I am still using a ten-year-old Sony Discman. (And huge credit to the quality of all Sony products from a few years back, rechargeable battery on the Discman was not used for six years and when I charged it up again, the battery life is still top class).

Back to the bass topic, astounded by the lack of a bass in most apple headphones and ipods, compared to Sony, Philips or Panasonic cd players from a few years ago.
All had dynamic bass modes of various kinds which gives drum and bass guitar sounds massive depth of tone.

My advice, dig up your old personal cd players and you will be blown away at what you have been missing for the last few years, maybe you have already. Ipods sound thin and squeaky in comparison.

This is true and can be measured. Mainly it is due to how volume restrictors are applied. In other parts of the world the same product may be marketed with no limit and that is the 'correct' design, however the (5mW) limit will be in place in the UK via a mix of hardware and software changes. As it is the bass that has the most energy this is the first thing to be impacted by any limiters. They do change the sound for the worse. Any decent china made personal music player will not have any limiter and will sound better. Add a headphone amplifier to your 'poor sounding' item and you will get an instant improvement. In my opinion the best sounding amplifier in any personal player was that in the Sony WM-D6C. It ran on 4AA batteries and even without bass boost had more bass than some items with that switched on. Its all about available current baby!

I've two vintage vinyl jukeboxes. As with hundreds of similar makes and models, as well as two 8" treble speakers, they've two 12" bass speakers. That's plenty enough bass to rattle the windows, if required.

I'd like to know why it's so hard to find a sensible pair of speakers with at least 10" drivers.

Most of the modern floor standers are skinny tall things and don't seem capable of room shaking bass.

I have a nice beefy pair of 1980s AR speakers which now sit either side of the TV and they definitely don't need a subwoofer.

it's mainly the speakers or headphones that make a difference. swap the headphones between the two devices and notice the diffence

regarding speakers, many people use a sub in a 5.1 setup so they get more than enough bass. if you don't want to do that, buy speakers that suit your ears

You just need to look in the right places, and be prepared to spend serious money for serious quality speakers.

Yes I suppose that's right. It's depressing going through the speakers Richer Sounds have for sale.

I dont think they even have one unit with an 8" woofer. All seem to be around 6", or even smaller!

There's always the chance of vintage stuff from ebay I suppose but that's likely to be a bit of a lottery.

I suspect you are a fan of old style boomy bass, many people are. Modern speakers are highly damped to give an accurate bass sound that compares surprisingly well with the live experience at a classical music concert. Older speakers gave a warm pleasant but inaccurate rendition which led many people to wonder why live classical music sounded, to their ears, rather thin. If you have a pair of modern speakers to hand you could try adding a small value wire wound resistor, say 2 ohms, in series with the connection to it. This impairs the damping factor on designs that use the low o/p impedance of modern amps to effectively short out the back EMF from an oscillating speaker cone. This may cause the speaker to boom to your satisfaction but as some speakers use effective mechanical damping on the cone it may not work. When ageing cinema valve amps were replaced by transistor ones some managers complained of lack of bass, adding a small series resistor satisfied them.

Have you considered building some kit speakers?

http://www.wilmslow-audio.co.uk/k50-monitor-1619-p.asp

I don't really want the bass to boom and TBH I'm not keen on upsetting the damping factor for effect. I'd just like less strained reproduction of the lower frequencies.

The resonant frequency of the 6" drivers in modern speakers along with the volume of the enclosure is bound to limit the bass response to some extent.


I remember last buying enclosures and separate drivers/crossovers back in the 70s. It's good to see someone is still supplying the bits.

Wilmslow Audio have been doing it for a great many years, I built a pair myself long ago, with 10 inch bass units funnily enough

Older speakers can still be good but may need the neoprene roll surrounds replaced.

My everyday speakers, which are aside my lounge TV (but play my radio etc as well) have 2 x 6 inch drivers for the bass/mid which is quite adequate. Though they are old Castle Conway IIIs, which although still made they are now Chinese and not as good.

Two six inch drivers are roughly equivalent to one 8 inch according to this thread -
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi...ker-sizes.html

There are lots of speakers with 2, 3 or 4 6.5 inch speakers which will do the job.

Though long throw drivers and the type of cabinet are also very important to the bass.

My home cinema has large XTZ bookshelf speakers which I cut off below 80 Hz and send the rest to my 12" long throw sealed sub. In the small room it is in you don't need any more than that. The Anthem Room Correction blends everything in perfectly.

Remember when the quality of music emanating from a device use to matter!

My 20 year old 14 inch speakers (active bass cone diameter) seem to have plenty of it. The enclosures are 18" wide x 31" high x 13" deep and I sit most of my audio and video gear on top of them!

No shortage of bass here.

I'll say!

Apart from my two vinyl jukeboxes (banished to our summerhouse by my wife) I've this set up in the front room which doubles as my "den."

For me, it's all about the "total experience."

These are YouTube videos downloaded as mp3s and recorded on an old Lumix camera, so you don't really get the full effect, played on an iPod, through a 1980s Leak tuner/amp and 1972 Goodman's Havant speakers.
I could "rattle the windows" if I chose too..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIjaHH-qbPU

Now you're talking.

