A quote I liked from Srajan on Sixmoons

[Deton Nation]

"Manly fascination with horsepower often applies the same more-is-better thinking but nothing interferes with the high in fidelity like dominant ringy bass."
This was in context of picking the right speaker for your room and not going for the biggest, baddest thing out there.
Originally from his review of the Ballerina 301.
Mike

[tmazz]

Absolutely! IMO a smaller quantity of tight faster bass is much more preferable to large amounts of sloppy, overshooting lower octave boom any day of the week.

[tmazz]

There has to be a joke in their somewhere about liking both your bass and your women fast and tight, but let's not go there (unless of course somebody has some good pictures to illustrate the point  )

[Bigfish8]

There has to be a joke in their somewhere about liking both your bass and your women fast and tight, but let's not go there (unless of course somebody has some good pictures to illustrate the point  )

Tom - are you dreaming again?

As I continue to pursue this hobby I find tight, controlled bass is essential but also the most challenging aspect of speaker selection.  If the speakers do bass well, can you treat the room to control the bass so that it does not bounce around the place like crazy?  Trust me, I found it a heck of a lot easier to talk about than to control in my room when I had the Timepieces.  My hat is off to you guys that have speakers that produce sub 30 HZ notes and you are able to control it.

Ken

[Deton Nation]

My room has lots of curtains, rug area, plush fabric couches to soak up the sound... Even still once you pass a certain sound level the bass does overload the room a bit. But thats pretty loud anyway.. so its ok.

But you do need the lowest lows, it just makes the music more realistic.

[JLM]

In my 40 years, the best bass comes from mass loaded transmission lines (MLTL).  It's only been the past few years that a design method has been available, thanks to Martin King.  Irving M. (Bud) Fried was a leading designer/advocate of MLTL's but his quirks and failed business dealings caused significant damage to his reputation.  Others have latched onto the term but never applied the principles correctly, thus leading many to dismiss them.  But perhaps most discount them based on lack of experience with them or the design complexities. 

Much of the criticism against MLTL have been the additional expense and complication in the cabinet construction.  Frankly this is way over blown and I'm sick of it.  The only speaker cabinets I ever built were MLTL with the only complication being a slightly larger cabinet and two additional internal panels needed to create the labyrinth.  If I can build them, it ain't so hard. 

The properly designed MLTL has a 6 dB/octave roll off (to match room gain) and the vent is in phase with the driver(s).  This eliminates one note bass boom and much of the issues associated with matching speakers to rooms while improving efficiency.  The MLTL is open, so back pressures don't affect the driver(s) and cabinet resonances are greatly reduced.  Because of the sloped internal spaces the back wave is directed away from the driver(s).  This cleans up the midrange as no driver material is acoustical opaque.

I sold those MLTL cabinets because I could never afford a room big enough to do them justice.  Just one session in a 20,000 cu. ft. chapel with a 20 wpc receiver proved that to me.

[BobM]

I know you've all been waiting for a picture of women with tight and fast bass, so here you go. Lets see how many hits this topic gets now ...

[Bigfish8]

Bob:

Well done My Man!

Ken

[richidoo]

Many people have told me how great MLTL bass sounds, so I'm looking forward to experimenting with that. How do you keep vent in phase with driver JLM? When length and stuffing is tuned correctly for flat impedance does it naturally come into phase?

How does tuned pipe compare to properly EQ boosted, properly sized drivers in large rigid sealed cabinet? Maybe with PRs? That's what I want to know, or better yet hear the difference side by side.

If only Srajan had done a review of such monsters, then I could just look it up...

[_Scotty_]

Richidoo,A passive radiator is the same as a vent in the enclosure. If you do a google on vented loudspeaker design further explanations can be found. A simplistic explanation would be that the air in the enclosure in a vented design is tuned to vibrate in a specific relationship to the woofers fundamental resonant frequency via a vent or a vent substitute such as a passive radiator. At a specific frequency,frequently the drivers resonant frequency, the air in the enclosure will vibrate in sympathy with the driver and damp the drivers output giving the appearance that the driver has nearly quit moving and at that point the port is doing almost all of the heavy lifting in the bass regions. With a vented design the woofers excursion decreases with frequency and the distortion produced can be lower than a sealed design for a given SPL at the same frequency. In a sealed design the woofers excursion must quadruple with every time the frequency is halved until the driver pops out on the floor. Also the harmonic distortion rises proportional to the drivers displacement. For a given frequency a vented design can have a higher output with lower distortion than a sealed design with the same size driver. That being said my perfect bass system would be a servod aperiodic design with towers of woofers on each side to maximize my cone area and minimize my excursion and distortion.
As far as the perceived tightness in the bass goes the amplifier used can impact the apparent tightness almost as dramatically as the type of speaker design. For a given speaker design I can manipulate your perceptions of the quality of bass just by switching the amps.
I also have a link to information on Transmission line speaker designs
http://www.quarter-wave.com/
http://www.quarter-wave.com/TLs/TL_Theory.html
Scotty

[BobM]

What is also interesting is that a speaker capable of producing tight, fast and deep bass is often said to sound somewhat lean, while a speaker that booms somewhat is considered to have prodigous bass, even if it cuts off at 35-40hz.

Of course there's more to it than that, including a warmth in the mid-bass area (@80-200hz) and not just what it sounds like from 20-80hz.

[JLM]

richidoo,

Here's a couple of good links to explain MLTL:

http://www.t-linespeakers.org/

http://brinesacoustics.com/ (the FTA-2000 speakers are mine)

[shep]

Hurray for TL's! (like mine) Don't believe a 5 inch driver can produce a solid 30 and curdle your milk? think again!
I'm dumb as a gator sleeping on a log  I don't know if it's a TL or MLTL. Well some people just gotta beat their own drum sometimes.

[richidoo]

Thanks guys!

[Bob in St. Louis]

Infinite Baffle.
Thoughts?