There’s a very simple premise behind today’s rant, perhaps even too simple. It goes like this:

Roughly speaking, we can divide up the range of frequencies that interest us as musicphiles into 3 sections – Highs, Mids, and Lows. Or: Treble, Midrange, and Bass, if you prefer,

To capture and reproduce the HF range to our liking, we’ll spend $1000’s, if not 10’s of $1000’s on high-end amplification. Likewise with the midrange, which many consider to be the make-or-break frequency range for satisfactory music playback. We may use the same amp or amps (monoblocks) for the mids and HF, or we may split the workload over two amps, as in the bi part of a tri-amped system. We then boast of our achievements by strutting our stuff on forums and spouting vernacular like, “pristine highs”, “romantic midrange” etc, then……. we stick a $100 plate amp on the bass and say ‘wow, that’s tight, dude’, and no one bats an eyelid.

I just don’t make no sense, bro.

Okay, you can come back at me quoting the small span of hertz that bass actually covers, the theoretical absence of being able to detect directionality from LF information etc. But that’s bullshit. When I hear an upright bass being plucked, the tone, the presence, the depth reproduction of those lowest notes….it matters!! Then of course there are those of you running perfectly fine full-range speakers driven by a single amp. Bully for you. The rest of us are stuck with shite listening rooms and wrestling daily with one or more subwoofers, trying to hear that bottom octave in a way that doesn’t make us all nauseous and light-headed.

So for my next trick, after the somewhat disappointing results of my foray into distributed bass arrays (SWARM), I’m going to attempt to tackle DSP, bass amplification, and the (hopefully) advantages of treating the Lower Frequencies with the same respect as everything else.

Come along for the ride if you want, you can join in using the comments box below.

I’ll be working with a pair of gutted Aerial Acoustics SW-12 subwoofers ($5K each, approx), a miniDSP 2x4HD, setup first with REW software, then later with DIRAC, dedicated subwoofer power amps – first, a single ProAudio amp, the extraordinarily competent and well-reviewed Crown XLS2502, then….another XLS2502 as we go full-swarm, then….we’ll swap out the XLS2502 amps and drop-in some higher-end power amps to see if they’re worth the extra spend.

Later, I may try other DSP solutions, but for now, the miniDSP is the starting point.

I’ll throw up a thread once the wheels get turning and link to it from this page.

Cheers

CAH 2021

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