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slowmotion wrote:

I don't understand what you mean here, Romy? To me "live" bass ( like when listening to an orchestra ) is much more dynamic than any reproduced bass I've ever heard. Also if listening to a real contrabass in a normal listening room the real thing is way more "dynamic" to my ears...

Anyhow I was thinking about it a lot a few years back and this is what I concluded. When we talk about "bass dynamic" we do not imply bass’ dynamic range. We do not really feel bass’ dynamic range. We can instantly identify a compression of dynamic range at higher frequencies but with bass it works differently. The Bass’s octave very short and bass usually is not evenly reproduced within octaves. Furthermore the mechanisms of bass reproduction, being imbedded into listening space, introduce very high contamination of bass by own residues of reproduction efforts. As the result, the dynamic envelop of bass at very high degree overwritten but the methods or reproduction (it will be more on some other aspects lower).

When we register reproduced bass we unwillingly loosing out humane reference to "dynamic” (as dynamic range) of bass notes and instead we recognize the "dynamic” as a motion of bass in space. Interestingly that as soon we recognize the “dynamic” of bass as a movable, variable and changeable force than the “dynamic” characteristics (attack/decay) of playback systems become prominent (actually they are always prominent but with bass it juts even more dominating). The attack/decay parent of bass has MUSH more affect on us then the absolute dynamic range of the bass’ octaves. Still, when we recognize the “absolute dynamic range” we presume the deviation of signal over the noise floor. Well, the nose floor in bass region is quite complicated thing and it is not accident that I used the phrase: “the attack/decay of ENTIRE playback system”

Bass to be properly reproduces should be enveloped into a certain acoustic environment, the certain reverberation time or what called the “decay time” (usesly we use –60dB and look how long it might be in seconds). The shorter reverberation time the sharper and “faster” bass sounds (in addition the effect of phase randomanization within the diminutive RT60 has not space/time to kick-in). But here is the catch: we do not want this “sharp bass” to exists because it sound like claps. So, the wily engineers UNINTENTIONALLY implement into this speakers and amplifiers the mechanisms that would produces “better bass” in the environments were bass should be naturally “too sort” and “too fast”.  So, while we false-fertilize bass with overwhelming amount of the lowest (usually second) harmonics, twist attack/decays of our amplifiers and do some crazy “tricks” with amplifiers/speakers interfaces we overwrite bass unrecognizably and present to ourselves juts dead overly possessed bass. To look at this “dead bass” and try to estimate it’s “absolute dynamic” is similar to looking at fish broth and trying to assess if it was an ocean or a river fish.

So, what we feel, when we are talking about "live" bass being more dynamic, is the fact was not bass but the Symphony Hall with it’s 40Hz decay at 60dB within 3-4 seconds. Also it was the sound where there are no thermodynamic distortions by poor electronics, no flux modulations of magnetic, no mechanical genericism of speakers’ suspensions and no many others “seriousness eliminating contributors”.

Looking at all of this, when I try to reproduce bass I at trying to imitate not the bass itself but the attack/decay patters of the listening environment and therefore most of the reproduced bass that I have hear for audio it “too fast” for me. This “too fast” and “too dynamic” might be OK for any music but as soon we hit classical music then the “fast” bass act like a knife among the ribs.  The bass should not be fast or slow: a reproduces listening space should sound like the “life” listening space and the bass in this space should be whatever it is. It is VERY- VERY- VERY complicated to replica the real dynamic range of bass AND at the SAME time to maintain the reproduces listening space’s attack/decay patters AND at the SAME time to use the LF channels to control the reverberation times within the reproduced space (you would need two LF transducers: one to care the signal and another to counterfeit the decay signature of the “optimum” for given octave listening space)

In the end the wrong attack/decay patters is MUCH more DEVASTATE MUSIC then a compressed dynamic range and this is why I always say that “live” bass never “dynamic”. The “live” bass rather has long decay and (BECAUSE OF THIS) it feels like it has high dynamic range. I do not think that this is imposable in playback.

PS: That all is not a secret and in way it is all commonly known things. The only regretful part that I feel that since I posted it I will see in a few months some kind another idiot-reviewer will brainlessly snatch the entire notion and will shove to the poor audiophiles some kind of new farts-producing machines. It has happened a few times before in audio publications. I remember in past, when I made some serious posts at AA, I had a tradition to intentionally implant in the concepts some strategically placed errors and I was very gratified when I have seen that the idiot-reviewers swallowed and copied the whole peace without even remote understanding what the hell they read. Few time those cretins even use my “off the wall” semantic. What was even more disgusting (it happened twice) that before the industry assholes decided to convert my serious posts into this marketing BS they made the dirt that runs the AA to delete my posts form AA archives.

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