AudioBanter.com - View Single Post - separating drum and bass sounds in dance/club music

(Scott Dorsey) wrote in message ...
nospam wrote:
Any good hints on separating the bass drum from the bass guitar sound if they
occupy the same sonic area at the same time? Is this an acoustical
impossibility? I like the effect of low bass sounds but do I have to give up
the drum?

Why do they have to occupy the same sonic area at the same time? Different
drum tuning can sometimes do wonders. EQing a notch in the bass sound for
the drum fundamental can too.

Part of the problem with this stuff is that you can have the best low end
definition around, but then it gets played in a club on some bandpass box
and everything goes to mush down there.
--scott

Not on my bandpass boxes it doesn't. If you mean the popular b*se
bandpass box then I can see where you're coming from, but then you can
get the same mush from a horn-bin that's been clumsily EQ'd for bass
extension, or pretty much any box that's badly positioned.

You CAN make bandpasses sound good by doing the following:
- Go for a bandwidth 1.5 octaves
- Upper cutoff should meet your midbass/midrange channel without a
gap
- Lower cutoff should be low enough for the material you plan to play
- Flat in-band to within 1 or 2dB
- Try to design the upper rolloff to not exhibit a group-delay peak

I'll elaborate on that last one. In general, bandpasses have a
flat-ish group delay in-band, and peaks near the upper and lower
cutoffs. You can design out the upper GD peak, but not the lower one
(as far as I can see). This generally means a softer knee at the top
end. Note that you can use a speaker controller to delay the other
speakers by the in-band GD (8ms for my units) at which point the
effective GD profile is that of a closed or ported box.

Doing all these things creates a bandpass that sounds deep *and*
punchy, with such clarity that even grown men have to sit down for a
moment and gather their thoughts.

The existence of bad bandpass designs and the difficulty in
understanding/calculating them is not an excuse to diss the whole
concept. It's no better than dissing transistor amplifiers, CDs, and
psychoacoustic compression IMO.

Cheers, John