Eric, have you heard the bass tunable Vandersteen subs? There are also others out there that have Bass EQ built in. Even with the crossover you can't properly integrate the subs unless you have a full octave overlap. I''ve spoken over the years with many speaker designers who offer sat/subs and they privately agreed that it's not a proper way, but they do it because it's close and it's what so many seem to want. I get that. We all know that HT is a different breed so they get away with it and folks just assume that it works for real music, but it can't. Not every room needs bass traps. I've had them in my room and I didn't like them. Erik, I get that you believe in bass traps and digital eq because it works for you. Why do you lump larger speakers with crap bass? My Treo's have wonderful bass as it's tight and highly musical. I just want more. Bass traps didn't give me more, nor can it. Physically you are limited by your speakers. If a speaker only goes down into the 30's then another device can't make it go lower. That's just physics. If I'm off base, please share the scientific proof. I am going to move up to Quatro's because I want MORE bass and dynamics. There are various ways physically to do this. Adding a subwoofer within the speaker is one that I personally like, because it's built for THAT speaker and the amp is designed for that speaker. It's room tunable, but not in the digital domain. When set up properly it sound like a point source (what many call it, including many reviewers as well as manufacturer's of other equipment who own them or the 5CT').
Just so I know where you are coming from, what do you consider great amounts of bass? Amounts of bass and quality of bass are two totally separate things? I've personally never heard smaller case speaker be able to produce true low bass. Physically it can't happen as there are still limits to how low they can go and then you have excursion problems in how distorted they will be by trying to produce larger quantities of bass. Maybe you are talking about mid bass? If so, I get it. Every speaker designer has to do trade offs. It's part of what there design and marketing process is. Bass done properly is very expensive and the better quality AND quantity will be paid for. There is just no way around this. I've never hear anyone in the industry say different since 1969 when I started out. Any designer of any component I've met always talks about physical limitations due to technology at hand. The laws of physics can't be broken.
I do appreciate the fact that you love bass traps and digital eq, taylor and Seleh speakers. It's awesome that you do. Passion is important in being an audiophile, but I went to the Selah website and saw their 2 way speakers go down to the 50hz range at best before trailing off. Even their largest 3 way only goes down to 35hz and that's already -3db. At 30hz it's -10db and that's for the floor standing speakers not bookshelves that we are talking about in this thread. Just curious as we all have a different meaning of quality, low bass I think. Thanks.
