Is bass management a waste of time ?

[michael w]

The issue of bass management seems to be on everyone's mind when it comes to multi-channel but is it really an issue when it comes to high fidelity reproduction (of either music or movies) ?

Let me define high fidelity in this context as being faithful to what was originally put on the disc.

Ideally we should be aiming to reproduce what was put on the disc and we should listened to it as intended by the producer.

However when you start shifting the bass away from it's original
location(s) through bass management schemes you begin to depart from what was intended and move away from high fidelity to some alternate reality.

In his review of three top surround processors (Hi Fi News November 2002), Paul Miller found that when engaged, bass management involved large amounts of DSP processing which was often far from transparent with potentially big changes in both the level and distortion of bass rich signals.

His conclusion was that the more bass management is used, the greater the chance of clipping the front or sub channels at a given level.

For the cleanest sound one is advised to set all speakers to "large" and the sub to "on".

My own humble multi-channel HT system uses full range speakers for the front and small bookshelf surrounds. No sub or hard center.

All speakers set to large seems to produce the best results.
The surrounds are able to handle anything that is put to them.

Any comments and alternate takes on BM ?



cheerio

[Sckott]

Well yes, if you set your speakers to "large" there's no rolloff going on. The rolloff is so that smaller speakers won't clip. Does the pre know what's good for you? Not always.

But a separate woof is, IMHO, essential in HT settings. If you don't have a decent woof on a pre or receiver that uses 5.1/DD or DTS, sure you can have it mixed into the stereo picture, but that's not exactly how movies to DVD are engineered.

If you saw a whole 6-channel DD soundtrack and how it's laid out, you'd understand that each channel has it's job, and why. Trust me ;)

[Gary Freed]

Hi All!

My understanding is that bass management with DVD-A players was
a problem and may still be. Many players just didn't have any.

If a player doesn't offer bass management control then you miss out on
some important frequency response especially if you don't have full range
speakers.

I haven't heard any complaints with SACD in the last year and a half in regards to bass management issues.


Happy Holidays!

[Strabo]

Originally posted by michael w
For the cleanest sound one is advised to set all speakers to "large" and the sub to "on".

cheerio

The large setting works best for me too. I haven't figured out why they say set speakers to small on another forum. When I set my center or surrounds to small (which they are) they sound like tin cans.

I set everything to large and let the .1 do it's job.

[Beagle]

Originally posted by michael w
Ideally we should be aiming to reproduce what was put on the disc and we should listened to it as intended by the producer.

However when you start shifting the bass away from it's original
location(s) through bass management schemes you begin to depart from what was intended and move away from high fidelity to some alternate reality

It's a difficult tightrope to walk. You do want to hear the music in the manner that was felt by the artist when he/she was inspired to create it.
Yet you must make maximum use of all this wonderful technical innovation.

Does anyone recall when stereo first came out, and it just had to be used? So you got things like the music on one channel and the vocal on the other? That was bad enough. But when the equipment itself starts to designate where certain frequencies should go and be heard, and people buy into that and accept it, who's in control here?