Why are music and audio systems with competent bass only recently a thing?

[goat76]

Of course it's not always the case that they only used the NS10 and that all music from the 80s lacks in bass, but just looking through som google images from studios in the 80s you can see some setups that have only the NS10 and nothing else (might be a sub on the floor, but there might as well not be). Because there where most probably cases where someone wants to build a studio and is told by someone else that the NS10 is the speaker that everyone is using and therefor settle with that because they don't know any better (or have limited budget), especially when the general knowledge of audio was worse than today.

You are shrinking down the scenario extensively to a very unlikely one.

1. An inexperienced mixing engineer setting up his studio for the first time...
2. He doesn't check his mix on any other speaker system...
3a. The mix will not be mastered in a mastering studio...
3b. Alternatively, the mix will be mastered in a mastering studio that also only has NS-10s... (I have never seen a mastering studio using that speaker)

Do you find the above scenario to be a widespread one we in general should be highly concerned about?

But do you have any other theory why older music aren't as bass heavy as today?

Yes, and the main reason is a simple one. The vinyl playback systems couldn't handle low bass so a highpass filter was used to leave out that information for the sake of keeping the needle in the grove.

The other reason may have been that there were probably very few people who had sound systems that reached down to sub-bass levels, and subwoofers were hardly a thing back then. Even today, most audio production has much of the lower bass information cut out, and what we often hear as more bass in modern audio productions is higher levels of upper bass information, which has probably more to do with how modern music is supposed to sound like and what it contains.

I know that you already know this.

 

[Tell]

You are shrinking down the scenario extensively to a very unlikely one.

1. Un unexperienced mixing engineer setting up his studio for the first time...
2. He doesn't check his mix on any other speaker system...
3a. The mix will not be mastered in a mastering studio...
3b. Alternatively, the mix will be mastered in a mastering studio that also only has NS-10s... (I have never seen a mastering studio using that speaker)

Do you find the above scenario to be a widespread one we in general should be highly concerned about?

Well I don't really know exactly how it was done in the 80s, I was playing with Lego back then and didn't have that big of an audio interest. All I know is that the NS10 was VERY popular and have been cited several times as a reason why some music back then did lack bass. But of course I might be wrong!

Yes, and the main reason is a simple one. The vinyl playback systems couldn't handle low bass so a highpass filter was used to leave out that information for the sake of keeping the needle in the grove.

The other reason may have been that there were probably very few people who had sound systems that reached down to sub-bass levels, and subwoofers were hardly a thing back then. Even today, most audio production has much of the lower bass information cut out, and what we often hear as more bass in modern audio productions is higher levels of upper bass information, which has probably more to do with how modern music is supposed to sound like and what it contains.

I know that you already know this.

Yeah might be the reason! And they might have gotten better at putting bass on vinyl because I know there are bass heavy releases, The Prodigy - Music for the Jilted Generation and X-Dream - Radio are two example, and probably lots of techno and hiphop as well that won't get the needle flying. But then of course it depends on what bass one means when they say bass. Low, mid or upper, and at what levels?

 

[Great Sun Jester]

LFE may be new but subwoofers go back to my mid-70's. Cerwin Vega made some killer subwoofers and the one I had was dual 15" passive that was a coffee table that I had a nice glass insert made for it.

 

[Prana Ferox]

Again if you're looking at an older speaker and it's got an enormous woofer, it's almost certainly for efficiency, not extension. They don't have a bunch of xmax, the cones are thin paper, and if you look on the back they really don't have much motor on them. Certainly nothing with a big square AlNiCo block on the back is going to be a bass machine. Another tell is the power ratings, if you've got a 12" or 15" monkey coffin and it's only rated to 100w or so, it is going nowhere in the low bass.

These things often sounded bassy (especially in hazy memory) because 1) they looked huge 2) they often had huge low-mid humps, so you heard all the bass harmonics, which causes the brain to fill in the fundamental, and 3) your contemporary non-hi-fi audio devices were likely to have absolutely atrocious fidelity often from alarm-clock-grade full range drivers (often open-baffle) that on a good day might have reproduced the frequency band of the human voice.

