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all about that bass...


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I find that people talking about accuracy have to consider it is a near impossible task.

 

Those of us who've spent time in the pursuit are acutely aware of the difficulty.  That's why we do it...not because it's easy, but because it's hard...with apologies to JFK.

 

Dave

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One thing I obsessed on years ago was accuracy. We followed a couple of local well known popular bands around for a while purchased their records and CD's then upgraded equipment and speakers till I got what was as good as it could be without actually being there. Then you have the recording studio and it's squeaky clean you have to figure in. As Dave said "it's all good if it sounds good to You"

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One thing I obsessed on years ago was accuracy. We followed a couple of local well known popular bands around for a while purchased their records and CD's then upgraded equipment and speakers till I got what was as good as it could be without actually being there. Then you have the recording studio and it's squeaky clean you have to figure in. As Dave said "it's all good if it sounds good to You"

 

I was friends with a recording studio owner and got to hang out there a lot.  There's quite a bit of magic they do to say the least.  About the best you can hope for is mimicking a good band in a small venue.  I say that because in a small venue they don't "really" have to go through a PA system on anything except vocals, all the guitars and bass and drums are as natural as possible, plus you don't have all the echos and whatnot of a large venue.  Drums are rarely amplified and the guitar and bass is typically just straight out of their own amps.  Unless you know what a raw Ampeg bass setup sounds like unamplified through a PA up close as played by a hardcore bass player, you don't really know what a bass guitar is supposed to sound like. :)

Edited by MetropolisLakeOutfitters
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One thing I obsessed on years ago was accuracy. We followed a couple of local well known popular bands around for a while purchased their records and CD's then upgraded equipment and speakers till I got what was as good as it could be without actually being there. Then you have the recording studio and it's squeaky clean you have to figure in. As Dave said "it's all good if it sounds good to You"

 

I was friends with a recording studio owner and got to hang out there a lot.  There's quite a bit of magic they do to say the least.  About the best you can hope for is mimicking a good band in a small venue.  I say that because in a small venue they don't "really" have to go through a PA system on anything except vocals, all the guitars and bass and drums are as natural as possible, plus you don't have all the echos and whatnot of a large venue.  Drums are rarely amplified and the guitar and bass is typically just straight out of their own amps.  Unless you know what a raw Ampeg bass setup sounds like unamplified through a PA up close as played by a hardcore bass player, you don't really know what a bass guitar is supposed to sound like. :)

 

Good point. NIN was on Austin City Limits about a month ago, the bass on the song "Sanctified" had an awesome flanger sound to it. I can only imagine how it sounded in person!

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Good point. NIN was on Austin City Limits about a month ago, the bass on the song "Sanctified" had an awesome flanger sound to it. I can only imagine how it sounded in person!

The best large'ish venue bass guitar I've ever heard in terms of accurate tone was the Stone Temple Pilots concert blu-ray, especially "Creep". It truly did have that actual Ampeg growl that you hear when sitting right in front of the bass cabinets. I am listening to the studio version right this second and I honestly believe the concert version is better. That's not particularly the best performance especially in terms of the fun factor but the tone for the bass guitar is spot on. Most bass guitar recordings nowadays mostly sound like the bass root note and not much else so I really like it when you can hear the extra magic going on inside the amp.

Edited by MetropolisLakeOutfitters
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just a FYI,  I play a Ken Smith 5 string, have Ampeg SVTs into 10 and 15 inch speakers.  At one sound check, we did not know that someone had turned the power up on the amps for the subs for the mains.  The drums were not ready for the sound check yet, so they had me go first,  I then found out what 35,000 watts and 130+bd of bass sounded like, it was painfull,  but something I will never forget either.

Edited by steve sells
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I find that people talking about accuracy have to consider it is a near impossible task.

 

Those of us who've spent time in the pursuit are acutely aware of the difficulty.  That's why we do it...not because it's easy, but because it's hard...with apologies to JFK.

 

Dave

 

Why?  Were you on the grassy knoll?

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Sometimes wish I could drop the fanatical pursuit of accurate music reproduction but it is the very thing that drives me and why we have the equipment we do. The wife said it best the other day while her and I were enjoying our new stack of speakers playing the music we both love together. That was " her and I are the only two that could possibly understand and enjoy what we have and why we need such a sound system " 

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It's all about transient response and micro details. Horn forever, especially on the bass.

 

Is it ever especially in the bass to have horns. No matter where we go in our home the music is clear, crisp, powerful and best of all you feel in your feet so many already have commented on that very experience.

