Audiophile Bass?

I agree, delkal97.  Bass should be a part of the music, not a dominating force.

I like bread and butter, I like toast and jam.  One of the most surprisingly things I've found in a sea of surprising things is how much bass that is on the CD is missing in action, which I attribute entirely to the fluttering of the disc during play and stray scattered laser light. Yes, I know what you're thinking - "but my system already sounds fabulous."

delka and baclagg a proper subwoofer system requires a cross over with both low pass and high pass filters. They can then be tailored to match perfectly at the 6 dB down point that sounds best. 1/2 the advantage of subwoofers is taking the bass away from the satellite speakers. Just because a speaker rolls off at 40 Hz does not mean that it is not trying to go down to DC. It is. How many threads have you seen about pumping woofers? When a woofer bounces around like this it is Doppler distorting every other note carried by the woofer. Sometimes you can even hear the woofer flutter. For vinyl users this is a major problem. Getting concert level bass off a turntable is no easy feat. 
Papa, again, accurate bass is accurate for any bass. The best systems will do an acoustic bass just as well as an earth quake. I do not hype anything for movies. I just change inputs. I don't change anything for acoustic jazz.
I will also add that I had a hard time getting things near perfect until digital bass management came along. Most audiophiles particularly the vinylistas  have never heard this work. I could never get concert level bass off a turntable until I got a digital subsonic filter that does 80 dB/Oct from 18 Hz. Instead of spending hours critically listening and tuning I just plug in a microphone spend 5 minutes taking a measurement, plug in crossover frequencies and slope, done.

I suspect that bass has different meanings to different people.  There is the bass of the kettle drum in a symphony that has both tone and impact (this may be the tight clean bass that is referenced?).  There is the bass at a club that goes boom, boom, boom and mostly just has impact. There is the bass of the kick drum and bass guitar at a live show in a club that has both impact and tone when played back through a good PA system.  And there is everything in between.

For bass at home to reproduce these different types of bass, the recording matters, the room really matters, the listening position matters and the speakers matter.  Without quality subwoofers, properly placed it is pretty hard if not impossible to get bass that remotely approaches any of the described situations, let alone clean, tight, tonally accurate bass...but at the end of the day, you have to "tune" to the type of bass you prefer...the boom of a club which may require a couple of 18" subs that really are good in the 50-100 hz range....or the symphony quality bass which will probably need a different home set up.

Much if not all of the obsession over bass and subwoofers has to do with the problem I spoke of a couple posts ago. If you could get all the bass information off the disc, the information that is actually there undiscovered, audiophiles would not feel so robbed of bass response. If you could hear what I’ve heard with your ears.