 

[kemmler3D]

I personally think the rise of Class D has something to do with it.

If someone has a competent subwoofer at home, most of the time it's got a class D plate amp in it. This is what made reasonably-sized, 300-1200w subwoofers affordable. In the 1970s that much amplification was very costly, heavy, hot, and big. (there's an off-color joke in there, I am sure of it.)

Anyway, once you could fit a 1000w amp inside the box with a 10" driver and get something approximating real bass, I think sub-bass in recordings starts to make a lot more sense.

Was the timing of the rise of hip-hop a cause, coincidence, or accelerant for this trend? I would say yes to at least two of those.

 

[Brian Hall]

I remember having good bass in my 68 Mustang back in the late 70s. Had an Alpine amp and good speakers.

 

[EERecordist]

Deep bass has been there in organ performance and you can feel bass in your seat in classic concert halls.

It is very hard to cut bass in vinyl. Even so, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, 1973 has some bass. CDs were early 80s with full range. But you don't want your release medium to damage the sound system, with excessive LF or HF energy.

The DBX 100 was late 70s, toward the end of the disco era, and allowed clubs to enhance the bass if they has a speaker system for it, which some did.

In film, the optical sound track is limited in frequency response. Magnetic was an improvement. SMPTE and Dolby became involved in improving the sound chain to theatrical release. THX certification for LFE in film theaters was introduced in 1983. Even so the number of films needing LFE for artistic purposes was small for many years.

Later DBX included their subharmonic synthesizer in their DriveRack. It was common among my DJ friends for dance music in their PA rack.

Since the 70s, we have more powerful amps, ferofluid, better cone materials, better magnets, stronger LF cabinets for outdoor shows, and Baltic birch. Even professional class D amplifiers are now reasonably priced. DBX continued their subharmonic synthesizer evolution and it was used by producers and recordists from the 1980s on. Recent products like the Subpac and gaming chairs are popular for LFE in gaming.

I think on the production side, it is producer aesthetics and musical genre, even starting in the 70s. Same with film soundtrack LFE

 

[A Surfer]

No such thing in my experience as meaningful bass in any 70s music. Lean, lean, lean.

 

[Richx200]

Deep bass has been there in organ performance and you can feel bass in your seat in classic concert halls.

It is very hard to cut bass in vinyl. Even so, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, 1973 has some bass. CDs were early 80s with full range. But you don't want your release medium to damage the sound system, with excessive LF or HF energy.

The DBX 100 was late 70s, toward the end of the disco era, and allowed clubs to enhance the bass if they has a speaker system for it, which some did.

In film, the optical sound track is limited in frequency response. Magnetic was an improvement. SMPTE and Dolby became involved in improving the sound chain to theatrical release. THX certification for LFE in film theaters was introduced in 1983. Even so the number of films needing LFE for artistic purposes was small for many years.

Later DBX included their subharmonic synthesizer in their DriveRack. It was common among my DJ friends for dance music in their PA rack.

Since the 70s, we have more powerful amps, ferofluid, better cone materials, better magnets, stronger LF cabinets for outdoor shows, and Baltic birch. Even professional class D amplifiers are now reasonably priced. DBX continued their subharmonic synthesizer evolution and it was used by producers and recordists from the 1980s on. Recent products like the Subpac and gaming chairs are popular for LFE in gaming.

I think on the production side, it is producer aesthetics and musical genre, even starting in the 70s. Same with film soundtrack LFE

Deep bass has always been around, you just had to hear it live. Vinyl up until the later 70s with the 12" 45 rpm wouldn't produce records with bass (wide grooves) due to the time constraints place on the media; 22 minutes per album side 3 minutes per 45 rpm side (I think) so there was AM radio and vinyl no bass so no market for equipment. If you wanted bass, you cranked up the bass and the loudness on your integrated amp, which lead to distortion because there wasn't any deep bass to amplify. However, there were some labels that had some bass, like Motown and I think Epic and groups like Spencer Davis, Four Season, Iron Butterfly and The Beach Boys to name a few. I remember The Young Rascals performed with a Hamand organ that had a large speaker cabinet that had a fan in it. (don't know the name) but the bass was very good. No matter where I went, the live music had good bass. Even the movies had good bass, remember Earth Quake?

