Bass Pig? Or Self-Destructive Addiction?

[studiodekadent]

Mark,

I thought my Dad was an audiophile whore until I read this thread. His Bang and Olufsen fetish is a toy in comparison to your audio setup. Mon Dieu.

Just looking at your page makes me think about how I could torment those speakers of yours with my synthesizers.... I must say, for a self-proclaimed Bass Pig, Im amazed you only use digital gear (Kurzweil is amazing... their KSP8 is something I have Gear Acquisition Syndrome over from time to time), analog does the best bass. Buy yourself a Sequential Circuits Pro One.... that synth is so ballsy and aggressive.

[mweiss]

Mark,

I thought my Dad was an audiophile whore until I read this thread. His Bang and Olufsen fetish is a toy in comparison to your audio setup. Mon Dieu.

Just looking at your page makes me think about how I could torment those speakers of yours with my synthesizers.... I must say, for a self-proclaimed Bass Pig, Im amazed you only use digital gear (Kurzweil is amazing... their KSP8 is something I have Gear Acquisition Syndrome over from time to time), analog does the best bass. Buy yourself a Sequential Circuits Pro One.... that synth is so ballsy and aggressive.

studiodekadent,

This is an addiction that has been going on since 1976. Pretty much all of my net worth is tied up in this pile of gear. I realized I went way too far last summer with getting four Bassmaxx subwoofers (hey, I expected them to be a little better than what they replaced--I didn't believe the claims that one woofer replaces 8-12 conventional woofers) when I was standing in a neighbor's livingroom about 2,000' from the house, down the other end of the street, feeling the vibration from my bass in his livingroom floor, when I wasn't even using 1/10th of the capacity of the QSC power amps. It's just insanely loud when the "signal present" LEDs start to flicker on bass peaks. Having gotten the 'exterior perspective' on how much bass was leaking from my basement, I now feel a strong sense of trespass onto other people's property when I turn it up that loud, so I keep it much lower most of the time, which is still way too loud by other people's standards, but to me, 127dB is a comfortable listening level for the duration of a typical rock tune. I can tolerate much louder at extremely low frequencies, but then the risk is damage to building structure. At the very least, it "snows" in here when things get much above the upper 120s, as ceiling tiles start to grind themselves against the framework and precipitate particals all over the studio. So I always have a mess to clean up after a loud listening session, not to mention the many things that fall from shelves.

I love my Kurzweils, but mainly because they have the ability to create any type of synthesis model with their VAST engine and the new K2600 with Triple Modular Processing just increased the number of sound possibilities by billions. The downside is that you have to be an engineer just to program new sounds, as the sheer number of functions and blocks and how it all works together is staggering. But achieving killer bass is very easy. A simple sine tone at maximum level is the ultimate bass. Of course, achieving the illusion of "killer bass" on smaller, limited bandwidth speakers requires combining some overtones on top of fundamental tones to fatten the sound and make it sound good on small speakers.

But making killer bass is not what my original intent for buying the Kurzweils was. I chose them because they have the most expressive, playable sounds, due to the complex abilities of the VAST engine to modulate acoustic instrument sounds and provide a rich palette of variations in the playing techniques that mere sample playback hardware cannot match. This was important for performing orchestral music. The Kurzweil is the first system I've tried that could produce believable orchestral performances. And I love the Steinway grand piano they have on the ROM3 option that I got with the K2600RS. I can play that piano day in and day out and never get tired of it. It plays like a real acoustic grand, not like my other samplers, which always output the same note timbre, regardless of how I played it. The K is expressive, from the pianissimo to the crescendo, where the piano tone goes from soft and mellow to sharp and striking and does so without obvious switching from low to high velocity samples. And the K is probably about the only box out there that does sympathetic resonance, creating the final aspect of a real piano's sound--the way in which sounding strings set off some of the other strings in sympathetic resonances, creating a rich and colorful sound that until now, only could be achieved on a real acoustic grand. So I play the piano program a lot when I'm just composing or relaxing.

