[Eagle_Driver]

I think I know a little bit on how you thought those CDs of heavy music sounded so 'bass-heavy' through speakers... You've heard me right. Artificial resonances.

It's the cabinetry of the speaker systems themselves - or the acoustics of your room - that tend to resonate abnormally when you listen to such bass-heavy music. No wonder why you've heard bass through loudspeakers (which, combined with the acoustics of your listening room, tend to resonate unnaturally) that really wasn't there to begin with.

And oh, by the way, I still think you're hearing artificially boosted mid-bass (in the 50 to 100 Hz range) rather than true low bass (below 50 Hz) whenever you listen to your heavy-music CDs. And I still stand by the fact that the mastering job the studios did on such recordings is craptastic.

 

[TimS]

Sounds reasonable, anyway, you're the HiFi expert here Then I guess I'm a basshead So is there any way I can enhace my sound with bass without giving it that unpleasent boomy/muddy sound of cheap stereo systems ? Would that bass-boost circuit slindeman mentioned give me "good" or "bad" bass ?

Would be nice if I could get some speaker style bass back without invensting too much in new components.

greetings,
Tim

 

[slindeman]

. Quote:

I like the bass of my HD-600, I just would appreciate to hear it during normal music listening. I can guarantee you that the lower frequencies are simply not present during normal music listening. I don't want any BOOOOOOM, really The problem is that this bottom end seems to fade in as soon as I turn up my amp to unpleasently high volume levels, I don't want to do that to my poor ears just to get some bass.

I don't think you've been misunderstood. I agree that the HD600+Corda+SB Soundcard lacks some bass during normal music. Maybe a new source or cables would be enough. Only you will know. Is there no friend or acquaintence with a nice source you can plug your Corda/HD600 into? That would be the quickest way to tell if a better source would make enough difference to you. I (and many others here) have heard the HD600 with a lot of cheap and expensive sources, with all the replacement cables, and with a lot of cheap and expensive amps. The amount of bass can vary depending upon all of the factors, but the differences are not huge enough to me that I'd say a $500 source, $1000 amp, and $150 cables are necessary to get good bass out of the HD600.

How quiet do you listen? At quiet levels the bass will seem much more reduced. That is just how human hearing works, and the only way deal with it is to use inaccurate headphones, get used to it, or use some form of eq. Also I've found that ambient noise can affect the perceived amount of bass.

Quote:

Would that bass-boost circuit slindeman mentioned give me "good" or "bad" bass ?

I would ask on the DIY or Amplification forum for peoples experiences with it. I know Jan Meier has obviously heard it, as have others who own the Analoguer. I believe ppl, also a regular poster in the DIY forum, uses a similar kind of circuit in his amps. I haven't heard it myself. Jan's implementation boosts just the very low frequencies, which most headphones (and speakers in general) have difficulties with. See his analoguer project at his website for a graph that shows the amount of boost and at which frequencies. Audiophiles would say anything like that is"bad" but I doubt it sounds anything like megabass.

The circuit is so simple it can be added to just about any opamp based headphone amp. In fact the first versions of the Corda schematic had the bass boost included. Your Corda could be modded to include such a bass boost but it would require soldering (and desoldering) skills and the purchase of a few resistors and capacitors. I'm going to try the circuit on my next META42 amp since I can add/remove it so easily and want to see for myself what it does to the sound.

 

[arnett]

Quote:

Originally posted by Eagle_Driver It's the cabinetry of the speaker systems themselves - or the acoustics of your room - that tend to resonate abnormally when you listen to such bass-heavy music. No wonder why you've heard bass through loudspeakers (which, combined with the acoustics of your listening room, tend to resonate unnaturally) that really wasn't there to begin with.

ah, now this is an interesting argument. i rarely see this one on head-fi: it makes me wonder -- is this true or is this something headphone audiophile guys tell themselves?

i have no idea if speaker cabs artificially enhance bass response. but i'll take artificially-enhanced speaker bass over headphone bass any day of the week (generally speaking). i guess that makes me a non-audiophile.

TimS: i also recommend you check out the beyerdynamic DT770. most 'speaker-like' bass i've heard in a headphone.

 

[wallijonn]

now speakers are something i know about

(along with photography).

unless the speakers are in room corners, bass isn't usually accented. room furnishing tend to absorb (clothe furniture) or amplify (glass) high frequencies. speakers should be kept 1 foot away from walls to cut down on boominess.

if you have a room that isn't rectangular - you've got problems.

subwoofers suck. they were made to mimick 15" woofers. the correct type of subwoofer has a feedback mic on the cone, not dual voice coils. my 12" speakers blow away any and all subwoofers i've ever heard.

depending on the type of enclosure type (ported gives a bass hump), acoustic, infinite baffle (makes for tigher bass) or labrynth (gives lower felt bass but no boominess), you'll hear different types of bass.

today's tower speakers are wrong. period.

unless you're using 2" mfd particle board the speaker is not resonance dead. what's 2" mfd? the stuff that they make counter tops from. i layered my speaker enclosures with 1/4" rubber and used 1" offsets for the fiberglass and handtuned the port to 30 Hz. it's has a horn midrange and bullet tweeter. very forward sounding. therefore grados complement my ears very well.

auto sound has pushed boom boxes to the point that that is all people ever hear. try installing EV woofer/tweeters instead. salesmen have always jacked up the bass (and volume) to sell speakers. curses.

next time you're in best buy, listen to the jbl studio speakers. only the yamahas will come close to their clarity. (yes, even the $1000 home theatre speakers). but "big" sells...

if anyone is interested in making their own speakers, contact me.

anyone have Hartley speakers for sale? you know, the ones with the 24" woofers?

