How important is bass to you?

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.

Bdp24, I think you'd have to have similar amps, speakers and room to reproduce a live rock band sound. But personally that's not the standard I would use. Live band soundmen tend to push the bass and drums too loud, leaving too little space for the other instruments and voices. Try understanding the words sung at a live show--good luck. Also the overall volume is usually too loud.
I look for a system that will reproduce acoustic music well and figure it will do fine for the electric stuff. You're right, you can't get all the elements of a live performance in a living room reproduction. But we know there's a wide gap between the systems that come close and those that totally miss.

Very few musicians are even close to being audiophiles, many of them liking loudspeakers that sound like P.A.'s. The JBL L-100 was popular with them in the 70's (the band house I lived in in '71 had a pair of Altec A-7's---our P.A.---in the living room!), most of them listening to music on their computer speakers now, not caring enough about sound to have even an entry-level true hi-fi. But they care a lot about the sound of their recordings, particularly that their part is high enough in the mix!

You're of course right Tostadosunidos. Live sound using P.A.'s is no standard against which to judge hi-fi. It was simple when hi-fi started, as the sound of live orchestras and jazz bands were mostly purely acoustic, orchestras in concert halls and jazz in small clubs without much sound reinforcement. Recordings were simpler back them too, intended to capture the live sound of those group's performances. Such recordings were an appropriate source with which to judge the quality of reproduction.

Comparing recordings of modern bands to their live sound is comparing apples to oranges. Recordings are now often created first, and live performances are judged by how closely they come to matching the recordings, the exact opposite of the old system. But even in comparing a good recording of a, say, Bluegrass group to their live sound leaves me with the impression that the singer's voice and the musician's instruments are but a pale, ghostly apparition, lacking the body and substance---the "thereness"---of their live sound. How much of that is in what the recording is missing? How much of that is due to too little bass? Or group delay/phase shift? Or any other cause? It's from everything! But if a loudspeaker's output is already dropping off at 40Hz, and/or it's output at 40Hz contains high levels of distortion, both of which are more common than we like to admit, attending to the bass in a system is a good place to start.

My speakers (Dynaudio monitors) are listed as going down to 40Hz. When I added a subwoofer I was surprised at how different the sound was for frequencies above the low bass range. Voices went from slightly thin and metallic to very smooth and natural sounding. There seemed to be improvement far beyond the cross-over frequency. And of course the deep stuff is much better. Win/win as far as I can see (and hear).