Where's My Bass?

What's the room like? Are your speakers near sliding glass windows? These will reinforce mids and highs, but leak bass badly. Do you have a good balance or absorption and diffusion material in the room? Sometimes bass sounds lacking simply because you are comparing it to the mids and highs that are not being absorbed enough relative to the bass. In this case the bass is where it should be and you really need to attenuate the other frequencies to bring everything back into balance. I would recommend graphing a response curve of the speakers in the room to determine the severity of the problem: ie do you have a bass sink at a small bandwidth, or is it low all around. If you've heard these speakers in a good set up where the bass sounds appropriate it would be useful (but possibly impractical) to measure the response under those conditions.

Should i or shouldn't i ??? Let me put on my dancing shoes rather than my "stomping boots" : )

Please keep in mind that these are strictly my opinions and worth slightly less than what you paid for them.

The MSB DAC's are somewhat leaner and brighter sounding.

Audio Research is known for being a "non-tubelike" tube product. That is, they do not have the full bodied bloom that many tube products offer. Instead, many of their products tend to emphasize a slightly leaner sound. Changing tubes may be able to alter this to a notable extent.

The Aleph series of amps have very sweet sounding midrange but lack bass impact.

The Analysis Plus Oval 9's produced a very lean and tizzy tonal balance in the systems that i tried them in.

I can't comment on the Harm Tech cables as i've never used them. I do know of a few people that have changed to other cables and stated that they found the Harm Tech's to be somewhat lean sounding or lacking warmth afterward.

As you noted, the Audio Physic's line is not known for being "powerful" sounding or having a lot of bottom end.

With that in mind, every product that you've mentioned that i've had experience with come across as being "light" in bass response. Obviously, others will have varying opinions and thoughts on the subject. I'm sure that under the circumstances that they used each of these components / brand names, their observations were probably quite valid. Some components can display the characteristics of a chameleon i.e. they change colors as their environment is altered. That is why "system synergy" is discussed so often here and on other audio forums. Sean
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Good post sean...
I have an LS-7 and lacked bass prior to switching the tubes.. of course, I am an Upscale audio fan..
I went with new old stock tubes.. and the bass improved significantly... Also, When I changed my cart from a mm to a garrott k2 mc the bass cleaned up and was incredible..
And I am using a simple 2 way monitor with 8 inch drivers and 1 inch tweeters...
Good luck,
Joe

I let a 4 lb.18" smallmouth go a couple of weeks ago, could it have been yours?