If I may chime in here on the "tight" bass issue. Atmasphere's description of the string bass is a good one - no orchestral bassist would want to be told that he sounds "tight." I am sorry to say that Kijanki's post in response makes almost no sense from this standpoint. No truly great sounding instrument sounds "tight," though one with a problem, or a bad quality one might. This would be considered a very negative description.
Charles1dad makes a good point: "there are audiophile qualities/expectations that appear to vary from the reality of live acoustic instruments. If some audiophiles were blind folded and heard peter`s bass playing(but told they`re hearing a system and judge it) they might say it lacked tightness and was too warm and round.People like what they like,but many audio components tend to thin and make the sound leaner(tighter?) than real life presentations i.e. fuller tone and body with weight and presence."
To this point, I would add that we also need to distinguish between amplified and unamplified acoustic bass - as soon as amplification is used, as it almost always is in live jazz, for instance, this results in an artificially boosted bass, and a very different sound from the unamplified string bass.
There are a great many audiophiles who do not listen to classical music even on recordings, let alone live, and therefore really don't have any idea what an un-amplified string bass actually sounds like live. Their concept of how bass is supposed to sound is therefore entirely based on either electronically produced or at least amplified acoustic bass. This is the biggest reason why there is so much debate about this in the audiophile community - there are two VERY different references going on. When orchestral musicians use the term "tight," they are never describing timbre. You simply would never hear someone say "He sounds tight!" Instead this term is used to describe how rhythmically together the group is playing - as in tight or loose ensemble.
