Bass Response and concrete floors

I agree with Karls, Maxgain, Mg123 that room resonance is usually a poor way to get base. Generally, if you buy well tuned and well designed speakers, you are going to try to use diffusers, ect... to reduce the effects of the room. The problem with relying on your room/floor for bass is that you have no way of knowing what frequencies are going to be reinforced and how big the peak(s) will be. Certainly it is not going to have anything to do with the music and everything with the rather arbitrary dimensions and construction of your room/floor. Nearly all rooms add some bass due to standing waves and generally it's something to remove. Get a speaker that performs well into the low 40hzs or if you are a real bass fan get a sub. Relying on room resonance for bass is going to get you a mushy, flabby, poorly defined lower octive of music. In fact, it won't be music so much as a hum punctuated by an arbitrary peak frequency. You don't want your listening room to resemble typical car audio, eh?

Sincerely, I remain

Agree with Clueless, Karls etc.

Having a resonating floor helps you to feel the bass you don't hear. Take your feet off the floor and you will see what I mean. In some rooms you will not hear low bass, but feeling it is a kind of [poor] substitute.

Having said that, a concrete floor will improve what you do hear. As stated, a flexible floor just sucks bass.

Redkiwi-That can't be, nothing in audio sucks!!! lol

Tim

The guys are right. Wood floors equal bloated, poorly defined bass. Kinda like using the loudness button. Concrete will seem to yield less bass, but it will be far more accurate and controled. You are lucky to have the concrete. Somebody else said it, but get monitors that will be good to around 40-50Hz and add a sub or subs below that and you'll have the best of both worlds. I've got a concrete floor and use a pair of Titan II subs with Jaguars. My bass measures and sounds flat to under 20Hz. It is so cool and natural. Really beats to the boom effect.

And now for something completely different. In the brochure "31 Secrets to Better Sound" from Anantgarde USA, it says the opposite. They recommend installing a wooden floor over concrete. He describes concrete as "colder less involving sound" vs. wood as "warmer more compelling". He says concrete imparts a "whitish coloration" to the sound.

He's not talking about a bouncy floor, but a well supported wooden floor, nailing down 2x4s on their sides and covering with hardwood or thick subflooring, then carpet. He says "you want to keep the solidity of the concrete surface, only change it's timbre." That seems to make sense. The guys at Michael Green's told me the same thing.

So does that work? I don't know. Hard to conduct that experiment.I have a concrete floor and I think it sounds pretty good, On the other hand I have a wooden ceiling made of 1x6 interlocking bead board. I may try the wooden floor but I'm worried if the basement ever leaks I'll have water trapped under the floor.

It looks like Krell is the only one so far who has actually done it, but I'm confused by the comment "I agree with Mg123 about boomy mid bass in that I have never had such a great sounding room." Do you have boomy mid bass or does the room sound great?