I hope your house is detached.

At this time of night, it has to be, no open windows either!

Edge diffraction is the answer.. Putting a pin point source into a wide cabinet leads to all sorts of complications.

Hence modern quaiity speakers tend to have a narrow front profile yet are deep to house lateral firing large bass units. Other solutions (from makers such as KEF or Bowers and Wilkins have wide cabinets but with the HF units acoustically separated in their own narrow housing or pod.

Perhaps you need to set your sights higher than Richer Sounds.

Plenty of quality floorstanders about, even at Richer Sounds, providing you have a healthy budget.

It all depends on the application, a pair of good floorstanders for stereo use will match or even surpass the low frequencies produced by vintage speakers even with 10" drivers.

For multichannel audio (DD5.1/DTS etc) a good quality dedicated sub is better suited, not only as it reaches frequencies main speakers only dream of, but frequencies you feel, plus it has a dedicated feed from the amp as it's a discrete channel.

I used a pair a Linn sandwich speakers, Garrard deck and SME arm for many years, whilst I was more than happy with the sound, it's not a patch on my modern setup.

my 1950 murphy baffleboard radio has a lovely "mellow tone" .......

http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/murphy_a122_a_122.html

In order to make some extra room for a larger TV I recently tried swapping over my AR speakers for a cheap pair of Tannoy Mercury V4s ( £150 from Richer Sounds ) and I'm really very pleasantly surprised at the depth of their bass response. Not at all what I was expecting and, as others here have said, it is a much tighter response compared to the more boomy vintage ARs.

As the V4s are much taller but narrower I can easily squeeze a 65" TV between them in the same corner of the lounge.

I too thought big woofers and fat speakers were needed for decent bass but I've done a lot of digging around since my last post in this thread and came by a bit of spare cash, so I decided to risk it - and get a pair of slimline floorstanders. Risky I know, as I already had some old 14 inch Jamos and I had doubts that 6.5 inch woofers (albeit 2 of them) could match the bass.

Ended up with a pair of B&W 683 S2s obtained at a nice discount and once I found the best position for them and seating positions, found that the bass is deeper and tighter than the old 14 inch Jamos. The spec is -6dB at 30Hz, some bottom end active sub-woofers struggle to get much lower than that. The midrange and treble is a revelation compared with the Jamos, so I'm well pleased.

So, as jackthorn indicates above, you don't need 8 or 10 inch woofers to get deep bass, just a pair of well designed floorstanders maybe with twin woofers - though they are usually quite pricey, obviously, though I'm not saying that you can't do even better with larger drivers (at a price).

Many devices now have some form of volume limiter.

My iPod has one, but you can only enable/disable it through software....plugging it into a PC and adjusting its settings thru iTunes.

The tv has one as well. It's got a simple on/off menu option. Sometimes you can hear it kicking in when something loud happens.

Generally, these systems ruin sound quality. Aside from making the sound appear distant, it makes the sound appear heavily compressed.

The other factor is the output device. My original iPod headphones were not too bad, but these sort of in the ear types can't match the power, or dynamic quality in a good pair of full size headphones. But you have to pay a fair bit for a good pair. £50+ and I won't be taking my ones to work. Being totally sealed off from all outside sounds isn't a good idea. Speakers basically follow the same rules. Tiny speakers on docks are just not designed for power or quality.

It's also true that plain old MP3 isn't as good as a cd. But cd's are just not as convenient. iPod connected to the car sound system is the way to go, not cd.

The conversation about speakers is interesting. I'm not too surprised at some of the conclusions. Much of what was budget and midrange speaker design from the 80's really hadn't moved on that far from the previous 40 or 50 years. The Americans were still following the ]Clarkson school of design where 'bigger = better = luxury', Jamo and Pioneer were fighting it out for the home disco market, and much of what came out of the established Hi-Fi speaker industry was designed by blokes who looked like this Okay, I'm kidding a bit, but the point is that there's a feeling that a lot of what made it to market was designed by trial and error.

What changed things greatly was the introduction of PC-aided design and manufacture. Companies such as KEF, B&W, Celestion, Wharfedale and Mission pioneered the use of new R&D tools to really understand the materials science behind the products they were designing. As a direct result we got high-end products such as Nautilus from B&W, SL600's from Celestion in the mid-range, and Mission 70's and Wharfedale Diamonds in the budget market.

It's easy to forget though how much prices have changed to to inflation. I think a pair of Diamond were around the £79 mark when introduced. That undercut the previous budget king Mission 70's by £20, although arguably the 70's were better. Those are the equivalent of spending roughly £250 and £320 in today's money. As Harold McMillan famously said, "You've never had it so good"

Good points, and of course, the technology and sometimes components used in the high-end products gradually filter down the chain, so we all benefit. The sound quality improvement from my old Jamos to the mid range B&Ws certainly doesn't need A/B switching to notice, it is very obvious - even though I can't hear anything above 10KHz these days!