“Real” bass vs. “Boom” — how do you know which?

Hi Shadorne, I agree that you appear to be a nerd when using meaurements. But one appears to be a fool if not using measurements. Because a fool denies knowledge and truth.

And audiophiles are fooling themselves if they believe that freq response and waterfall etc are not indicative of exactly what you are hearing and that changing these parameters is proufoundly and easily heard. That a good inroom response is important and is significancant to help us understand what we are hearing.

You do not need to be an audiophile, trained ear, musician to tune your system. We are indeed looking for just that, a good inroom response and one without ringing (including the speakers) and low freq modal problems. This is something that can be measured. All this technology can do is assist you in getting the most from your speakers and system. What more can you ask for?

How you get there and if you want to get there is your own concern regarding this issue. But there is no denying its importance. You are course free to explore all manner of speakers and amps and TTs etc but one of the fundemental goals remains the same.

That is of course if you as an audiophile believe that freq response and ringing are important. And that indeed these can be measured

Bob

What happens if the measurements look good but things still don't sound right? No two people hear exactly the same, do they?

Also, I know you can measure frequency response, but how do you measure imaging accuracy and soundstage?

You can baseline accurately on measurements certainly, but you still might have to tweak from there to get things to sound best to you. Measurements are still a partial solution at best.

Plus, you have to know what you are doing to some extent in order to get the right measurements and know how to interpret them. This is not a trivial thing for many who are not technically oriented and just want to enjoy the music.

In that case, if you have the money, it might be worth it to pay someone to do it for you.

Can you hear the *individual pitch* of bass notes? That may not be all there is to it, but it certainly is a very important and good way of knowing if your bass vs boom is good.

My suggestion is to play a few recordings with bass, and get very familiar with them. Jazz piano trios are great because there are only 3 instruments, i.e., it's easier to hear or follow the bass. Then make a change to your speaker and/or room set-up. You probably will know quite quickly if there is an improvement. If not, stop and try a different change to your set-up. If things do sound better after the first change, stop and become very familiar with the sound of these recordings again; then you can move on to making another set-up change. Go through this process until you feel satisfied (which may be never : -)

Caveat: the above way of tuning may take you a long time; and a lot of patience that you may not have. It has proven to be the most effective way of guaranteed improvement (without back tracking and getting confused) over time for me, however. One more thing: I suggest you get a notebook and keep track very specifically of the changes you make; and what you hear when you make the changes. BE SURE you keep track (again, VERY specifically) with what your reference set-up is as you go along...small things sometimes make a big difference...just unplugging your video, microwave, etc will result in different sound from your stereo, for example. This will help you document improvement over time, and will allow you to go back to a previous reference to check it again if you wish. Good luck!

Three things improved bass in my system making it more articulate (shorter) and dynamic - new interconnects, new amp and vibrapods under speakers. My old amp had boomy, woolly bass that covered most of the midrange. It got better after replacing power supply cap and much better with my new class D amp. Vibrapods made bass short and even ("musical" would be the right word) by eliminating floor resonances that spikes (placed on coins) failed to do. It is difficult to say how it should sound since concerts have own, often bad, acoustics. Headphones as reference might be good but some of them are bass heavy while the others (like my Sennheisers) are bass light.

Vibrapods at $6 a piece are the cheapest (and the greatest) improvement in my system. They come in 5 different weight ranges. It will be different for the two front ones and the back once - use scale to find exact load.

I like the Vibrapod idea if needed as a last resort in your case Rebbi in that you have wood floors and I am assuming not a solid concrete foundation.

With my 100s, in the 12X12 room located in teh basement with concrete foundation and thin carpet and padding, with speaks a good 3 feet out from rear wall, bass is full, defined and tight.

Same speakers in 12X12 room on ground level, a typical wood foundation with tile floors and speaks only 12 inches or so from rear wall due to WAF, bass is a good bit fatter and needs to be tamed.

This is the case in that room with both my OHM 100s and tiny but fairly wide range Dynaudio monitors, so I partially plug the ports with a pair of old socks with both when in that room