Wow, my brothers here have been going at it, and BASS, my favorite as well, while I was sleeping and going to church!!!!
Happy Easter BTW!!!!

Congrats of even knowing to spell it BASS, and not BASE.

You guys know my thoughts, or at least know I have some on all these topics. And they are all worthy topics. BUT I feel some important stuff has been left out, or neglected because it is a Pain in the butt!!! I have struggled with nearly all you have been discussing and ROOM interactions and ROOM CORRECTION as well.
So, IF I may, let me throw out a couple of points --- toss them into the ring as well.
1. As Bro Charlie has discussed, one size does not fit all, music and movies IF one is to have realistic, lifelike movie explosions, etc. So for my taste, and I try, mostly my system does it all, I have settled in my mind that shaking my couch, pants legs, rattling the walls and making my hundreds of CD jewel boxes rattle against each other is all I will allow, I do not go above that to shaking the ceiling and bringing the house down. That limitation said, my system does everything else on your list, movies (limited as discussed) and music.
ALL kinds of music.
2. To do that, I have LFE going to my TOnes in front and my T 2s as surrounds and a SVS SB16Ultra in the rear of the room. I do not discuss this much on this forum as this is a GEt forum and they are kind enough to let us discuss things here. But this has been essential to getting the low bass I want on an orchestra or Rock, Jazz or contemporary standup bass, organ and from movies of course. It has the plus of a smart phone app to control several things including volume from my listening seat which is sometimes a great help.
3. To make all this bass work in my room I have DIRAC room correction running in my Emotiva XMC-1 Pre-processor. It calms room nodes or modes. Smooths out the bass.
4. Is it perfect, NO. I have never found a way to perfectly integrate bass from music and movies into a room. I was careful of the dimensions of the room before it was ever built. And careful of the furniture, rugs, etc. except for the damn jewel boxes, I have to get them outta the room. I got the XMC-1 specifically for the room correction, which is pretty good, not perfect. The addition of the SVS sub was the final piece, before it came all my struggles were one big headache, double bass, etc.
Now I am a happy camper with my bass.
I find it makes a HUGE difference to have the proper foundation for all the music.
And movies are just not the same without rocking good bass.
Hope this contributes, God Bless,
Wayne

Hi Rick,

I agree with your comment about double bass resulting in a muddy bass sound. After many months of intensive listening with double bass active, I finally reached the same conclusion. If I were still driving my Ones with an AV Receiver, I might still be using a double bass setup with the Ones set to Small and the LFE cutoff set to 40 HZ, as you had tried.

But, I am much happier now with sending my Cambridge preout signal to my two external subs and letting the Ones handle the full range signal.

I also agree with your assessment of the relationship between overall playback sound level and bass. I do listen at below concert-level (sometimes well below). Bass rolls off quickly with lower volume levels. I am compensating with the two external subs.

Perhaps you do present a credible argument for adding a pair of References to the mix. If I had a pair of References, my setup would closely mirror yours - Refs in Front and Ones in the Rear. Much more "natural bass" unless room characteristics caused wave cancellations.

Art

Hi Wayne,

Your reported experiments and results closely mirror some of my activities. There is so much variation in sound when listening to various types of music, compounded by volume levels, variations in recording and mixing techniques, room characteristics, personal preferences, etc. that it is very difficult to find a suitable compromise. One size certainly does not fit all - not even for one individual's preferences.

I have been happier since I separated my AV system from my music system, but I recognize that my approach would not please, or even be feasible for, many folks.

Art

ArthurDaniels wrote: I do want a bit of thump in the bass (well, maybe just a bit more thump than just an audible bass line).

Art, reading the various replies here, a few things stand out in my mind.

One important bass factor is the dynamic compression being done on the front lines of the Loudness Wars. I have found that I have to run many newer recordings at volume levels half (or less) of where I usually listen to classical. Invariably, these very loud recordings have very poor bass dynamics, and that bass thump all but disappears. That's what all that headroom is needed for, and compression crushes the life out of dynamic transients. Makes for a boring recording in my mind. I think that most modern non-classical recordings suffer from this problem.

Before I discovered GET, I had tried a separate subwoofer, but I was never happy with the sound of the system. It was very hard to integrate the subwoofer with the main speakers in a way that was transparent. The result was usually muddy and ill defined. Then, when I got the T1s, everything came together, and I no longer needed the sub. Now my TRefs give me everything I could want in clean, well integrated bass. I run my TRefs just a smidge above 12:00, and I love the sound. Pipe organ? No problem! Drum hits? Stunning! But, again, the overall perception depends greatly on the quality of the recordings. The best ones come through with clearly defined bass, but there are many many bad ones out there that are compressed to death.

Finally, as I'm sure you all know, room placement of both speakers and listener is critical. It took a lot of fiddling around to get it right, and I was guided to where I am today by plotting standing wave amplitudes in my room. This was a great help in finding the right places that smoothed out the bass fluctuations, and I discovered that even a few inches made a difference in the sound. Wrong location, and the bass went lumpy and boomy or dead and flat.

I had considered using Dirac for bass correction, but I've hit on a placement scheme that is so good that I no longer feel it is necessary. For now, at least, I'm leaving things as they are. I think part of it is just dumb luck in having a room shape (with openings) that helps minimize many of the modes to begin with.

A happy bass camper I am...

Charlie

My solution is fairly simple. I pair two external, sealed velodyne subs to the GEt system.

2 CHANNEL AUDIO: Triton 2’s + the front 8” sub.
HOME THEATER: 7 channels + front 8” sub, + rear 10” sub.

Basically, when I watch movies I switch the receiver from 2 channel to 7 channels & hit a light switch that turns on power to the rear sub which extends lower and provides a lot more bass presence (I have the volume a touch higher than you’d want for music). The front 8” sub plays so low that one can’t detect it, though it does a great job equalizing low pressure waves.

That’s how I built a single system that will accommodate both needs.

Everybody,

Great replies and comments. Just as I had hoped when I constructed the original post to get this discussion started. I hoped that different approaches would come forth and, so far, there have been several.

Come on, folks.... Let us hear how you have tackled the problem of managing bass response in your GE setup.

Art