35Hz - 25kHz -- A Partial 'Purist'?

Rwwear, your comments regarding "bass speed" are WAY off in left field.

What is typically referred to as "fast bass" is a low frequency system that suffers from minimal overhang, ringing and has excellent transient response on the whole. To achieve such, most designers typically resort to a sealed design with a Q of between .5 and .7 at the highest. Some have had very good luck with specific driver and TL combinations i.e. the Kef B139.

All of those designs tend to sound somewhat "dry" or "tight and lean" compared to other designs that have similar frequency response curves. This is due to the lack of "bloat" or "ringing" that they AREN'T introducing.

The effect that many people consider "good bass" or "meaty bottom end" is similar to what an electric guitar player looks for in his sound. This is called "sustain", which is a form of ringing distortion. It helps to fill the sound out somewhat by carrying on longer than it would naturally and / or by adding IMD ( intermodulation distortion ). Needless to say, it might sound good but it is not an "accurate" portrayal of what was recorded. The speakers contribute their signature to every recording uniformly. As such, that is a distortion or "coloration" of what one should hear.

Think of "bass weigth" and "bass speed" this way. Try looking at a physically fit, muscular atheletic person and a "slob" that are the same height and weigh the same. One carries themselves much better and efficiently but end up weighing the same in terms of "measurements" that most people can relate to. Not only that, one has a very different presentation than the other. This is true even though they look the same on paper.

I do agree that many times, people confuse lack of extension or "bass weight" for "fast bass". That is primarily just a lack of experience and something that can be corrected with time if they continue on their path to "audio nirvana". Sean
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My point is that a large driver can produce quality bass. It's as simple as that. I have always been a proponent of sealed cabinets because of their fast transient response but that has nothing to do with driver size.

And while I may have been using a shotgun approach to get my point across, the very nature of bass is that it is slower than the higher frequencies.

As far as accuracy goes, who's to say? In order for you to know, you would have to hear exactly what the recording engineer heard. And have you ever been to a live rock concert? Would you really want your system to sound like that? I wouldn't but, it would be accurate if it did.

I don't consider myself an expert nor an audiophile but I do have a high resolution system. And I've been in the sound business many years as a manufacturer and in retail.

Stehno how much music am i missing below say 40hz..very little in most classical music..i prefer to do w/o a sub than to make all manner of attemps to adjust readjust..and so on..i'm into a super superior quality midwoofer AND a top quality amp..if i did not have a tube amp and wanted soild punch i would get a electroacompaniet amp

Good question, Tweekerman. If Telarc's Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture real cannons instead sound like shots fired from a .22 pistol, how much have you missed?

How about Telect's Copland Fanfare for the Common Man cd track 2 where the kettle drums(?) are pretty closely miked, but I have no idea what what these would sound like rolled off at 40Hz. The decay and reverberation continue forever on one or two of these strikes. But some would never know this.

I have a 14 year old Telarc movie score cd. The score from Back to the Future has a deep synthesizer running through about 2/3rd's of the entire piece. If you had monitors dropping off around 40Hz, you would probably never know it.

I have a 15 year old Tracy Chapman pop cd that has some very deep bass (synthesizer I believe). My Aerial 10T go to 26Hz, and the bass notes on this drop off without the sub at around 24 or 25 Hz perhaps. With the sub turned on the bottom goes deeper and continues rather than dropping off.

How about Herb Alpert's Greatest Hits cd (a fun cd) where on the opening of Rotation on track 17, there is a very, very deep percussion that is strong. Without a sub, one would never know it's there. Played it on a friend's system who had an NHT sub two (I don't like this boomy sub at all and neither does he) and the deep notes compressed, muffled, and disappeared. It sounded terrible.

A musician friend brought over a pipe organ music cd because he wanted to hear what he might be missing. He couldn't believe how much deeper, fuller, lifelike, and more 3-D the music sounded with a sub.

These are just a few of my numerous examples of what you might miss.

As for adjusting and re-adjusting, I've tweaked my sub maybe 6 or 7 times times in the last 2 years. Shoot! Some guys swap out their tubes more often than that.

Let me ask you: If you installed a high filter cutoff at say 16kHz where everything above is now gone, what have you missed?

You probably think I'm crazy for even asking such a question. But that is what puzzles me. How can so many be so willing to disgard musical info at one end of the spectrum but not at the other end or anywhere else in between?

Isn't every musical note the equivalant to every other musical note?

If not, then who, aside from the composer, is qualified to determine which notes are worth retaining (reproducing) and which notes are to be discarded? And please don't say 'HP'.

-IMO

yes i would like to have all the musical presence i can get but like every choice in driver selection there is a trade off...i'm sure IF i found a sub i liked there is a possibility that that the system would have a monitor + sub sound...i would be nagged by the "split in the seam" sound...like you say every now and then i may miss something..but at the moment i've found a 8 inch midwoofer that supposingly goes down to 30 hz..that's good enough for me..and this driver has very sweet upper midbass qualities..the biggest problem today is the lack of quality speakers..thats why i'm a big fan of "kits"..you have some choice in drivers and xover parts...most all the audiogonners disagree and vote commercial labs engineering abilities "the tried and true" over the solo designers abilities ..so a good sub may not be for everyone but great sounding monitors are..