 

[Sovkiller]

Uuffffff!!!! Why not spending a 100 or 150 in a decent CD player instead of going back and forth around the same crappy sound cards, the regular home PCs are not intended for listening music man, they offer this feature as a complement of another functions, and of course the smart guys always will try to get advantage of that, and try to create fancy names and software and try to fool everybody, the computer power supplies are extremelly noisy, and I do not have heard any sound card with a decent sound yet, at the end there are a lot of noise involved, the cables from the CD player to the soundcards are crappy too, unless in XP or so that process the sound in a different way, sorry about your wallet but spending time trying to fix that is a waste of time, even with a nice set of headphones, get a cd player and with your currently rig you will get a lot better sound quality, it worth believe me!!!!

 

[poorimpulsectrl]

sovkiller, meet . , . meet sovkiller

Now that you two have been introduced...

 

[puppyslugg]

Sovkiller:

I am in total agreement with you. Why go through a computer if you don't have to? Kids and their mp3's, bah!!

 

[absolutofft]

I found more than enough bass with HD580s by just using the headphone setting in the creative control panel. I have just had these HD580s for about a week now and much prefer listening to them than I do to my Klipsch RF3s with a Paradigm Servo 15 which has orgasmic bass. The accuracy of the bass with the 580s is much more desirable.

I have also found that soundcards roll off heavily in the lower bass department, however I am still using just the HD580s right into the soundcard so I expect to get an improvement when I get a headphone amp and another improvement when I get a better soundcard than a soundblaster live 5.1.

 

[wallijonn]

Tim, you ears have become accustomed to your cheap cans. that's all. now if you put a good set of can you'll have problems because they are not (they'ren't ?) as efficient. this will cause no bass, and distortion when you crank up the volume. the better cans will sound worse than the cheap cans.

when it comes to power i always look at impedence curves. the higher the hump, the more power you'll need. this is one reason why the sony mdr-f1's interested me so much; their impedence matching circuit. why can't calabasse make headphones? (calabasse makes some great midrange & tweeter speakers, for those of you that don't know).

 

[TimS]

If I listen to some music with bass instruments or a bassdrum etc. and there's no bass than this is not a good reproduction of the sound. I know that if you would listen to such instruments live that there would be bass. I know how a real world bassdrum sounds. After all it wouldn't be called bassdrum if there would be no bottom end? So I wonder why I need to equalize my sound with some cheap soundcard DSP to even notice the presence of that sound.

I wish one of you guys could come over to my place, bring their favourite rock/techno/metal/pop CD and listen to it on my setup with all EQs turned off. I'm 100% convinced that he would come to the conclusion that there's NO sign of any bass frequencies. Just none As soon as I set bass to 85% the 'missing' frequencies start to appear. Guess I should totally blame my source for this since amp/headphones appearently can reproduce any frequencies to my total satisfaction

slindeman:
I got a soldering iron and some op amps as well as lots of other electronics stuff lying around. If you could give me a place where I can find a schematic for such a bassenhancing circuit, I think I would be able to assemble it!

Sovkiller:
I don't like the idea of having to store a lot of CDs, swapping them all the time and also buying a CD player doesn't sound too appealing at the moment. Guess at some point I have to do it, when I have some money to spent...

absolutofft:
Hmmm, you really like the headphone mode ? It certainly increases the bass, but everything else sounds totally different as well. Don't like that ;-(

I can't wait until my December holiday starts, where I go I'll have the chance to listen to some Beyerdynamic cans with my Corda. Hope they have the same amazing soundstage like my HD-600 + more bass, hmmmm...

As usual, thanks for your tips and caring about my maybe not-so-audiophile-tastes !

greetings,
Tim

 

[wallijonn]

Tim, check this out:

http://www.1388.com/articles/headphone-english/

 

[slindeman]

I got this off of some webpage but can't remember where now. I'll post the link if I can find it:

f1 and f2 are the frequency corners, G2 is the gain (boost) in the bass. So you decide what frequencies you want, what gain, and then solve for the resistor and capacitor values. Any opamp should work but of course the better ones should sound better.

You can also add this circuit into your normal opamp voltage gain stage as is shown here. This was posted a long time ago on Headwize by Apheared:

So if you've got a Corda or Meta42 or something you just insert the resistor/cap pair in between the opamp output and the feedback resistor. When you do it this way I'm not sure how the equations change (if at all) for determining the frequency corners.

 

[gerG]

Lots of great suggestions, but I still think that something is wrong with this picture. I have run my 600s off all sorts of sources, some borderline crappy. They have never failed to deliver tight deep bass, even without burn in. Sound quality varied, but the bass was still present. I must confess that I am a bit of a bass-head. It has to be there, along with the rest of the spectrum, or I start rewiring things, damnit! (I say this as I sit here listening to my K1000s con subwoofer

Now where could Tim's bass signal be going?

Why does it show up on DVDs?

Why is it there on test signals?

Tim, when the bass does appear, is it an abrupt transition, or a gradual one?

Do Tim's HD 600 headphones have a "Made in China" sticker on them?

We have to get to the bottom of this!


gerG

 

[Eagle_Driver]

Quote:

Originally posted by Greg Freeman Do Tim's HD 600 headphones have a "Made in China" sticker on them?

HD 600 made in China?

Nah. Mine are "Made in Ireland".