 

Thank you ClaudeJ for steering me in that direction

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It's all about transient response and micro details. Horn forever, especially on the bass.

 

Is it ever especially in the bass to have horns. No matter where we go in our home the music is clear, crisp, powerful and best of all you feel in your feet so many already have commented on that very experience.

 

Thank you ClaudeJ for steering me in that direction

 

I take no credit except for further propagation of the truth. Thank the late, great, PWK, but especially Roy Delgado, the Klipsch Pro Chief Engineer and co-designer of the Jubilee. PWK said: "If a cone moves, it produces distortion." Roy extrapolated that (after testing my DH1a driver/EV horn in the anechoic chamber in Indy for me) that the FIRST place one needs a horn is on the BASS, since it has the greatest cone motion of all the bands in a 2, 3, or 4-way setup. He said the tweeter produces the least distortion since it moves the least, yet, that is the FIRST place people put a horn instead of the bass. Size, space, and cost concerns? You bet, but for those who are willing, the bass has superior impact and micro definition.

 

Electro-Acoustic transducers are either "air pushers" or "air squeezers." The Heil AMT tweeter is of low distortion because it squeezes the air from a 21" pleated diaphragm to a short horn behaving similarly to a compression driver in terms of clarity.

 

The rest is just variations of cosmetics, not PRINCIPLES!

Edited by ClaudeJ1
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I wish that you'd post that over in the other thread on Jubilees, Claude.  Bjorn seemed to have the most trouble with the advice that the most important place to have a horn is on the bass--because you can hear all the harmonic distortion up to and including 10th order, but second and third order harmonics in tweeters often are above our hearing range (15-20+kHz).  Once you've done some testing and looked at the harmonic distortion, it becomes quite clear why PWK spent so much time on bass bin design.

 

Modulation distortion (the really bad type of distortion--along with compression distortion and mass-effect delay distortion) is heard as it piles up at the highest frequencies of the driver in its pass band.  This means that the lowest bass harmonic, Doppler, and AMD distortion all wind up at midrange frequencies (above 200 Hz) in the form of non-harmonic sidebands on the higher tones playing simultaneously in real music, and that really suck in terms of SQ. 

 

PWK saw this way, way back, but wasn't able to convince the entire audio community that it was the kind of distortion that one needs to design to avoid, and that means using horns - all the way, if possible.

Edited by Chris A
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Modulation distortion (the really bad type of distortion--along with compression distortion and mass-effect delay distortion) is heard as it piles up at the highest frequencies of the driver in its pass band.

 

 

The undisputed King of Bass, Tom Danley, mentioned that THERMAL compression in a voice coil will typically begin at about 10% of a woofer's rated power, which is why he uses so many woofers in his stadium tapped horns. There are many reasons why everyone is copying or inspired by his designs, especially the Tapped Horns for bass, which allow for amazing performance down in the teens.

 

That said, most of the musical info is in the 60-500 Hz. range, which the Jubilee does better than the Khorn. It took Paul 50 years to come up with the Jubilee, with Roy doing all the legwork,  and it's sad that the bean counters prevented it's release as the NEW Klipschorn. Instead, they wanted to use the "60 Plus" years of production legacy for marketing as opposed to raising the bar with their Flagship (except for aesthetics, it ain't the Palladium).

 

The Jube, in most rooms gets weaker below 60 Hz. so you may as well use a tapped horn there instead and REALLY keep the IMD low.

Edited by ClaudeJ1
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  • 3 weeks later...

The Jube, in most rooms gets weaker below 60 Hz. so you may as well use a tapped horn there instead and REALLY keep the IMD low.

 

 

I'd love to go horn loaded (or even tapped horn) on the very deep bottom end but the size of the subs becomes ridiculous. I run a pair of DD-18s and I can make the windows nearly fall out of their frames at under 10Hz without even running them at maximum. As for accuracy, well, I don't think anyone really has just cause to complain about the Velodyne Digital Drive system. As tight as any serious horn loaded sub I've ever heard (which really isn't many). The DD-18s are huge but compared to any horn loaded sub that can dig as deep, accurately and loud, they are tiny.

 

Maybe one fine day Klipsch will produce a truly deep horn loaded sub to complement their cinema line. Nothing stopping them but plain economics... However, should that day ever come, I'll be a buyer.

Edited by laager
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To be honest, if I wanted accuracy in my bass for orchestra music, I'd throw my subs away and only run my RF-7ii's.

BS, horn bass is what you need for accuracy. All direct radiator bass sounds "mushy" on a kick drum in comparison. Transient response!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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