And interesting and timely note about Bassmaxx... two weeks ago, was a "subwoofer shootout", a sort of audio products realworld test of all the major pro sound reinforcement subwoofers currently on the market. It was held in Manhattan at an 11,000 sq ft night club located a block from Madison Square Garden. Inside, they had about 15 different makes and models of subwoofers, shipped in from all over the world. The week prior, signs stating "SPLs in excess of 150dB" were posted all over the building. Then the testing began. Things were going smoothly during testing of the general mass produced stuff. Then the Bassmaxx came up next on the roster and they fed it power. It ran so effortlessly that some of the audio guys wanted to see what it could do, so they gave it all the amplifier power they had on tap, and they broke the sound barrier. Not only was it 8dB louder than the next loudest contender, it didn't go up in smoke and it was obvious that if a larger amplifier were available, it would go louder still. But the real wake up call came when a neighboring tenant from the 5th floor of the high rise apartment building ACROSS THE STREET came down to the club and complained that the testing just then was shaking up his apartment. If you are familiar with Manhattan, you know that most normal club system sound is drowned out by NYC ambient traffic noise. And the streets are 100+' wide, so anything across the street is quite far away. To make enough noise in one brick and steel structure that it carries over and across the street to another concrete and steel highrise, so that someone five floors up gets enough of a rumble to come stomping down to the club to complain (and it turned out he also complained to the NYC office of the EPA), it must have been unusually loud. New technology woofer designs are quite far along in terms of power handling and efficiency.

Where the Bassmaxx subs excel is below 30Hz. In my cabinets, tuned the way they are, from 19Hz on down, they are king of the roost. And that makes pipe organ listening an incredible thrill. Carver's Sonic Hologram makes it sound as if there were a channel of sound for every instrument on stage (some listeners, when blindfolded, thought there were 36 channels of sound and 36 speakers) when I engaged the Hologram during an orchestral demonstration. Despite all the earthshaking bass capabilities, it still can faithfully reproduce my 24-bit/96KHz recordings that I made of the Danbury Symphony Orchestra, which is my benchmark for calibrating the system for uncolored sound reproduction. It was a challenge to solve the high efficiency OR high fidelity riddle, but I think I cracked that nut by 1982 when I came up with the mid/high reproducer configuration which remains in use today.

Sheesh, long-winded reply here.. well, there are plenty of videos for "basspig" on YouTube and Break web sites, showing all sorts of interesting phenomena that occur in the infrasound range.

Glad you enjoyed browsing the site.

[studiodekadent]

I see why you choose the Kurz's. They are great for the orchestral/natural sounds you are after. Since I am an Industrial musician I tend to avoid natural sounds. However, VAST certainly is a great technology albiet its a little difficult to control. Wish you all the best in your audio whoredom... When I have my first EP done, Ill see about selling it around here and maybe you will allow your speakers to suffer my abominable cybernetic onslaught.

[mweiss]

I see why you choose the Kurz's. They are great for the orchestral/natural sounds you are after. Since I am an Industrial musician I tend to avoid natural sounds. However, VAST certainly is a great technology albiet its a little difficult to control. Wish you all the best in your audio whoredom... When I have my first EP done, Ill see about selling it around here and maybe you will allow your speakers to suffer my abominable cybernetic onslaught.

Interestingly, the large majority of Kurz owners are Techo musicians. I hear them talk about how great the Kurz is for "Industrial" music (what the heck is that??) because of it's ability to mangle sounds with the Shaper and Wrap algorithms, among others. But I'm not into that. It sounds like noise and chaos to me. In fact, much of the samples I've heard from other musicians on SonikMatter forums sounds like twisted distortions of reality, rather anti-Objectivist, IMHO. At least the Kurz is so broad in its range of capabilities that it gives me the film soundtrack-making ability that I want, so all that extra synthesis stuff is more of a curiousity that I will sometimes dabble in on a slow night, but otherwise get overwhelmed with. Somebody needs to write a good book on VAST, because a lot of people don't "get it", and I'm among them. Those who do, manage to create beautiful sounds with it, while I find that it's hard to create something I consider musically useful from scratch.

I can tell you that these speakers don't care anymore about the destruction they wreak on the neighborhood than the A-bomb we dropped on Hiroshima cared about Hiroshima. They'll just do their job and whatever collateral damage occurs, well that's up to me to exercise restraint. That said, I'll be glad to listen to a sample of your work and tell you what I think of it.