In the 70s I found my bass, built my own speakers (see attached) and using the DBX 110 Subharmonic Synthesizer. All my 45s and LPs came alive, I even kicked them up a notch with a DBX 503 Dynamic Expander the SAE 5000A eliminated the pops and clicks and powered my stuff with a Sansui AU9119. Once I got the sound right, I would record it on a Dragon cassette deck with DBX noise reduction. Always wanted to build a set of speakers with the Electra Voice 30" speaker.

The 60s and 70s had the equipment and bass, you just had to find it... Stereo Review

 

[Waxx]

Even the Altec Lansing 620 speaker (1970's) with the 604E coax driver went easy to 45Hz F3 and 32Hz F10, and this driver was also used in big onken designs that went in the low 30's F3. But the problem is "big". It did not fit most homes.

And the infamous Altec Lansing 416-8A (1970) could easely go to 30Hz, but again, in a very big wardrobe style cabinet (300L). Both drivers were based on older designs that go back to the 1950's. And the 416-8A drivers were used a lot in the early nightclubs (1970 and 1980) in at least Belgium, for high power applications because of their bass posibilities. The first club here, the Popcorn (1969-2003) in Vrasene (Belgium) had a few A7's with the 416-8A as woofers amped with transistor amps from the early 1972 on, before it was a Dynacord system with tube amps. The first soundsystem of the infamous Fuse club were also modified Altec A7's with 416-8A woofers. These speakers are so efficient and go low that they can do techno parties like we did in the 1990's in the Fuse, on those A7's and they were fairly cheap to find at that time, as they were out of fashion and a lot of theaters dumped theirs for more modern systems...

 

[Waxx]

No such thing in my experience as meaningful bass in any 70s music. Lean, lean, lean.

it depends on what 1970's music, this is also 1970's:

 

[Tell]

it depends on what 1970's music, this is also 1970's:

Depends on what you call bassy as well. Compare that to modern psydub or other dub genre this is very lean.

 

[Cbdb2]

I've been checking out the music landscape from the 1960s to the 1990s and I noticed how there is almost always a negligible amount of bass (say, 80Hz and below). However, starting in the 2000s, music generally became more bass-heavy. I also noticed how sound systems from the 1960s to the 1990s generally didn't have much in the way of bass capabilities. Or, at least, that was never a selling point of them.

That led me to this question: Why has the bass range only recently become something worth thinking about when it comes to sound? It's not like our ears have changed in the last few decades. It's not like acoustic materials for the lower end have only recently become viable. It's not like old tape formats couldn't handle it, because lower frequencies have the highest SNR. It's not like bassy instruments didn't exist, because organs and bass guitars/uprights have been in the 30-40Hz range for at least a century. It's not the levels today are too loud, because bass naturally requires higher power to sound the same as higher frequencies (Fletcher-Munson). It's not like the amplifier technology didn't exist back then, because plenty of subwoofers are still using the ancient and inefficient Class AB standard. It's not that plastic and plywood materials for subwoofers haven't existed for decades.

So, why have our music and sound systems only just now cared about this important part of the audio spectrum?

I have to disagree. These came out in 1973

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/65/75/9e/65759eb8d7f6c9ce2b42cd4dcaf07892.jpg

Tannoys and Ureiis with a 15" woof or two in a large enclosure came out shortly after and all the studios started using them.
For home the Klipschorn was introduced in 1946 (surprised me) and had a sensitivity of 105db and could shake the house with a 10watt valve Amp. I bought a pair of used JBL L200 for home in 1978 and they could shake the house. And there was music with decent bass in the early seventies, reggae comes to mind but rock also started adding more bass. The limiting factor back then was vinyl but you could still get good bass.

