What is Tight Bass?

I am all about the effect of ports or sealed speaker construction as well as amplification, but the room resonance is the biggest deal of all. Not just by way of speaker/subwoofer placement, but whatever can be done to flatten the frequency and decay response will provide tight bass. 

Krell amps produce great bass because the power supply is so large, the damping factor isn't that high.

@ ohlala Bingo!

Bass traps for reducing bass anomalies and ringing due to large parallel surfaces (ceiling/floor is usually the first offender (and often shortest distance)) in most domestic settings has the largest effect in “tighter bass” IME.

Boundary interference is enemy No 1 for tight bass.

As for bass being “too tight” …well I’ve never heard that.

@tablejockey ...great example...👍.  As for tighten'd up, I like some of riffs that play with the 'qualities' of a bass line's notes... house and edm, other oddities.

Room resonance is just your shower writ Large(r)...

Next abode, I'm pondering running a test on the empty space.
Know upfront what you're faced with.
Move the bulky things in, run it again.
See what happened, and keep that in mind.

Only get one shot @ this sort of thing; got means 'n method.

Thanks to all for triggering that thought....*S*

Standing in closer proximity to an upright bass playing spells everything most any hifi speaker can’t reproduce. At one point I walked around an upright bass on a theater stage during a rehearsal, and in conjunction what I’ve heard at quite a few live concerts was struck by the sheer physical, resonating fullness and immersive and harmonically rich presence it produced. This wasn’t "tightness" but more like the very opposite, and if a speaker was actually able to faithfully reproduce it I’m quite most would claim it to be loose, underdamped bass, when in fact this is what it can sound like for real.

I vital aspect here is the accompanying physicality, which most domestic speakers simply cannot come close to replicating, let alone effortlessly. Indeed, "fullness" for it to be felt fairly authentic with an instrument like an upright bass requires lots of displacement and headroom, and therefore it’s not a scalable feature of sound reproduction that one can successfully minimize. Perhaps some tube amps with their typically looser and warmer bass reproduction is a compensation of sorts for a lack of displacement in most speakers, that adds to the sensation of the lower frequencies being more authentic or natural sounding.

Many hifi setups strike me as sounding overdamped in the bass and yet at the same time too forced or "pulsating" even. With electronic non-acoustic music this mayn’t be a hindrance, in fact it can give the opposite impression and being an advantage, but with acoustic instruments (and environments) in particular many if not most simply fall short. To make matters worse lesser bass reproduction (be that for reasons of poor implementation or other) has a tendency to be gained down for it not to be too conspicuous, which further robs the overall sound of a foundation and fullness that should ideally be present.

Using an active setup myself (with prodigious displacement, high eff. and headroom) I’ve sometimes found the subs gain to be a little tricky depending on the material that is being played, though I’m fairly close now to a fixed setting that serves both one and the other genre, or one that may prioritize a range of music slightly more than others if not being a more balanced "middle road" setting. Classical music generally will happily take more sub gain for it to simply sound more real (mostly we’re only talking increments of 0.25dB’s here, so it’s close, but you’d be surprised to find them audible nonetheless), whereas this higher gain setting can potentially be detrimental to other, electronic genres. If one day I’m in a particular classical mood the subs gain may be increased a bit, but mostly it’s a one-setting-fits-most call.

I’m using a Belles SA30 Class A power amp (30 watts) for the frequency range ~600Hz on up by a 111dB sensitive horn/driver combo, and high power Class D variants for the spectrum below with a sensitivity rating here at 97 and 100dB respectively. Total output capacity sits at +2kW per channel - again, fully actively coupled, so no intervening passive cross-overs to compromise an amp's power delivery and control over the driver. That’s one of the charms with active configuration: use Class A where it matters the most and needs the less wattage, and the higher power amps where it’s more in demand.