[ManMythLegend]

Purely un researched possibly ridiculous observation..

1. Its the part you "feel". Loud sound will make you cover your ears...a bass/boom heavy you feel inside of you. Totally different experience the latter excites the nice adrenaline.

2. Im no musician but Ive heard that beats/tempos are not coincidentally tied closely to peoples heart rates. Could be something subconscious going on.

3. IMO easiest part to tell if its gotten right. Bass is hard to reproduce well. Easily distorted , easily covers other frequencies .

4. Just my ears but soundstage and bass are the biggest things that hit me when demoiong a home theater or headphones. IMO takes much more discerning ears and careful listening to seperate good/bad of the other variables.

5. You are right about Bass being over done and not accurate or real. But its fun. It does lead to some lousy headphones being sold at ridiculous prices though.

 

[PleasantNoise]

I play guitar, And as a guitar player, I tend to crank up the mids on my Guitar amp, to cut through the mix of a band, the drums and bass are alot lower, so cranking the mids helps lift the guitar above them.
But in saying that, that setup without the drums and bass, sounds pretty terrible, it becomes piercing, and harsh, so maybe this is what people hear when bass frequencies are too quiet, they lose that sense of fullness, and an even mix.
Bass is needed, anything really bass light will sound like most of the song is gone, even if its only a small sextion of the music thats been lost/ reduced in volume, impact, depth...
In saying that though, far too often, people around here, eq huge bass boosts on their ipods, cd players, computers, then play them through an amp and boost the bass again, play them through tiny speakers that don't extend below about 100hz, or have any real impact, then comment on how great it sounds.....
I walk out at that point, its just stupid.
Learning to play an instrument was the best thing I ever did for my ears, it made me properly aware of the music, and the mix, and how import each part is.
 

 

[gregorio]

I play guitar, And as a guitar player, I tend to crank up the mids on my Guitar amp, to cut through the mix of a band, the drums and bass are alot lower, so cranking the mids helps lift the guitar above them.But in saying that, that setup without the drums and bass, sounds pretty terrible, it becomes piercing, and harsh, so maybe this is what people hear when bass frequencies are too quiet, they lose that sense of fullness, and an even mix.

You have discovered one of the basic tenets of mixing and production. EQ is relative! Getting an instrument to sound good on it's own does not mean it will work well in the mix and vice versa. Mixing is always a trade off, for example if you crank up your mids, then you are likely to cause a problem with the vocals.

Bass is virtually always problematic. Our ears are highly insensitive to bass frequencies which means that we have to use far more power for lower freqs just to get them to sound the same (balanced), it's not a small difference either. To make the volume of a 60Hz signal sound the same as the volume as a 2kHz signal (for example), the 60Hz signal needs to be roughly 1,000 times louder! This is nothing that the consumer has to be directly concerned about because all this is accounted for by the producer/mastering engineer on the recording. Providing you have an accurate system, you will get the correct balance, depending on the skill of the producer and mastering engineer.

There is one aspect of this which the consumer should be aware of:

Hearing is essentially a highly specialised form of touch. We can both hear and feel vibrations (which is all sound waves are). In the lower freqs, where our hearing is insensitive and where the vast amount of audio energy exists, the body's sense of touch starts to take over from the sense of hearing. This is why, when say a truck drives past, we feel the vibration through our body as much as hear the sound vibration through our ears. Our perception of hearing is a mixture of both. This is especially important to understand when listening through headphones. Headphones pump all the frequencies directly into our ears, this is in contrast to speakers and/or sub woofers, which fill the room with sound, enabling us to perceive lower freqs throughout our entire body, rather than just through the ears. As the vast majority of mixes are designed for speaker playback, those using headphones miss out an entire area of low frequency sound perception. This is one of the inherent weaknesses of using headphones! Boosting the amount of bass to the cans helps a little but doesn't solve the underlying problem. This is why IMO you often find people who use cans really cranking up the bass, they are trying to compensate for the lack of sensation experienced from lower frequency reproduction in cans.

G

 

[PleasantNoise]

Thanks Gregorio, makes alot of sense.
I'm sure I saw a thread somewhere on here, about someone using headphones, and a subwoofer at the same time, to try and reclaim some of that felt bass.
Sounds a tad mad, what with trying to get the levels right and all, and the sound people would hear, without the headphones, would just be a thumping bass line

 

[Spareribs]

I do love some of the low register notes of the pipe organ in Mahler's 8th symphony in the final movement. With the right recording (there's a lot of different ones) it is truly spectuacular. With other orchestral pieces,deep bass registers can be almost life changing as it can be like the heavens opening up and the earthquake wakes the angels of glory.
 
Yes, I love bass!
 
That said, most bass that is in music, especially pop music is stupid. I'm sure there are some exceptions and I will be proven wrong. I actually like some of the heavy bass in the Tupac raps and they can be great. Also, in percussion music, you need good bass and it can be a thing of beauty.
 
But so many people are clueless about tasteful bass. Overall, as much as I love bass, I could live without it because it is so abused. 
 
Bass is like garlic. You only need it at certain times and a little goes a long way. Too much garlic ruins the mood.