[Robert Jones]

Mark: I can understand your love for bass, but not your addiction, as you refer to it. I am an audiophile, and my living room is thankfully surrounded with gorgeous sound from my McIntosh tube amps and huge Electrovoice woofers from the 1960s and ADS bookshelf speakers from the 1980s. I challenge ANYONE with one of their cheap "home theater" systems to touch the tonal purity of my stereo system.

You strive for volume, but as one who is growing deaf in his right ear from years of artillery ranges as an Army NCO, my obsession is tone (which, yes, I do love loud, but not distorted).

Until a couple of years ago, I had to blast the music too, and found out that I was drowning out a lot of the nuances in the music, not just classical, but jazz and heavy metal, even punk as well.

What I am getting at is this: Maybe you should try taking a different tack and channel your bass obsession for a trial period into obsessing over the full range of music frequency. Let me tell you, I really miss hearing the high pitch in my right ear (although a nice unintentional side benefit of hearing only lower midrange and bass is that now I "hear" even my monaural recordings in stereo!)

Angie: You have amazing insight into the mind in how passion can spill over into unhealthy obsession. There's a great novel in you somewhere waiting to get out!

[mweiss]

Mark: I can understand your love for bass, but not your addiction, as you refer to it. I am an audiophile, and my living room is thankfully surrounded with gorgeous sound from my McIntosh tube amps and huge Electrovoice woofers from the 1960s and ADS bookshelf speakers from the 1980s. I challenge ANYONE with one of their cheap "home theater" systems to touch the tonal purity of my stereo system.

You strive for volume, but as one who is growing deaf in his right ear from years of artillery ranges as an Army NCO, my obsession is tone (which, yes, I do love loud, but not distorted).

Until a couple of years ago, I had to blast the music too, and found out that I was drowning out a lot of the nuances in the music, not just classical, but jazz and heavy metal, even punk as well.

What I am getting at is this: Maybe you should try taking a different tack and channel your bass obsession for a trial period into obsessing over the full range of music frequency. Let me tell you, I really miss hearing the high pitch in my right ear (although a nice unintentional side benefit of hearing only lower midrange and bass is that now I "hear" even my monaural recordings in stereo!)

Angie: You have amazing insight into the mind in how passion can spill over into unhealthy obsession. There's a great novel in you somewhere waiting to get out!

All good points, Robert, and I think I address them all in my varied listening habits.

I have two distinct listening modes:

High fidelity--where the volume is at exactly orchestral level and the frequency range is natural. I use this for listening to modern jazz, classical and other orchestral music.

Bass Pig mode: I use this for electronic music with a heavy bass output. I derive a physical and visceral pleasure from the sensation of overpowering subsonic energy--sort of reminds me of the terrifying thrill of watching the Saturn V rocket test at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, back in the '60s. That sensation of power, and knowing that I created and control it, gives me a "high" I cannot describe.

The saving grace is that I keep the duration very short for the very loud sessions. I might play for 3 minutes with peaks of 139dB, and I might push it 10dB above that for a few seconds now and then, just to feel the air turn solid around me and to feel the pressure on my body. I only do this when I'm in a maniacal mood, or when I am enjoying a new piece of music that's got an interesting bass line.

I too like to listen to the whole spectrum of music. My combined goals with this system was to reproduce acoustic orchestral music with uncompromising accuracy, while at the same time having the headroom to reproduce a cannon round exploding without clipping. Most of the time, there is an absurd amount of unused headroom, as I play with about 6 watts of power for full orchestral levels and slightly beyond. I have to emphasize that I don't listen at extreme levels for long. When it is up loud, I'm either out in the yard, or have my fingers in my ears, because it's possible to feel the midrange in one's skull bones when it's that loud, like feeling a snare drum with your eyeballs and your skull bones.

Last summer, I was playing a Korean album that was especially well-recorded and featured a ballad with an extended range bass guitar. The fourier analysis in SoundForge told me that the two low bass notes that recurred frequently were 24Hz and 29Hz. On June 30th, I played the track, ripped to a hard drive as the CD player would not track with all the vibration, and pushed the levels up about as high as I felt I could get away with without causing a lot of structural damage to the house. I took my sound level meter outside and walked 1/4 mile up the road, over a hillside and took a reading in front of a neighbor's house. The two lowest bass noted registered 97dB from over there. Back at the house, in my yard, you could feel it. I was thrilled with the new Bassmaxx subwoofers, but shocked that the bass was carrying that far, so I immediately went in and turned it way down. That was pretty much the extent of my craziness.

