LaScala bass?

[Marvel]

Rock bass, a 5 string bass goes to a B. The A below that is 55Hz. Like I said before, listen to some Victor Wooten. Listem to some Edgar Meyer on acoustic bass. Meyer can even reveal how good your highs are, as he can do some things that fiddle players can't do.

Drums are a different story. A kick will have a pretty strong fundamental around 20-25Hz. That is where the chest thumping comes in, not from the bass.

Marvel

[marksdad]

muddy bass could also be the electronics, bass, i have found, really differs from 1 manufacturer to another

[dodger]

Hello:

As an old sound/recording engineer

the factors are going to be:

The Bass used - electric or acoustic

How it is miked and the microphone used - a factor in orchestral, symphonic, organ etc.

The Amplifier used if it's rock music - tube or SS, eight 10" speakers as in a Traynor or an 18" in an Acoustic brand amplifier

Tone settings - on the instrument if electric and on the amplifier and in all cases the settings on the Recording board - its unique sound Mackie vs EV vs Samson vs Behringer etc.

Final mixdown and the points of digital, analog, etc.

With drums what used to known as the bassdrum is now called the "Kickdrum"

Go to a concert now and the Kickdrum is a few db more than in the 70s or 80s. And the list goes on.

The LaScala has a longer throw and can reveal flaws in the room - standing waves, brightness, etc..

The urge for more bass has come as a partial result of the Kickdrum microphone with the head inside the drum, better equalizers, single amplifiers that can equal the wattage of all of John Entwhistle's Marshall's together.

Improved home audio amplifiers

Speakers such as Klipsch that can produce high db so that what is not necessarily such a low note can move your shirt without having to have 200 watts per channel RMS.

The bass drivers in the LaScala make a difference I had 2 pair, bought about 18 months apart. 1st pair = great bass, 2nd pair = definitely less bass, Company changed drivers. At that tiem they were nice enough to exchange as long as I paid shipping.

HT has also contributed to desire for more bass to equal theater volume for explosions, car crashes, etc.

I did have one pair outside for 1/2 hour. Couple watts, all heard halfway down street.

A lot of bass is perception from feeling, thus sub-woofer (or K-horn.)

There is no right answer only what the owner wants to hear. My LaScalas did great on a low C - Tacotta and Fugue to me. Some want more.

[heavyP]

i reopen this thread as very interesting things have been said and probably useful for La Scala newcomers like me.

my set is an early 90's models with AL-3. they're tucked in the corners of the small wall of an approx. 5x12 meters room, my listening position is about 5 meters away. my main system is a marantz cr610 all-in-one box or Eryk S red king EL84 tubes, working in PSE mode. I've been listening to the speakers for a full week now. bass is fine but slightly on the light/naturel side, not bottom heavy - which was expected and chosen for - as this room tends to be boomy. i got rid of Altec 19 for that, after 2 painful years of trying to make them sound right.

oh, cables, right. i first tried plain mogami OFC speaker cables then Belden shindo. mogami wins the bass game hands on, even with the tubes.

 

now, what i really re-discovered and matters most - though of course i already knew it but La Scala set things to another level:  IT ALL DEPENDS of the record and mix!

you take jimmy giuffre 3 (cd repress/5 albums shitty edition) with jim hall and ralph pena and you have a full, rich, low double-bass in all its glory, and you can't even imagine bass could sound better or more natural.

then you take one of the shittier cd i ever listened to, not musically but as mastering goes: Brian Ferry/bete noire (don't ask me how it landed here ;-):  there is no bass AT ALL, and the rest of the mix is a nightmare, too. you just throw the plastic away. xcept it may sound fab in a car system (but too late, i'll never know).

 

try to listen to james carter/"heaven on earth" cd and christian mc bride chorus (one of his finest) and you're swept away by the bass, it's rich, plenty deeeeeeep and you can't get enough. even john medeski's organ sounds great (and i hate organ, xcept for a few larry young tricks). that live session recording is astounding.

then you play neil's/harvest moon cd and you want to howl and growl at it for such a lame job.

take st-germain/boulevard. it's 90's house/jazz electro with kick, snare, 4/4 and deeep synth bass- and plenty of inspired live jazz and blues samples in the mix -  you know it could reach lower if you had listened to it on a good club sound-system back in the days but  the soul and the groove are here. and as it is,it's good enough for me at home.

 

so of course i will take the sub-test sometimes and maybe i won't be able to live without it ever after. or not. but i'm pretty sure that 80% of the real "lack of bass" issue are in the records and the mix itself - not the speakers. you can't hear proper bass if it's not there.

