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The audibility of deep bass research is all wrong

Human hearing fades under 30Hz. and can be very poor by 20Hz.
But people do report feeling body pressurization from deep bass even when they don't hear a distinct tone. Surveys tend to miss that effect by asking what people "hear", rather than asking what they hear with their ears, and feel with their body.

Even worse, surveys tend to use sine wave tones that makes harmonic distortion MUCH easier to hear, rather than using real music that masks harmonic distortion well.

Complex real music may mask harmonic distortion so well that it may have to exceed 10% in a subwoofer before being noticed.

The result: While we listen to music, not test tones, some subwoofers will produce 20Hz. loud enough to be felt ... and the resulting harmonic distortion may not be audible (especially if the subwoofer driver faces away from the listeners ears (mechanical low-pass filtering) and there is a low turnover frequency and steep slope low-pass filter (let's say 24dB/octave at 50Hz.).

In summary it's amazing how much harmonic distortion from subwoofers is masked by the music content. The "research" does not correlate with what people hear and feel when listening to the deep bass in (some) music.

Even if a subwoofer WAS able to produce loud low distortion 20Hz. test tones, the wood frame house it was located in would most likely make noises far worse than harmonic distortion!
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Richard BassNut Greene
My Stereo is MUCH BETTER than Your Stereo

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