Over 90% of my listening is done at 120-125dB for most vintage rock music of the 1950s/60s. I go a little louder if listening to a Funk style music with a pounding beat and I want to really get hit in the chest with it. Most of the time, if it's modern Jazz, then 105-110dB peaks. With pipe organ, I tend to go overboard again, but again, the loudness is below 20Hz, where the main sensations are pressure on the eardrums similar to deep diving without earplugs, a disruption to breathing and a foreboding sense that the ceiling is going to fall down on top of me at any moment. When the carpeting suddenly lifted off the floor during one such excursion into the world of infrasonics, I suddenly realized, "hey, that's friggin' loud". I'd never gone that far with another person in the room, since they start to panic when the ceiling starts to visibly move and dust starts to fall everywhere and it's already quite painful to the ears. But I do these silly experiments while alone, videotape them with fire wire direct to Premiere Pro onto the hard drive and put them on YouTube as a sort of 'hi-fi freak show'.

This bizarre trait of mine evolved over the past 35 or so years. Having been born oversized and ugly as hell, my social live was zilch for the first 40 some odd years of dating efforts. So I had accumulated substantial savings by not going to bars and dating over those decades and finally decided I want to build a sound system. So in the mid 1970s, I began building Bass Pig, which would become my "wife" of sorts, offering a sort of quasi-physical pleasure that served in place of the pleasure that normal, attractive people enjoy from romantic adventures. Since I was pretty much a failure at everything else in life, this was one thing I could do well. I never had any friends until I became known to some others as an eccentric hi-fi nut. By then, most of my other friends were similar middle-aged folks and appearances didn't matter--what mattered was what we talked about, whether it was woofers, tweeters, amplifier feedback gain, etc. For once, it didn't matter how much hair one had on one's head, we were all equal in the world of hi-fi nutcases.

Eventually, after retirement, I did manage to go to the Philippines and meet a young lady who wanted to better her situation and we got married. There have been times when we'd get strange looks, and someone even thought she was my daughter, but for the most part, things have been pretty smooth. But my first love was and always will be music and hi-fi. It's been a part of my life for the last four decades and I don't see it going away any time soon, by my own choice.

[Victor Pross]

Angie: You have amazing insight into the mind in how passion can spill over into unhealthy obsession. There's a great novel in you somewhere waiting to get out!

Robert,

Angie’s life and personal transformation from a groping pubescent group-conformist to the free-thinking individualist maverick we have today--is Romantic Realism with a happy ending. It was only last night that I told her that I love her for the person she became---the person she is.

-Victor

Edited February 18, 2007 by Victor Pross

[studiodekadent]

Interestingly, the large majority of Kurz owners are Techo musicians.

Thats because techno pays, Industrial doesnt pay nearly as much (much more niche market) and Kurz=pricey pricey pricey.

I hear them talk about how great the Kurz is for "Industrial" music (what the heck is that??) because of it's ability to mangle sounds with the Shaper and Wrap algorithms, among others. But I'm not into that. It sounds like noise and chaos to me.

Industrial music is, well, an imprecise term. Generally speaking, the term refers to any form of predominantly electronic music that is dark, hard and/or harsh. However, there are many subgenres to it. One sub genre is called "EBM" or "Electronic Body Music," which all modern techno producers were raised on. The sound of EBM is essentially Kraftwerk but with a lot of punk-like aggression, so the sound was rather mechanical and dark and sinister.... Go to

and watch the music video for the quintessential EBM song: "Headhunter" by Front 242.

