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Four great reference disks to test your system's bass
by Nyal MellorApril 21, 2011
This weeks blog posts covers some of my favorite disks that I use when I am out at a customer’s house diagnosing their room’s unique acoustical issues or setting up their system. They have been chosen because they are high quality recordings that contain elements that are useful to test a system’s sound quality.
Temptation by Dianna Krall fromThe Girl In The Other Roomhas an acoustic double bass line that is great for testing for even bass decay and bass smoothness. Room modes will very often cause the double bass to lose articulation and clarity, with some notes sounding louder than others and decaying at different rates. Her voice is also a good test of image stability – it should be locked in the center of the soundstage and not wander from side to side. Wandering images are a sign of differences in frequency response between speakers which can be caused by poor pair matching or side walls that are acoustically dissimilar.
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Vuolgga Mu Mielde Bassivárráiby a Sami lady called Mari Bione from the albumEallin Liveis another good track for testing your system’s bass response. It contains some very low bass guitar notes, buried in the track, that many many systems have problems reproducing cleanly. Room modes can cause this, as can lack of extension of the main speakers and poor integration of mains and subwoofers.
Anything by Rage Against The Machine fromRage Against the Machine. Rage’s debut album was recorded without much compression and the drums on it are equal in recording quality to the famous direct-to-disk Sheffield Labs Drum and Track disc from the 1970s. Look out for a system’s ability to reproduce the effortlessness and dynamic contrast abundent in this album. It is a great test album and very few systems in my experience can reproduce it with the drive and verve required.
Bela Fleck’sFlight of the Cosmic Hippofrom the album of the same name has a growling (no other word to describe it) bass guitar that is a sure fire way to test for smoothness of bass response, even modal decay and good subwoofer integration.
What are your favorite albums for testing bass response? Please contact me if you have any question!
GET THE RESULTS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR WITH ACOUSTIC FRONTIERS
You'll have a system you love.
You'll experience audio-video like never before.
You'll have no doubt you got the best performing system for your budget.
Clint, an avid DIYer, planned on building his own home theater to cut costs until he realized the complexity of the task. "One piece of advice I came across most often was to hire a professional. I was hesitant, but I just found myself going in circles and didn't want to invest in something I'd later regret."
Dreaming of a home theater but think you lack space? Think again. In this month's newsletter, we present a client's story who faced the challenge of not having a designated space for a home theater. While considering converting the garage, the plan proved more challenging than anticipated due to complexities in obtaining building permits. The project encountered exceptional challenges that required unprecedented solutions.
Discover how Acoustic Frontiers transformed a small space into a high-performance home theater and another AVS Forum Home Theater of The Month. Unique challenges and innovative solutions deliver an immersive audio-video experience.
Nyal Mellor
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