Audiophile Bass?

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. 

Geoffkait.
Is the lack of bass just a CD problem or is it a digital music in general problem? I don’t notice better bass when streaming vs listening to a CD.

Excellent question. It all depends on how the files that are streamed are obtained. I do not know the sequence of events for how tracks or albums are streamed. What is their source? But I don’t hear people say, “Wow, the bass is much better streaming than on CD” so I suspect the same problem must extend to streaming. In fact, it appears many people prefer CD to streaming. Obviously it’s complicated because there are many ways to stream. When the CD is stiffened properly and the scattered light is eliminated it’s a whole new ballgame. And it’s not only the bass, it’s top to bottom. The signal to noise ratio goes through the roof. Which is what it should have done from the beginning. I’m not hot doggin ya. 🌭