What is Tight Bass?

But be careful folks.  I tightened the bass so much the treble popped out and broke on the floor!

Well I thought that was funny but it's pretty early on a Saturday morning. 

Anyway, I have 3-series Maggies and those actually pump out beautifully tight bass, but I have found that to get the SPLs I prefer (music always sounded best to me in clubs), I use a swarm of 4 subs - 2 in the 10 inch range and 2 smaller ones.  Primarily RELs that are geared towards music. They are each dialed in such that you don't perceive sound coming from them, but together they subtly control the room SPL while reinforcing the bass from the Maggies. I find this method more all enveloping than the brute force of a single big sub.  Give it a shot! 

Well, I guess my best solution is to buy Forte iv pair, move them around until I get the bass I’m looking for, and get rid of my SVS sub. Rated at 38 on the low end, and from what I understand, these Klipsch speakers are darker than previous Fortes, and move the listener physically if you NEED it… but most enjoyable for most of us, is the detail we get at night, at volume where we actually LISTEN, “tightly”.

Do you not see any live music?  A symphony? A local jazz club, Folk music?  Really any live musical event, even a parade filled with marching bands.  If you haven't, then all the discussion on what tight bass is is frankly a waste of time without the live reference point (s).  The odds of exactly replicating it in a home is next to impossible but once you know what it sounds like, you'll know if you're getting there or not.

@mijostyn --

".. good for you. It sounds like you are working on a great system. There are no passive crossovers in my system either, wouldn't do it any other way. The best crossover is no crossover, passive at least. In my system there is only one digital crossover for the subwoofers. Otherwise, the Sound Labs operate full range, 100 Hz to 20 kHz."

Thank you. 

Paradoxically (in a sense), as you might know with your own floor-to-ceiling Sound Labs, very large speakers can present sound in such a way that makes the listener less aware of them actually being speakers - not least compared to smaller speakers, and despite their imposing physical stature and presence. Spatially, smaller 2-way "monitor" speakers in particular are generally thought of as being good at the "disappearing" act, but their small size is an easy give-away to the mind that this is nonetheless a reproduction. This is where physics, size and height matters and with it a range of "macro parameters" that are vital for the more adulterated sense of music just happening in front of the listener with proper scaling, dynamics and a sense of effortlessness, more than coming from a speaker per se. 

Stuff like that interests and intrigues me, and I deem trying to accommodate core physics in audio reproduction leagues more important than cultivating ad nauseam a smaller, direct radiating package to eventually cost a fortune; it's still a small package, just like a gazillion $$ dome tweeter is still a dome tweeter, a small woofer is still woofer, the same with passive cross-overs, etc. 

With the Sound Labs you've taken the "no (passive) cross-over" part a step further by having a large "full-range" ESL element covering from 100Hz up to the human hearing limit, with no frequency divide between different transducer elements in this entire range - that's of vital importance. The only filtering applied, I assume, is a high-pass filter cutting off the Sound Labs below 100Hz (or thereabouts) to your subs. 

While I can't afford the luxury of such an approach with a wideband, floor-to-ceiling ESL element (apart from being a horn guy), I've sought the solution of a driver element pairing that in dispersion characteristics matches very well at the single cross-over point in the main speakers, making the sound rather wideband as well as unrestricted in overall size and height. Lately a non-audiophile friend of mine remarked how my current, large auditorium pro cinema speakers were actually the most "discrete" sounding of all my speakers these last ~20 years he'd heard (which includes smaller 2-way stand-mounted speakers), despite their largest size of all the speakers I've owned, because they "didn't sound like speakers" with "music just existing in front of him." That's the kind of feedback from non-audiophiles I like and appreciate, because they're not "conditioned" to our vocabulary nor prejudiced with speaker types, price and their segment origin. 

@johnnycamp5 

Hi. With help from Acoustic Frontiers, I was able to flatten the bass response significantly by way of sealing the ports and subwoofer positioning. My main speakers were creating a 60Hz resonance on the vertical axis that a crossover almost eliminated. I just received several half-round diffusers/bass absorbers that are fairly broadband but are efficient at 60Hz. Looking forward to hearing what happens after I install them. I agree with you that overdamping bass without affecting the frequency response is an unusual problem.