who here likes DEEP BASS?

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I wasn't out of breath or panting because I wasn't doing that silly LaMaze stuff. I was very calm and centered and focused and breathing slowly, deeply, and naturally. I was chanting the AUM which starts out deep in the abdomen on a bass note and culminates in a rising tone that comes up through the chest.

I couldn't *see* the walls moving. It was all a physical sensation. But it was something that everyone else in the room appeared to feel as well because everyone reacted even though only my midwife made an actual comment on it. Something about the quality of the room changed completely on that note and there was a huge, vibrating pressure in the air.

I may be a contralto. Alto scores are always in too high a register for me to sing without going into falsetto. No steroids. But tons of oxytocin, I'm sure.

maybe you are a contralto. the way to tell is if you can pick up a tenor saxophone and if you can sing as low or lower than the sax then you ARE a contralto. the tenor sax tone and range has been compared to a contralto woman.

Like this?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89A0vvoeI6M[/youtube]

I was able to stay right with him very comfortably except my voice cracked a little bit on the two highest notes.

I'm having an "a-ha" moment here. This could at least partially explain why I've never been able to sing. Nothing's in my range! I always get put with the altos and sing along a little bit and mostly shape my mouth like the words because I can't sing the parts. It never occured to my why that might be other than believing I'm just genetically incompetent when it comes to singing.

I just looked up vocal range on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_range) and I don't fit into any of the female ranges.

When I was last working on a piece of music, it had a C5 in it and if I stayed very, very focused and used al the tricks the coach taught me like imagining the note was coming out of the top of my head, I could *just* hit that C5. But it took a LOT of work to get there.

The Wikipedia page says that's the top note of the tenor range. That's a male range!

I don't know what my low note is because I've never worked to learn a piece of music that had a low note that was difficult for me to hit.

So . . . am I a *tenor*? And is that really freaky-weird?

well, ivan renta [the tenor player] didn't use much of his right hand low register, so i have no idea how low you can sing or speak naturally. but if you watched ivan speak at the end, then you can see if you can speak as low as he speaks, that is a good indicator of contralto voice range.



sid caesar [the comedian and actor] famously had a limited vocal range for singing, so much so that in the musical "little me" he ordered composer cy coleman to write him a song with no more than a 3 consecutive note range, so cy complied with his wishes and wrote "real live girl" for him, and it indeed has no more than a 3-consecutive note range. but if you could keep up with the tenor sax that tells me you have a relatively wide vocal range, at least compared with ol' sid. or me, for that matter. NO songs are in my range, with the passable exception of sammy davis and his version of the song, "i'm always chasing rainbows." i sing that one ok for the shower.

That might explain why the low notes were so comfortable.
I turned it off when he started speaking, so I don't know.





Kind of like George M. Cohan - the man who proved quite literally that if you can talk, you can "sing" :-)



I couldn't keep up with the high notes of the sax. They were way out of my range. But the lower notes that he was mainly staying in were no trouble for me.

I tried "I'm always chasing rainbows" out of a piano book once, but it was way too high for me. I can handle it if I move it way way way down from where it was written.

hmm... maybe I need to find a good vocal teacher who's willing to waste time with someone as lousy as I am (but who might be acceptible if someone would just help find her proper range . . . ) I'm tired of not being able to sing because I really LOVE to sing but I'm so awful at it that I never do it around people. Even just singing in the kitchen will get my partner in the living room to say, "is something wrong?" (me: "no, I was just singing" partner: "I really do wish you'd stop it, then.")

My equalizer has a switchable filter to cut the <20Hz range for that reason, plus any subsonic turntable noise and similar things you don't want getting to the speakers.

As for the 30" woofers, sure there are better things out there, but there's just something awesome about huge vintage speakers. I appreciate not just the sound itself, but the style of the equipment that went into producing it. I use tubes in my amplifiers, but I don't entirely buy into the "warmer sound" argument that a lot of audiophiles regurgitate. There is hard evidence that they are different from solid state, but I can't place my finger on how the difference sounds to me. However, I'm not afraid to admit that a large reason for using them is because I find them simpler to work with and understand (I love repairing/modifying equipment), and they're just plain cool!

Because they bought into the hype and spent so much money on their plastic cubes, they need a justification. Bose told them that their shit-boxes were the best things out there, so they'd damn well better be! If they found out their equipment actually sucked they'd regret having spent the money. It's all about convincing themselves that they've done right.

Part of the reason has to do with the fact that when tube amps clip, they produce even ordered harmonic distortion which sounds pleasant human ears, while transistor amps produce odd ordered harmonic distortion when they clip out which sounds unpleasant to human ears. Also when pushed to the point of clipping and beyond, tubes compress the dynamic range. --This is one of the reasons why guitar players still prefer to play through tube amps, as well as the fact that tube based gear is still used for studio gear. --If you listen to pop music, chances are quite high that it was passed through a 50 year old Fairchild 670 compressor in the mastering process.

