so bass traps in corners do nothing, it seems we have been fooled. or are being fooled.

In my experience, acoustic treatments made a rather significant improvement in my small (12x16 and 13x14) listening rooms.  Stacked GIK 244s (w/diffusion plates) in the front corners, two of the same ones on the ceiling, 244 w/o plates on 1st and 2nd reflection points and centered on the front wall.  And finally one behind the listening seat.

I didn’t put them in one by one and listen to the differences.  Everything went in at the same time, except the ceiling, and before vs after was quite dramatic in my room.

@bdp24  Below 60Hz is sub-bass? The lowest frequency produced by a standard 4-string bass (acoustic and electric; why do people insist on calling an electric bass a bass "guitar"? That’s an oxymoron!)---the E string played "open"---is 41Hz. That’s not sub-bass, that’s bass.

In general audio terms sub bass is defined as 20 Hz to 60 Hz. I used to play the the acoustic bass, aka contrabass, aka double bass. Musical instruments never adopted the prefix "sub." 41 Hz is the lowest note. The strings on the bass guitar are tuned the same, so it could be called the contrabass guitar or double bass guitar! They call it guitar because it's played sideways like that. You can get an upright electric bass. I've never played one.

@asctim: Hi Tim. I played in a Blues trio with a bassist who had an electric upright bass. It didn’t sound much different than a regular electric bass (the neck was fretless of course), but looked kinda cool. Hey, did you ever play music with Chris (I can’t recall his last name), who used to work at ASC? I knew him when he lived in L.A. The last time I saw him was at the Vegas CES in the late-90’s, where he was supplying a lot of the rooms with Tube Traps. We met in the bar of the hotel to catch up.

By the way, in the early-90’s there was an ad in The Recycler (a weekly buy/sell newspaper in SoCal), offering Tube Traps for ten bucks a piece! I called the phone number, and arranged to go to the seller’s house immediately. I got there and found a guy in a empty house, all except for 13 of the Traps, ranging in size from 9" (diameter of course) up to 16". Naturally I bought ’em all. Best deal I ever got in hi-fi!

I got here at ASC too late to meet Chris. I’ve only played an electric bass a tiny bit. A few years ago someone gave me one that suffered some kind of rattle with the knobs on the main body. I didn’t have an appropriate amp to work with it, but got it to play and sound decent through my hifi speakers. I in turn gave it away to someone who fixed it. Being used to an acoustic bass, the solid body on the electric struck me as really weird. I haven’t touched an upright bass in over 30 years. From time to time I’ve thought about getting an upright electric. They’re nice and compact. My mother used to drive me to youth symphony practice with the scroll and pegbox of the contrabass sticking out the window. I often wondered what drew me to such a logistically challenging instrument. It’s been so long now since I’ve played with any seriousness it’ll be almost like starting from scratch.

Oh yes, the frets vs fretless. The frets were strange to me too, but kind of nice. It’s fun to slide into notes on the fretless, but doing that and also trying to pluck with any volume was tough on the fingers! I got some private lessons for one brief period and the guy teaching me said my tone was slightly off on some notes. That was worrisome to me because I wasn’t sure if I could hear it correctly. Thinking back, I suspect it could have been an issue with the difference between just intonation and even temperament, something I was not at all aware of at that time, and I’m still not sure I understand the full implications of. In any case, if you’re listening to overtones and trying to get the  next note tuned relative to those, you will be off in terms of even temperament, more so on some notes than others. I think that’s how it works.

What instrument do play?