HZ.....How low for full range music???

It is awfully hard to find "full range" speakers that go down to
20Hz and the ones that do, are usually very expensive. I agree with
Eldartford, I would rather have limited range speakers than speakers that do
bass badly -- and, to my ears, there are many, many speakers that do bass
badly. If you are listening to rock music, you probably want some bass slam.
Getting that slam will be a function of two things; Speakers capable of that
bass and amplifiers that can control the speakers. Most likely, you're talking
about solid state amplifier and you'll need a fair amount of power. I would
call any speaker that can give a relatively flat response down to the mid
twenties, "full range."

As far as room response, you can go to various web-sites and feed the
dimensions of your room into a simulator and it will predict the frequency
response of your room. Having fed lots and lots of dimensions into these
simulators, it seems to me that most rooms have large peaks and valleys
between 35Hz and 100Hz.

This is why many acoustical consultants recommend using a sub-woofer with
a parametic equalizer -- to smooth out the bass response in the room.

Here is one of those room simulators --

http://www.rivesaudio.com/CARAquick/CARAframe.html

electric bass goes down to 41 hz. organ can go down into the 20's. it depends what you listen to. blues , rock, jazz and most music are happy with 40 hz performance. pro sound PA and bass gear is built to go down to 40 hz, so other than organ and home theater we don't get to hear much music below 40 hz, live or recorded.

I feel that 30hz and below could safely be called full range...not a lot going on down this low but still low enough to give the heft that full range has over speakers that can't go below 35hz or so.

Bass slam never takes place at these low freq's...I would say 35-40hz limited speakers will provide plenty of slam if thats what you are after. At around 30hz things like room-shudder (thats what I call it anyway) can set in...this can be very pleasing if your room is built well enough to have also achieved room-lock and of course is part of the music (new age comes to mind).

Dave

The lowest fundamental tone a string bass plays is at 41hz per second.

The treatment of overtones is not relevant to your question but remember the difference tones. A difference tone could be called an "undertone". A fundadmental of 41 will generate a difference tone of 20.5,which will generate a difference tone of 10.25 and so forth. These later tones are felt as much as heard and are responsible for the visceral ambience in a live performace that is(for me) outrageously expensive to recreate.

A poster above mentions an elaborate array of subwoofers and based upon the quality of his posts,I believe he has recreated that ambience.

I'm not a subwoofer guy(which is my problem,of course) and am happy if enough of the fundamentalsin the forties and fifties are present to represent the harmonies involved.

Hope your friend finds speakers he likes.