How important is bass to you?

With the human voice musicians are readily classified as tenors, sopranos, bass, altos, etc., but in popular music combos only the bass player gets a specific mention for the range of their instrument. The conclusion is unavoidable -- the bass is the most important element in popular music (other than the vocal).

Can you imagine the great Larry Graham singing "I'm gonna add some upper midrange to make it easy to move your feet"? Maybe in you're alternate reality, but not in mine!

if bass really matters, why do so many people buy stand-mounted "monitor" speakers? They don't sound much like real music, to me, because of the lack of bass.

Enter the ubiquitous subwoofer.

Every time I enter a club in which live music is already being performed, I am struck by how much more bass is in the room than what I hear in the listening rooms of audiophiles (including my own) and hi-fi shops. A lot of that is due to the multiple 15" woofers in the club's sound system of course, some from the club's room itself, as well as the SPL common these days. But it's more than that. Reproduced music rarely if ever has as much "body" as does live, sounding eviscerated. There is still a long way to go to fully replicate the sound of live music.

Citing the sound of live music heard through a sound-reinforcement system rather than purely acoustically raises the valid question of whether or not that qualifies as a standard against which to compare music's reproduction. Recordings after all are made with mics very different from those used in sound-reinforcement systems, for starters. But I think that is how most of us hear the majority of our live music. Besides which, live music heard acoustically also has more of that body I'm talking about.

Bass is just as important as the rest of the spectrum. When I purchased my JL sub I found I was getting slight headaches. After adjusting the extreme low frequencies down to nearly -6dB my headaches are gone and the bass still sounds excellent.