La Scala speakers are hyper-revealing and it comes at a price.

[Chris A]

1 hour ago, heavyP said:

IT ALL DEPENDS of the record and mix!

Yes...

 

[twk123]

For instrumental music the LS bass is plenty and punches really hard. The only time I turn on my sub is when listening to really bass heavy electronic music and want to drop the floor out of the house. Unless you have a well set up horn sub, I have never been able to blend my 15'' Ported Dayton Audio sub to my LaScalas. It just doenst keep up and the mismatch is always there in the back of your head.

[Chris A]

Try a horn-loaded subwoofer: there are many DIY designs that are fairly good out there that are very economical.

 

You'll need some bass management in your preamp or active crossover to compensate for the typical time delay differences with the La Scala bass bins. 

 

Chris

[WMcD]

About whether it is the recording. 

 

Heyser's review of the K-Horn eliminated this.  He set up high quality microphones in his front yard and fed K-Horns versus some wide range speaker which could shake the house with bass, IIRC.  Therefore he could switch between the two types of speakers and also go outside next to the microphones and listen.  His driveway must have been nearby.  It was therefore A vs B vs live.  He could look out his picture window too.

 

He reports that the a car door slamming sounded like a muffled wooomp on the "shake the house" speakers but sounded like a car door slamming on the K-Horns.

 

I expect the LaScala can do something like this.

 

Wouldn't it be wonderful to re-create this at Hope or Indy?  Maybe a marching band could be arranged.  Smile.

 

WMcD

[heavyP]

as stated before, if a recording captured bass frequencies below 45/50hz, the La Scala won't be able to cover them and a sub would be needed.

from what i've been reading on the subject, the issues the sub fixes may create others along the sound spectrum, hence the remedy being worse than the disease. but i guess it's a matter of balance here and results can be rewarding.

however,  a bad mix/recording doesn't stop at bass level but alter mids, highs and the whole essence of the music too. wrong can't be changed to right, whatever speakers or subs are called for help.

i'm currently listening to "nightfall" by charlie haden/john taylor on the naim audio label. a long-time favorite record, a beautiful opus and sublime recording - which could be expected from the mighty naim label, right? then listen to haden+ chris anderson... i just can't cope with the piano on this one, which is a shame - as anderson is a rare performer.

 

[Chris A]

1 hour ago, heavyP said:

from what i've been reading on the subject, the issues the sub fixes may create others along the sound spectrum, hence the remedy being worse than the disease.

This doesn't correspond to my experience, but then I don't try to pair direct-radiating subwoofers with very clean horn-loaded bass bins...nor would I ever try. 

 

A quarter-wavelength 55 Hz acoustic wave in air at room temperature is 1.6 metres long.  An octave below that, it's 3.2 metres long, etc.  A typical horn-loaded subwoofer will have internal path length that is proportional to those figures.  If you're trying to cheat physics by squashing that path length into effectively zero path length using a direct radiating woofer--you get what you bargained for.

 

1 hour ago, heavyP said:

...however,  a bad mix/recording doesn't stop at bass level but alter mids, highs and the whole essence of the music too. wrong can't be changed to right, whatever speakers or subs are called for help.

 

If your approach is that you won't even try to improve your recordings, then nothing changes: it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In my experience, better is better.  Professing how something sounds without first hearing it has never worked very well for me.

 

1 hour ago, heavyP said:

...then listen to haden+ chris anderson... i just can't cope with the piano on this one, which is a shame - as anderson is a rare performer.

 

Try rebalancing the EQ on the recording via unmastering.  I think that you'll have a much different opinion of the listening experience once you hear it rebalanced much closer to the way the musicians played it in the recording studio, not "mastered" out of the mastering guy's computer.  Unmastering your recordings to achieve this is actually quite easy to do.  Refer to the linked thread, above.

 

Chris

[heavyP]

you're probably right on all subjects, as you seem to have acoustics knowledge and expertise i don't. 

i'm reading your Audacity thread with much interest and i'm grateful you linked  it to me

[Chris A]

Note that one area that I really haven't commented on using the techniques that are detailed in that thread:

 

The statistics of the 1/f spectral curve are the real secret to approximating the original sound.  Once you select a few seconds of the digital tracks, the statistics involved are quite strong.  The 1/f spectral view is the first view used to understand what's been done to the stereo tracks, and the one that shows me where and how much to apply unmastering EQ corrections.

