something that i've found interesting...

Now now Sir,again,you make sweeping generalisations !

Your telling us what to think LOL

Il agree that most music has substantial fundamentals down to 50hz.But to some music,like dubstep,you might need that 35hz at a very high level.

using cooledit2000/adobe audition, spectrum analyse the song,and youl see the information in the source.
Instead of

for those of you who think you need 30hz playability... you really don't...

...Most dont. If you want the entire bandwidth,then yes you do.

Neverwinter : I think along the same lines,when I bought my 2226 for home use,in 175L internal enclosure with 33hz port tuning,I was thinking exactly the same thing. After spectrum analysing alot of my drum n bass,i decided on the 33hz tuning. Good times.I had to sell it though :( Time for another ! a year without bass is like eternity :'(

its crazy to think,that many in the car audio have a flat anechoic response to 20hz sub - then put it in the car,giving a HUGE LF increase below 100hz,boom boom! Fun uncontrolled bass,+ panel flex. The 2226 flexed the car rather well,little blips in the vinyl recordings moved some air that I hadnt heard before ,the nice overdamped response made an ok result,tone wise.
:P

yeah,

im sure we had a thread like this before. 


Almost all commercial or popular music now a days will have very little below 40 or 50Hz, its only really some D&B, Dub, and reggae  (and one or two very fex exceptions in pop music) that ha anything below this.


Its dead easy to check as well.  Get any wave editing program for a PC (Cool Edit, Sound Forge, Wavelab are the big ones, and theres a few free ones on the net too) and single out a 10 second clip of the song your interested in.

The programs all have some sort of spectrograph function that allows you to see a plot of the frequency content over a short clip. Some use a 2D graph with time and frequency on the axes and colour representing amplitude (i.e. so brighter at a particuluar spot means higher content of that frequency at that time) and some like Wavelab that I have use a waterfall plot.

Here are some examples (done in wavelab so they're the waterfall type), firstly Take the Power Back by rage against the machine.  (very well produced and good example of a nice balanced Rock sound, i use it a lot for quickly sounding out a system and seeing how it sounds) Its about 8 seconds of sound just where the guitars kick in at the start of the song.




On this graph time is coming towards us down the y axis and frequency is going left to right. Height denotes amplitude.

As you can see almost all of the bass is located around 80Hz, in the 'kick' region of the bass range, which is very obvious if you listen to the song its got a very nice rock sounding and 'kicky' bass drum sound.

Another example is the song "can i have it like that" by Pharell Williams. it has a very deep sounding flowing bass line running through it, and here's the graph:



all of the bass, and most of the power of the song, is located right around 40-45Hz, but if you look along the 40Hz line, its far to perfect a drop off to be natural, looks like soneone has just sliced the bottom off with a big cheese wire, so its fairly obvious that everything below 40Hz has been filtered out, probably by the mastering people.

So yeah, labsubs and getting down to 20 odd Hz is all well and good, but very few people actually need it.  The reflex subs i'm making only go down to 35-40Hz and although i could have squeezed a few more Hz out of them there wasn't really any point as almost all of the music I play while DJing never gets any lower than 40Hz.


Neverwinter, if you dont have any software to do this then email me a clip of the song you mentioned and i'll stick a graph on so you can see what frequency that drop is.


kev



Edited by kevinmcdonough - 17 November 2006 at 9:17am

@ kev - i sure will do that. just gota find me a little something to get the clip out and i'll send it to ya via email. PM me with the details!

Edited by NeverWinter - 17 November 2006 at 4:42pm

using the cheap hardware of bumringer, their EQ's feedback thing makes a pretty cool spectrograph, can watch basslines rolling up and down!

this is the graph of the loop Neverwinter created,

as you can see his big bass note is pretty much exactly around 30 Hz but there's also a decient amount of sound around 25 Hz as well.





Edited by kevinmcdonough - 17 November 2006 at 8:10pm