As far as Bose 901's are concered, I have no idea, as not only do they not sound good, they totally f**k up the accuracy of the stereo image in the process. --Then again, there are also people who have no problem spending thousands of dollars on exotic cabling, even down to the 120 VAC power cable who are sold on the fact that it improves sound quality due to some review in an audiophool magazine .

Last edited by Fogman on 07 Jun 2010, 6:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My take on Bose is, if the customer is happy with the product they receive for the price they paid, then it's a good product and a good sale.

I am not a fan of most Bose products, I find the sound bland and un-engaging (some of which is on purpose, engineered to be ill-defined so that user placement won't completely ruin the pre-ruined sound.)

There is probably nothing productive to come from urinating on a Bose owner's corn flakes, I let them enjoy what they're proud of, and sometimes an easy plug-n-play setup has its advantages.

Tubes, btw, gain their so-called "Warm" sound by simply having half of a strong damping factor due to the sheer number of electrons possible to be pushed across the gap. I say half, because they only "damp" against a stationary or slow moving cone, they don't have much followthrough for reversing a cone (or its air load) - the result is a fast attack which does catch one's ear. Due to the physical surface area in a vacuum tube's transductive parts, there is simply a larger average cross section of electrons moving per given differential in voltage.

*edit - also as Fogman stated, ordered clipping, I forgot about that. Very good point.

I like a good class A FET driven amplifier, and fast feedback class D if done right is awesome! My automotive amps are all class D (xtant 1.1i) and I have relatively generic A/B class transistor amps at home, they don't sound as good as they COULD, but I'm happy to let good enough be good enough. No guests or housemates complain that it's too much, or too little Tubes, I wish there was less mystique about them, they're just another way to skin a cat and really aren't worth the money they command at market. Still, if the customer is happy then the transaction is good, enjoying what you have is an essential component of life and I won't rob anyone of it.

Actually I think the damping factor has less to do with the electrons inside the tube, and has more to do with transformer coupling and the amount of negative feedback being shunted to ground. FWIW, I have two guitar amps that have a damping pot on the back. When the the damping factor is very high, the response of the amp is very tight and dynamic, but when it's set low, the amp has a spongier, looser feel which is what a lot of 'Tube Aficionados' like. Also, the same two amps can be switched between pentode and triode mode, of which, the triode mode has the 'looser' , 'tubier' sound, which coincidentally, is the exact same mode of operation of a lot of high dollar hi-fi amps.

I love deep bass. Some of my most prized posessions are my two Advent 20" towers, made in 1972. Somehow, they ended up in a thrift store for fifteen dollars even though the origional instructions were still taped to the back. Mom brought them home because she knows such things make me happy. The woofers looked ruined and emitted a choked buzzing at first, but I put on the Blind Boys of Alabama. When "Down by the Riverside" played, they came on full blast and were absolutely glorious. They have worked ever since. I like them, and the two other pairs of Advent towers from that era, also from thrift stores and in good working order, better than anything I could buy new. My little sister has pretty decent 2009 speakers. They sound okay, but they seem to lack some of the richness and warmth of my beloved dinosaurs. Also, the bass resonates less. Her speakers can fill a room, but mine, even at a low volume, make the walls, floors, and windows vibrate.

Your mom sounds pretty cool to bring those home for you! Quality, and even mid-grade vintage speakers are getting hard to find for cheap, since everyone has realized the value of them compared to the hollow plastic that they call "hi-fi" today.

I found my vintage JBL monitors in my girlfriend's dad's junk shed, in near perfect condition, while looking for something completely unrelated. He told me he had rescued them from the dumpster while doing a job at a TV studio, and he simply let me have them! There's a warm corner of hell for a person who would chuck those in a dumpster.

I forwarded the good karma by giving my Polk Monitor 10s to a friend of mine who wanted some good speakers, and who I knew would take good care of them. The JBLs sound just as good in a smaller package.

You would be a low dramatic contralto or female octavist.

Last edited by Xelebes on 07 Jun 2010, 11:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

since we're talking deep bass, i'd like to share a pic of a little toy I built at work...
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/4955/photo0224z.jpg

also somewhat related, a couple projects I did last month at home for the hell of it. :


http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/606/1010186l.jpg

http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/170/1010181.jpg

the problem with a 20-hz flat cut-off, especially if it is sharp, is that you lose the bottom 2 octaves of some pipe organs. a dynamic filter which "rode the notes" and dynamically rolled-off between the notes, would be better. also, sharp subsonic filtering plays a nasty psychoacoustic trick, in that it concentrates the apparent bass around the cut-off frequency, IOW "one-note bass."
the real problem is the nature of microphones and how they capture low frequencies compared to how the ear naturally captures low frequencies. i have listened to large pipe organs in various sizes of venue and have never encountered the lumpy deep-bassed extraneous noise that i hear in just about all pipe organ recordings.