Then, there were more experimental acts who took the Kraftwerk sound and mixed it with really really weird experimental performance art type stuff. The band here to look for, essentially the founders of the modern electro-Industrial sound, is Skinny Puppy. Im linking two of their more accessible songs (they are melodic and kind of pop-ish, but still demented): "Dig It" (Nine Inch Nails plagiarized this song on their song "Down In it")

And (considered by many Puppy fans their best song) "Worlock" http://youtube.com/watch?v=qELOFihdwHo

Then, a Skinny Puppy offshoot called Front Line Assembly came along and basically tamed Skinny Puppy's sound by adding a strong EBM/dancefloor influence and a cyberpunk feel to it... The video here is "Mindphaser" (brilliant video)

and "Prophecy" (fan video but the song is awesome)

Best FLA albums are "Tactical Neural Implant" and "Hard Wired."

Those acts basically founded the genre and codified it. Will give you an idea of what to expect.

In fact, much of the samples I've heard from other musicians on SonikMatter forums sounds like twisted distortions of reality, rather anti-Objectivist, IMHO.

It sounds to me like you were listening to Power Noise or the like rather than genuine Industrial. Real Industrial is harsh and violent (to an extent), granted, but its rarely totally amelodic. I dont like amelodic music. Also, lets add that 1) Rand conceded that music was epistemologically subjective, and 2) the reason I like Industrial is because not only is technology an embodiment of the genius of man, but Industrial stirs up my emotions.... can be (with the right kind of Industrial) triumph, rage, vengefullness, demented confusion. Its not because I think reality is malevolent... its because many of my experiences have been of malevolent people.... bringing back those feelings, fighting with malevolent people, is somewhat exhilarating (like a horror film).... also helps demonstrate my own heroism for refusing to give in to their onslaught.

That said, I'll be glad to listen to a sample of your work and tell you what I think of it.

Good. Ill make sure I tell you when I can show you my work.

[mweiss]

Well, I've listened to all but one of your example links (which refused to load after many attempts and a lot of waiting) and my impression of it is that it is monotonous, depressing and conveys a sense of death, rather than a sense of life--ie., a nightmare world. I couldn't listen all the way through any of them. This repetitive noise (to me it's not music) doesn't convey anything interesting musically to my ears. All this electronic music seems so easy to create with computers these days that there's a flood of it, apparently.

About the only "music" close to that genre that I heard and considered mildly listenable was the soundtrack to Parasite Eve, particularly a track entitled "Arise Within You". But still repetitious, though cleverly crafted to metamorphose slowly with ever-changing sonic textures.

But for me, bass gets tiring both on the ears and the body, to say nothing of the mind, when it occurs in predictable repetition like this. My impression of what I've heard so far is that this is the noise that suits a drug-induced hypnotic trance-like state, not a state of fully-conscious, critical awareness.

Hell, if it's that simple to make this kind of music, and it pays well, I ought to get into this racket. It takes talent and a great deal of practice to be a virtuoso concert pianist and I am not on that level, so I can't make a living doing that, but heck, if this level of automation of beats by MIDI cut 'n paste sells well, I should switch careers!

I certainly have the tools to do it, but not the motivation, at least prior to realizing the state of this genre.

I could just see the reviews now... "Bass Pig approaches the genre of Industrial/Electronica with a sort of swashbuckling and bold irreverence, daring to inject innovative new originality into the scene." Yeah, just wait a year and check the record stores.

Edited February 21, 2007 by Mark Weiss

[studiodekadent]

Mark,

You are entitled to your opinion. However, note that Youtube audio is anything but precise, and the music does sound much more complex when listening to a hard copy.

It may convey, to you a sense of death, but it does not do so for me. Yes, it is dark music, but dark and death are not synonymous (as I understand it). Not only is this matter epistemologically subjective (i.e. it conveys different things to you than it does for me), even according to Ayn Rand in The Romantic Manifesto, but I would appreciate if you specifically stated that you were not attempting to claim I was some sort of psychoepistemic pervert. Im aware you probably do not think that, but the behavior of some Objectivists makes me uncomfortably aware of the possibility.

After all, I could say that your self-proclaimed Bass-Pig-ness is a product of a subconscious yearning to obliterate the differences between concretes and embrace some sort of Hegelian-Spinozan monism in a quest to avoid extrospection: avoid diversity and embrace the fact that it is all the one (or all the bass). However, I know that doing such is irrational rationalism and a personal attack disguised as philosophy. Since I do not think of you as corrupt on the grounds of your sonic and musical tastes, I would be most appreciative if you would assure me that you do not consider my tastes a sign of corruption.