 

[Cbdb2]

Quite a few studios had lacking monitors for bass as well. The famed Yamaha NS10 rolls off like a brick wall at 90hz or so. So if you only used that as an engineer, you wouldn't really know if your track had bass or not.

All the studios I saw had large format mains with 15" woofs as well as the NS10s and most mixers would check there mixes on both.

 

[Waxx]

Depends on what you call bassy as well. Compare that to modern psydub or other dub genre this is very lean.

you mean the <30Hz content? That is true, but almost no modern hi power dub soundsystem does play that, so it has no use in the dance to go that low. Most soundsystem are tuned to 32hz, very rarely lower. But if you analyse this tune, you will see it goes to the low 30's on reasonable volume.

And why no content? because instruments that go that low were rare, even most synths of that time didn't really do that. Now it's totally different.

 

[Waxx]

All the studios I saw had large format mains with 15" woofs as well as the NS10s and most mixers would check there mixes on both.

And very often there was another pair of nearfield, a more neutral one, on the bridge also. Brands depended a lot on where the studio was (the market was not that international yet), but the NS10 was almost never used as only monitor, always paired with at least one more neutral one. The main reason for the NS10 was that it very well told how a mix translate on lower end systems. The Auratones were another example of such a speaker (but older and different design), not accurate in sound, but very accurate in translation to lower end systems. And that is also a very important factor in good mixing of music.

 

[Cbdb2]

Another tell is the power ratings, if you've got a 12" or 15" monkey coffin and it's only rated to 100w or so, it is going nowhere in the low bass.

That depends on efficiency. That JBL 4350 is 95db/w. And is down 3db at 30hz. So 100 watts will give you 115db and lots of bass. It is also biampable with an optional xover and then the woofs can handle 200 watts. This is in 1973.

 

[Tell]

you mean the <30Hz content? That is true, but almost no modern hi power dub soundsystem does play that, so it has no use in the dance to go that low. Most soundsystem are tuned to 32hz, very rarely lower. But if you analyse this tune, you will see it goes to the low 30's on reasonable volume.

And why no content? because instruments that go that low were rare, even most synths of that time didn't really do that. Now it's totally different.

Nah not that low, more around maybe 30-60hz, but at a louder level than what they did back then. But yeah I often go to festivals and parties playing bassy electronic music and they rarely have systems that goes bellow 30hz or even 40hz.

But I guess that's the hard thing about just saying "bass" since it's not one frequency at just one amplitude. I mean I really do like bass and like to bring it up in my system, but mostly the lower bass (around 30-80hz), while the upper bass (100-200hz ish) I've actually brought down a bit since I find it gets easily muddy and boomy.

 

[coonmanx]

Maybe it's just the fact that back then nobody wanted so much bass in a car that the panels would sound like they were going to fall off of the car.

The system that I had back in 1980 did bass just fine. All with 8" woofers. And yes, Speakerlab even had a sub back then. I thought about getting one and then figured out that I just didn't need that much bass.

 

[Richx200]

No such thing in my experience as meaningful bass in any 70s music. Lean, lean, lean.

First, let me say I'm not sure what you mean by "meaningful bass" so let just give you a few examples of what I think was "meaning bass" music in the 70s and see if we can agree on some of it.

You Sexy Thing - Hot Chocolate
Peace of Mind - Boston
What's Going On - Marvin Gaye
Good Times - Chic
Money - Pink Floyd
Psycho Killer, Talking Heads
Walk on The Wild Side - Lou Reed

Groups: Herbie Hancock, Donna Summer, The Bee Gees, Chic, Deep Purple, Grand Funk Railroad, Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest. Ozzy Osbourne etc.

Let's throw in a couple of Classics: J.S. Bach Toccata Fugue in D Minor .... Direct To Disc 1977 Crystal Clear Records
Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture, Op. 49 .... Digital 1979 Telarc, Initial cannon crack 2000-3000 kHz follow-up boom down to 6hz
(I think you'll like it; if your turntable can track it)

Come to think of it turn up the subs and crank the systems to 90-95 db and drop this: Daniel Pemberton, Run Lundinium (not 70s) but sure to rearrange the furniture