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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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In Reply to: Question about dealing with mid-bass bloat. posted by pkats on March 19, 2008 at 07:18:47:
It's probably not "new bloat" but something that was there all along but masked by the room's uneven bass response until you installed some acoustic treatment and reduced the impact of the room on what you hear.
It's difficult to say what the cause could be. I don't know your speakers but I think the Bachs are a stand mount monitor if I remember correctly from an ad I once saw. Monitors often have a bit of a bump in frequency response in the mid to upper bass to provide compensation for the lack of genuine low bass extension. This bump helps the speaker to seem as if it's delivering deeper bass than it actually is and the presence of such a bump if your speaker has one may now be becoming more obvious. Not all small monitors have this bump but some do. Moving the speakers further into the room, away from the walls, may help here by reducing bass reinforcement from those surfaces since speaker location relative to the walls and floor may have an effect like this since proximity to these surfaces provides bass reinforcement.
Even if your speakers don't have that particular bump in their respeonse, proximity to room surfaces may reinforce bass response enough to cause what you're hearing. Once the speaker's bass response rolls off enough, the nearby room surfaces won't provide enough reinforcement for it to appear as bloat but as you increase the frequency, and the level of the bass, it will start to show the effects of proximity to surfaces more so the boost that proximity gives won't start appearing excessive in the lowest frequencies you hear but a little bit above that where the speaker's bass response is a little stronger. This is what you might be hearing. The solution, as I said, is to move the speaker further away from the walls and further into open space. You really can't do much about distance to the floor.
You commented on the sweetness of the mids and you may well find that this sweetness starts to extend more into the highs as well as you move the speakers out from the walls since that weakens the strength of the first reflections relative to the direct sound and reflections can harden the sound of the highs, especially reflections from glass windows, so moving the speakers may eliminate the bloat and/or reduce the impact of any bump in mid bass response that the speaker has, and improve the sound of the highs as well.
In my experience I've found that too much mass loading of components, or putting too much mass in stands, can have this sort of effect. Reducing the mass used will correct that. You can experiment with how much mass you can use to get the benefits of mass loading without incurring that penalty.
No doubt there are other possible causes as well but a deliberate mid bass bump in the speaker's response, proximity to room surfaces, and excessive mass loading are the 3 possibilities that immediately come to mind for me.
David Aiken
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Follow Ups
- RE: Question about dealing with mid-bass bloat. - David Aiken 13:45:43 03/19/08 (0)
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