The near-perfect level of bass experience is a luxury, far from the vast majority of casual music listeners. Because to get it, you have to have a lot of elements. From the high-end sound system, the standard room in terms of acoustics, the appropriate room area/volume, the entire room and equipment must be professionally configured and calibrated… Therefore, you will not find it difficult at all. when looking for complaints about the quality of bass online, in forums about music, sound.
This article will help us learn about common bass problems, their causes, and open up ways to fix them in the future.
Coordinate Reference System
First of all, we need to agree on an extremely obvious point: Everyone’s ears are different, each person’s taste is an idea. Hence, boredom or good is personal opinion and feeling.
Actually, I say that to please many people. If you ask us privately, we will answer that high or low quality bass can be quantified by specific specifications, not obscure at all.
Second, we need to agree on how to understand bass.
Bass is the lowest frequency range that can be heard by the human ear. The range of bass is usually specified from 20 to 250 Hz. However, the area that is usually the most problematic, the most difficult to deal with, and the most expensive is in the 20-100 Hz range.
Unfortunately, even with a narrow range (20-250Hz compared to the human hearing capacity of 20-20,000 Hz), the quality of the bass greatly affects the experience of listening to music or working professionally on music. sound.
Do you listen to a good dance song, a jazz song, can you feel the subtleties of each drum beat, each bass note, is the movie viewing experience consistent among many chairs in the room or is the chair um chair? I can’t hear the bass, does your studio mix translate well into other sound systems or rooms… (and a lot of other contexts). All are greatly influenced by the quality and accuracy of the bass in your room.
How bad is the bass?
Our goal in this section is to try to materialize the “boring” of your current room bass experience. Let’s take a look at some common “symptoms” below:
1. The bass lacks detail
Listen without clearly separating the bass content generated from different instruments and effects. It’s all just a halo that’s not very clear. You cannot specifically separate which bass notes are produced by kick drum, bass guitar, synthesizer, cello, etc.
2. Shallow
Not deep. When we talk about shallow or deep bass, we are not talking about intensity, but about the lowest set of frequencies that the sound system can reproduce and perceive by our bodies. For example: In the room, you only hear the bass notes down to 50 Hz, below 50Hz, you almost no longer feel anything. When you hear the bass is shallow, maybe your speaker system is not good enough to hit that frequency, or the position you listen to is suppressing the pressure of the very low frequency group eg 20-40 Hz.. A lot. reason.
3. Thin
Bass is lost a lot in certain frequency groups. This is not caused by equipment, sound absorption systems that absorb bass as many people think, but because the sound wave interactions cancel each other inside your room.
4. Ringing
When we talk about um, we usually mean 1 or a few low frequencies in the 80-200 Hz range that are strongly resonant, overwhelming the surrounding frequencies.
5. Buzz
Headache! This feeling is generated because your room is very strongly resonant at some frequency in the range of 20-100 Hz. Those frequencies have a very long sustain. Even when the speaker has stopped playing, the buzzing frequency can continue to ring for 1-3 seconds or worse.
6. Out of tune
Have you ever felt like a musician playing the bass was not tuned properly, the notes were exposed when listening in the room, but did not have that feeling when listening with headphones? If you really pay attention, there must have been. When the previous bass note has stopped, but it causes the note to be more sustained, mixing in the next bass note. You will have a very strange feeling. Especially in the transitions and uptones.
7. Thin, shallow, ringing and buzzing
How can it be like that? It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. For example: The bass in your room is both buzzing at 53 Hz, shallow because 20-45 Hz is suppressed, thin because 70-90 Hz is suppressed, and um because 150 Hz is strongly resonant. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. On the contrary, rooms with multiple problems at once are very common.
8. Somewhere the bass hurts my head, somewhere it’s thin
The experience of bass is completely unstable at many different locations in the room. As a result, there are very few options for where to sit to enjoy music and movies, although the room has a lot of excess space.
