Low bass in your space? Are you sure?

[DrWho]

Nope - still waiting on that PM too........... [][]

[Arky]

Why aren't you at Colter's partying? School? Go read that 2 channel MCM thread. Colter dug it up & I bumped it. Gunna be slow around here for awhile I reckon.

[DrWho]

Got class at 9am tomorrow, then gonna book over afterwards. I'll try to keep my laptop with me in the WiFi locations and leave plenty of updates for all y'alls that can't make it. I'm sure a few others will have laptops too.

[Arky]

Gracias, have fun & drive safe.

[jacksonbart]

Who cares about room acoustics, its all about what tubes your rolling and your LP arm. I mean come on get real, everyone's room is the same.

[WMcD]

I'm not going to argue with you good folks about theory.

It is a factual matter. So you must hear the facts.

I've suggested this before. Over and over.

If you want to find out for yourself, just find a website with a signal generator you can load into your computer. Eric Winer has some. It is a simple matter of hooking a headphone output of a laptop or line out on a desk top, into your amp and speakers.

Be careful. Continual test tones can damage your speaker and hearing. You'll find this all on your own. BTW, 41 Hz is the lowest note on a bass guitar. It also probably as low as you should go in driving your speakers unless you're careful.

- - -

It is fairly pointless to debate room reponse and bass with anyone who had not done the above. Walk around and find the nulls.

Please, I'm not trying to snow you with theory. You have to do this for yourself. It is a first step in understanding the complexity of issues.

It is also a first step away from "I read someplace on the Internet", to I actually did this myself.

Gil

[Islander]

Be careful. Continual test tones can damage your speaker and hearing. You'll find this all on your own. BTW, 41 Hz is the lowest note on a bass guitar. It also probably as low as you should go in driving your speakers unless you're careful.

That would be the usual 4-string bass guitar. Quite a few bass players use a 5-string, which goes to around 30 Hz.

Test tones can damage your hearing? Hadn't heard that, but it makes sense, since white noise at 65 dB sounds as loud to me as music at 85 dB or so.

[mas]

I read in an acoustical engineering book (...doesn't matter which one, they ALL say it!) that a room cannot recreate a frequency that cannot fit inside it.

So, being smarter than the average bear, I avoid these issues by listening with headphones!

Of course since the acoustical space between the diaphragm and the ear is only about an inch or so, I cannot hear anything below ~13,500Hz. Needless to say I don't listen to much except dolphin whistles and bat chatter, but hey! its fisiks!

Prove it to yourself! Listen to headphones! You won't hear anything below about 13,500 Hz either!

See! I proved it! Its simple logic!

Damn I love that fisiks stuff! Come on you @#$&% little electrons! Get the lead out! (Getting out of the little box wasn't that hard!)

{Oh, oh... I guess that I had better tell people that I am stating this in jest to illustrate a point, else I will have the hordes who cannot interpret wry humor coming after me thinking that I think that this is literally correct! Geesh!}

[WMcD]

Thanks Islander for the update on bass guitars.

I'm being a bit cautious about ear health. I find 80 to 90 dB continuous tones to be overbearing. And you never know what the likes of people around here would contrive to do.

I killed a bass horn driver with a Telarc disk (one with a warning). Also, I was able to use the HP tone generator to drive a "Bigger Belle" until the driver bottomed out with a 10 watt amp. This was at resonance. With a little more juice, I'm sure the driver would fail mechanically.

Of course I agree with mas. Another example is the car interior. We know we hear bass in the car. Why would anyone think a small living room, which is larger, will somehow not "support" bass notes.

Probably what people are trying to say is that small rooms do not have resonance modes down in the low bass which would otherwise boost bass. That is not the same thing as failure to pass them along to your ear.

Gil

[mas]

I'm being a little careful about saying that room nodes can go to absolute silence (the summed magnitude is zero), though that was not my point at all. It can get very low. However, my thought is that the room would have to have perfect, non-lossey reflections.

Just a very small point. The standing waves are 'reinforced' pressure waves. These differ from how we often characterize waves in that the nulls are low pressure and the peaks are high pressure. ...Think more akin to a weather front. Or even an ocean wave. The nulls are not cancellations due to superposition in room modes. They are the room resonant frequencies determined and reinforced by the room dimensions.

[Islander]

I'm being a bit cautious about ear health. I find 80 to 90 dB continuous tones to be overbearing. And you never know what the likes of people around here would contrive to do.

Cautious is smart. I never go to a concert without earplugs in my pocket. Even extras, in case I meet a hot fellow music lover... (who's not a fellow, I should add)