into the structure than you could EVER achieve through airborne sound transmission. And if it isn't drained into the ground, it's going to reradiate from the structure back into the room. IMO, it is the job of the playback system and listening room to give you what is on the recording in as pure and noncolored a fashion as possible, and the only way to do this is to keep the room from literally being a sound source of its own.