9. Less accurate
The bass notes that people hit lightly are loud, the ones that people hit are small or invisible. People playing staccato sound like legato. The timbre of the kick drum, of the bass guitar is also not felt specifically and clearly.
Reasons?
1 boredom that has 9 symptoms (still not enough) to describe. You can see how long and thorny the road to a high-end bass experience is. So let’s take a look at some of the main reasons that lead to the above problems!
Bad Acoustic Treatment
This is one of the extremely important causes that affect all 9 symptoms of the unpleasant bass experience mentioned above.
You won’t be able to get an excellent audio experience in any aspect, in any frequency band, if your room is not acoustically treated well. Here, I emphasize that the treatment is good, not just taking sound-absorbing materials or buying ready-made sound-absorbing products to attach and paste all over the room.
The cost of having a room with a high standard of acoustics is not low. Especially when the room has a problem with bass. Never expect to get the ideal bass experience with just a few simple muffler modules mounted in a few corners of the room.
If things were that simple, the world’s top mastering studios wouldn’t have to spend a huge budget on studio acoustics processing.
Wrong Speaker Position, Speaker Installation, Seating Position
When speakers are placed in a room, the sound you hear never comes from the speaker alone. It is the synthesis of a very complex interaction between the speakers, the room, where you sit to the furniture and furniture in the room.
It is not difficult to simulate the interaction of speakers in a room with a specific frequency. But with real sound it’s not easy at all. Because the sound we hear consists of many different frequencies with continuously varying intensities.
In the same room, you put speakers here or there, the bass will be different. Sometimes, by just 5 cm, the measured results can be significantly different. The listening position is similar.
Then comes the installation or placement of speakers. You install the speaker hanging or on the speaker stand or wall. When installing you should pay attention to how the speaker interacts with the structure, surface to which it is mounted or placed. Many things facilitate our brain to have more wrinkles, thereby improving the pleasure of the eardrum.
Bad Sound System Calibration
With the same sound system, if left in the hands of 2 independent tuners, chances are, you will get 2 very different listening experiences even though on the response chart everything seems to be the same. Too weird!
It’s very simple, because tuning a sound system is more than simply smoothing the response. The true professional calibrator will have to optimize the system on many other technical aspects of the sound system, how the sound system interacts with the room.
The Room itself is not suitable
There are some rooms that are very difficult to renovate to become music, movie or studio rooms. Bass is very concerned with the size, volume and texture of your walls, ceilings, floors.
If your room is full of glass, a few curtains or a few sound-absorbing modules can’t solve the bass.
If your room is too small, process it to have a good bass, and you will only be able to fit the set and a small single sofa that is almost all.
If your room ratio is too bad or the geometry is too unfavorable, you should consider changing rooms or choosing another solution to listen to music and work because treating the bass in these rooms will be very expensive in terms of budget. and area where it is still difficult to achieve the ideal bass experience.
Bad Sound System
This is the most likely cause to blame. But the truth is not like that.
We have reason to put this down last. Simply because it doesn’t contribute as much to the bad bass experience in the room as people think. 80% of the lousy bass rooms we’ve dealt with for clients have not come from the sound system.
Many customers have had to say that they no longer recognize the bass experience of the old speakers after we reprocessed the entire room. Everything is different and the experience is much better than before.
Before blaming the sound system for the bad bass in the room, you need to check all aspects of the sound system. From system native response (not room response), distortion, response over time, maximum sound pressure, desired sound pressure at listening position…
Summary
Poor bass experience is one of the biggest and most common problems, and also the hardest to deal with in the studio, music room, movie room.
A few curtains, rugs or a few sound-absorbing modules will hardly bring the excellent bass quality you want. The experience of bass or sound in a room is a combination of many factors, from the shape and size of the room, to the types of wall and ceiling textures, acoustic design, installation methods and calibration of the sound system. …
This video won’t give you immediate bass improvements, but it will help you understand why you’re having problems now and how to deal with it.
For a deeper analysis, we will need a lot of articles and ink. Because really, it’s so complicated. Thank you for reading and see you in the next articles.
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