Charivari
Fighting Naïve Realism
The recent recurrence in a usefulness of subwoofers in music thread in General Audio has once again revealed the myth that music albums contain no information below roughly 50 Hz and that deep bass is only to be found in movies. Well, that simply isn't the case.
Quite a few albums in a variety of genres have a surprising amount of information down in the below the chest thump range of frequencies. Hearing such music on a system that has quality bass reproduction with infrasonic extension then hearing the same on a sound reinforcement type system with a -10dB point at 42 Hz is a bit akin to listening to a set of quality speakers with the tweeters disconnected. The majority of the music information might still be there, but there is an obvious lack in the music.
So, to help dispel this myth, I thought it might be fun to start up a thread that shows examples of recordings that do have significant deep bass content and even quantify it a bit to prevent dismissal. I'll post a few examples and hope that others will offer up their own examples and graphs.
To make the task simple, I'll use Audacity, a free software program capable of rudimentary frequency analysis, sampling a 15-20 second window using the simpler method. The data and graph will be done with the Hanning window setting, which will reduce the output from the actual levels, but make the structure of the signal more evident and interesting. So, bear in mind that the graphs are showing the deeper frequencies as much reduced compared to how they actually are in the recording.
For example, here is the outputted data in the Hanning window of a sample track:
...and the same section using the default setting:
It is worth noting that while some of the infrasonic information might appear to be of much reduced level and covering only a few Hertz, that little bit can cause woofers to flap, experience non-linear motor movement, possibly be damaged (bottoming out), and suffer general distortion and noise such as port flatulence.
Hopefully some of you will participate.
- JP
Quite a few albums in a variety of genres have a surprising amount of information down in the below the chest thump range of frequencies. Hearing such music on a system that has quality bass reproduction with infrasonic extension then hearing the same on a sound reinforcement type system with a -10dB point at 42 Hz is a bit akin to listening to a set of quality speakers with the tweeters disconnected. The majority of the music information might still be there, but there is an obvious lack in the music.
So, to help dispel this myth, I thought it might be fun to start up a thread that shows examples of recordings that do have significant deep bass content and even quantify it a bit to prevent dismissal. I'll post a few examples and hope that others will offer up their own examples and graphs.
To make the task simple, I'll use Audacity, a free software program capable of rudimentary frequency analysis, sampling a 15-20 second window using the simpler method. The data and graph will be done with the Hanning window setting, which will reduce the output from the actual levels, but make the structure of the signal more evident and interesting. So, bear in mind that the graphs are showing the deeper frequencies as much reduced compared to how they actually are in the recording.
For example, here is the outputted data in the Hanning window of a sample track:
...and the same section using the default setting:
It is worth noting that while some of the infrasonic information might appear to be of much reduced level and covering only a few Hertz, that little bit can cause woofers to flap, experience non-linear motor movement, possibly be damaged (bottoming out), and suffer general distortion and noise such as port flatulence.
Hopefully some of you will participate.
- JP