 

[TMRaven]

Tasteful bass is subjective depending on person to person.  Who are you to say one person's bass is better than another person's bass-- outside of fidelity when it comes to actual instruments?  Too much bass gets a lot of people in the mood, so you really can't universally define bass like that.

 

[gregorio]

Thanks Gregorio, makes alot of sense.I'm sure I saw a thread somewhere on here, about someone using headphones, and a subwoofer at the same time, to try and reclaim some of that felt bass.Sounds a tad mad, what with trying to get the levels right and all, and the sound people would hear, without the headphones, would just be a thumping bass line

I've seen that too. Baring in mind what I said in my previous post, there is some logic behind using a sub with cans. I agree with you though, I can't see how this could be made to work properly in practice.

Tasteful bass is subjective depending on person to person.  Who are you to say one person's bass is better than another person's bass-- outside of fidelity when it comes to actual instruments?

I think that's kind of the point. I believe what Spareribs is trying to say and certainly what I am trying to say is that the level of the bass should be defined by the producer and mastering engineer on the recording, not someone else's subjective opinion of what constitutes tasteful bass.

G

 

[RPGWiZaRD]

Quote:

I've seen that too. Baring in mind what I said in my previous post, there is some logic behind using a sub with cans. I agree with you though, I can't see how this could be made to work properly in practice.
I think that's kind of the point. I believe what Spareribs is trying to say and certainly what I am trying to say is that the level of the bass should be defined by the producer and mastering engineer on the recording, not someone else's subjective opinion of what constitutes tasteful bass.
G

 
That's so typical audiophile's point of view. What if I don't get optimal listening experience if listening as the producer intended it to be like? For me it's all about getting the best possible pleasure listening to music and it's probably something like 1/100000000 chance I'd have exactly same taste as the producer... I mean just look at how our tastes differs in food, colors, sex etc...
 
 

 

[gregorio]

 
That's so typical audiophile's point of view. What if I don't get optimal listening experience if listening as the producer intended it to be like? For me it's all about getting the best possible pleasure listening to music and it's probably something like 1/100000000 chance I'd have exactly same taste as the producer... I mean just look at how our tastes differs in food, colors, sex etc... 
 

If you go to the Louvre and look at the Mona Lisa, maybe you don't get "pleasure" from her smile, do you think to yourself that you know better than Leonardo DaVinci and repaint it? Alternatively you could try to appreciate and understand why DaVinci painted the Mona Lisa with that smile. That's the point of art, to try and understand the intentions of the artist, to experience what the artist is trying to convey. In my opinion, you are missing the whole point of art and music if all you want to do is reduce it to just "best possible pleasure". There's far more complex and stimulating emotional experiences to be gained from listening to music than just pleasure. Each to his own though.

G

 

[TMRaven]

The mona lisa references are getting tiring for me, and so is the whole 'intended what the producer intended' argument.  Only the people who mastered the song know what was truly intended, and what type of systems they want their songs to be played back on.  Half the times a song is mastered in a way so that it compensates for cheaper audio equipment, or even some who master for a system with subwoofers, so it sounds very weird on an objectively 'flat' high-fidelity system.  So unless one literally knocks on the door of every artist/producer/engineer out there for every synthetic song on their music library to ask them what they think their song sounds like best, there's really nothing wrong with altering it in whichever way you think is more musically pleasing.  You're not dealing with fidelity, and not trying to play the song back with what's 100% accurate to real life instruments-- you're just playing it back depending on whatever suites your tastes, which is ultimately just as legit of a point as playing it back with a 100% flat system.  It's a closed-mined audiophile's argument that's rather silly.
 
 

 

[gregorio]

The mona lisa references are getting tiring for me, and so is the whole 'intended what the producer intended' argument.  Only the people who mastered the song know what was truly intended ...

Then you don't understand the point of mastering. You think you know better than the mastering engineer or DaVinci (for example) then go right ahead, colour your system (or go and view DaVinci artworks wearing pink tinted sunglasses) and forget about fidelity. Your choice but then I consider that view to be "rather silly".

G

 

[deadlylover]

Quote:

Then you don't understand the point of mastering. You think you know better than the mastering engineer or DaVinci (for example) then go right ahead, colour your system (or go and view DaVinci artworks wearing pink tinted sunglasses) and forget about fidelity. Your choice but then I consider that view to be "rather silly".
G

If you break it down further, I think DaVinci just wanted people to enjoy his works of art. If we were to meet him today, I reckon he would be more than pleased with that.

 

[TMRaven]

Next time quote and respond to the part of my post where I talked about mastering for different systems and knocking on the door of the artists and engineers asking them what they think their songs sound best on when being played back.  There's no universal way to tell what's true fidelity in a synthetic song because you're not trying to match the fidelity of real-world instruments.  There are also instances where songs can be mastered differently for desired target audiences and their audio systems.  Yes, I get the point that different emphasis on different synthetic parts in a synthetic song might effect the desired emotion intended from an artist, but it's nigh impossible to tell unless you actually ask the artist how they like hearing their song played back the best.

 

[gregorio]

It's not rocket science, a flat system is going to get you reasonably, if not very, close most of the time. A deliberately coloured system (say one with the bass cranked right up) is not going to get you close most of the time.

G

 

[TMRaven]

You're making too many assumptions about the artist and engineer.  I'll end it at that.