Bass Response and concrete floors

I have a concrete floor in my listening room and must admit that my bass was not that super until I added subwoofers and now there is no question about bass. I think the downside of wooden floors is that you then have to worry about boomy midbass. I would believe the salesman, though, if he says one model works better with concrete floors.

I laid a 3/4" sub floor over my concrete floor using furing strips every 12" in my audio/video room. A local dealer suggested this to help the bass travel the room for a realistic feel for movies. I used to have my dedicated audio on a first floor of a house, but now prefer the lower level or basement for isolation reasons such as any outside noise or distractions. The effect is good but not as much as I had thought. I agree with Mg123 about boomy mid bass in that I have never had such a great sounding room. I would take a less forgiving boundry any day and feel no matter the cost put into the room there will always be compromises.

Using the floor to radiate bass is certainly one way of getting bass, but it is a LOUSY way to do it. It means you are driving resonance into the floor (or more accurately, driving the floor into resonance), and the frequency response and transient response will be horrible compared to being on a concrete floor. Be thankful, very thankful, that you have a concrete floor, and wish that you had concrete walls as well. In the meantime, buy a really high quality monitor like the C3, a really good set of stands, and a REL Stadium III; this combination will absolutely blow away the C5, not only in bass but in every other aspect as well.

I agree with Karls, Maxgain, Mg123 that room resonance is usually a poor way to get base. Generally, if you buy well tuned and well designed speakers, you are going to try to use diffusers, ect... to reduce the effects of the room. The problem with relying on your room/floor for bass is that you have no way of knowing what frequencies are going to be reinforced and how big the peak(s) will be. Certainly it is not going to have anything to do with the music and everything with the rather arbitrary dimensions and construction of your room/floor. Nearly all rooms add some bass due to standing waves and generally it's something to remove. Get a speaker that performs well into the low 40hzs or if you are a real bass fan get a sub. Relying on room resonance for bass is going to get you a mushy, flabby, poorly defined lower octive of music. In fact, it won't be music so much as a hum punctuated by an arbitrary peak frequency. You don't want your listening room to resemble typical car audio, eh?

Sincerely, I remain

Agree with Clueless, Karls etc.

Having a resonating floor helps you to feel the bass you don't hear. Take your feet off the floor and you will see what I mean. In some rooms you will not hear low bass, but feeling it is a kind of [poor] substitute.

Having said that, a concrete floor will improve what you do hear. As stated, a flexible floor just sucks bass.