 

Also, the use of the spectrogram log(f) view serves as a visual check on the background noise levels vs. frequency, so that you can actually see where the mastering guy has attenuated and boosted various frequency bands at the threshold noise backgrounds.

 

The power of the statistics is the real enabler in reconstructing an unmastering EQ curve for each track, with an investigative eye on both graphs to achieve a much better balance that's been upset by the mastering process.  Once you start to find a more happy medium with regard to the correction EQ, I find one other phenomenon arises: the tracks suddenly get much more sensitive to extremely small adjustments in EQ as you reach an unmastering EQ curve.  This is the most interesting property that I've discovered, and one that should provoke some thinking about what is occurring and the validity of the approach.

 

One more comment:  I note with some amount of disdain that mastering "engineers" are not typically musicians, nor are they usually co-located with the recording studios and the musicians that created the music.  Mastering houses are usually chosen by the A&R representatives of record companies (via coerced contractual obligation found by the record company contracts).   I have little regard for this "non-musician's added value" to the original musician's creations--because the culture of these organizations has shown that it has little regard for the musicians themselves or the customers of the music: you and I.  This record company culture apparently is motivated only to do what has made them the most money in the past, not product quality as judged by discerning consumers.

 

When you unmaster the music and then compare it back to the sound of the original released tracks, it's clear that they are, by and large, mastering the music to make it sound like a table radio.

 

Chris

[heavyP]

This thread is quite revolutionary... Though the task of unmastering all favorite tracks /albums seem gigantic... Probably worth it in the long run

[Ceptorman]

4 hours ago, heavyP said:

This thread is quite revolutionary... Though the task of unmastering all favorite tracks /albums seem gigantic... Probably worth it in the long run

The amount of knowledge around here and the friendly people willing to share it is why this place will be around for a while, IMO.

We could learn a lot from Chris A's posts.

[Chris A]

Just sharing...

 

 

Chris

[-js-]

On 12/18/2016 at 10:06 AM, Ceptorman said:

The amount of knowledge around here and the friendly people willing to share it is why this place will be around for a while, IMO.

We could learn a lot from Chris A's posts.

 

 

AMEN to that @Ceptorman!  I was reading during a "break" at work , and had a thought (which isn't always a good thing) about sending @Chris A a pm to say idk what other than how impressive all this sounds.  don't misunderstand me - I'm sure Chris, you know what you're talking about but just as surely I know that I don't.  I'm a little kid hanging on every word, hoping I'll understand a word here & there.  so what I mean Chris is thanks again for sharing what you know with some of us who don't have a stinking clue but are trying to pick something up along the way.

[Chris A]

My intent is to try to pay forward what I've learned from other really good people...which turns out to be most of what I share. 

 

Chris

[heavyP]

chris i haven't found time (or guts) to embark on demastering path yet, but i will very soon ;-) with a few favorites

back on the bass and the relative necessity of subs...

if i get your point well you say that the only way would be a "horn-loaded subwoofer" and i wonder if such thing exists out of DIY - and that a direct radiating woofer will be unfitted.

i understand the logics of that but then what could be a fair compromize?

i have the opportunity to acquire this sub.

http://www.mjacoustics.co.uk/MJ_Acoustics/Product_html/Ref_200.htm

it's small, fast - and would fit fine in my system. is it too small anyway? as the only compromize needs to be a 15"?

thanks guys for the input

 

[Chris A]

There is a DIY tapped horn which is a direct lift of a Danley Sound Labs design--called the TH-SPUD: see http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/subwoofers/134369-dual-8-tapped-horn-th-spud-3.html?postid=1698483#post1698483

 

One of these or even perhaps two of them (like I have in the corners of my listening room) are sufficient.  Cost of materials for two of them is less than about €600. 

 

I don't know of any direct radiating subwoofers that are really good candidates for crossing with La Scala bass bins.  YMMV.  Perhaps someone else here has a really big DR sub that can attest to very good integration with the La Scala.

 

If you have the title of your favorite albums that you wish to hear unmastered, perhaps I've already done one or more of them in my collection.  Send me a personal message via this forum, and perhaps you might be able to hear something first hand to give you a better idea of how it compares in auditioning.

 

Chris

[JohnA]

 

VMPS Larger Subwoofer with Megawoofer Option.  No longer in production.  -4 dB at 16 Hz in my room.  12" active, 15" active and 15" slot loaded passive.  ~92 dB/w/m.  Claimed <2.5% THD at 1 watt.