Below 100 Hz. Toward A Musicology of Bass

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Wed May 23 2018, NEWGEN
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Below 100 Hz
Toward a Musicology of Bass Culture
ROBERT FINK
The Politics of Frequency

It has become common in recent years to construe a broad range of sound-sys-
tem-enabled popular music practices as a singular bass culture. This is the timbral
world the subwoofer has made, a virtual archipelago of thumping musics situated
along the old trade routes of the African diaspora—from Jamaican reggae, dub,
and dance hall through US “Dirty South” hip-hop, Miami bass, and other Latin
American derivatives (cumbia, reggaeton), and then back across the Atlantic in a
dizzying explosion of hardcore UK dance styles (techno, jungle, drum and bass,
garage, dubstep, bassline, etc.). They all come together in a culture of musical resis-
tance predicated on the ability to dominate collective spaces with large quantities
of low-frequency sound.
Attempts to think through the political implications of bass culture have led
practitioners and scholars toward a redistributive “(sub)politics of frequency”1 in
which the sheer physicality of the sub-bass register, insufficiently theorized by cul-
tural approaches to music that privilege the semiotic, takes pride of place. As Sonic
Warfare, the dark manifesto of bass culture from philosopher Steve Goodman (aka
dubstep producer Kode9) argues, if one wants to comprehend this world, “sound as
text” must make way for “sound as force”: “The production of vibrational environ-
ments that facilitate the transduction of the tensions of urban existence, transform-
ing deeply engrained ambiences of fear or dread into other collective dispositions,
serve as a model of collectivity that revolves around affective tonality, and precedes
ideology.”2
Vibrational transduction of affect, not translation of meaning, is also how eth-
nographer Julian Henriques conceptualizes the low-frequency drive for “sonic
dominance” that he discovered in Jamaican sound-system culture: “These powerful
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Bel ow 10 0 Hz : Bass C u lt ure 89
low frequencies resonate with embodied movement and furthermore bleed into the
cultural spectrum to become a carrier frequency, as it were, for Africa’s musical gifts
to its diaspora.”3
Theoretical explorations of acoustic materialism can be highly suggestive, but
in practice, they lead all too easily to claims that the band of frequencies below 100
Hz is more powerful, more physical—in effect, more real—simply because it falls
at the limit of human hearing: “Bass figures as exemplary because of all frequency
bands within a sonic encounter, it most explicitly exceeds mere audition and acti-
vates the sonic conjunction with amodal perception: bass is not just heard but is
felt.”4 Celebrations of bass often go along with blanket dismissals of the midrange
frequencies to which our ears are most sensitive and within which most musical
information is encoded: “Sounding . . . the depths of low bass frequency . . . has this,
a haecceity or thisness, or a force of attack and sharpness of edge. . . . It also has con-
ceptual edge, compared to the tamed, more domesticated, culturally recuperative
mid-frequencies, or the more firmly theoretically constituted object that ‘music’ is
most often considered to be.”5
Vibrational materialism thus tends to sonic extremes. Goodman’s Sonic Warfare
postulates our collective future as a techno-apocalyptic battle of infra- (< 20 Hz)
and ultra- (> 20 kHz) sound frequencies, in which subaltern “sub-bass materialism”
in the global streets will square off against increasingly sophisticated governmental
and corporate counterstrategies of high-frequency “holosonic control.”6 Both ends
of the spectrum, both kinds of sonic domination, fairly demand attention. But it’s
hard to get exercised about the stuff in the middle—whether it’s bland, like the per-
vasive Muzak that, one commentator claims, whitens and disembodies black music
through “the subtraction of very low and high frequencies,” or superficially abrasive,
like “the rockist legacy of (white) noise music . . . with its fetishization of midrange
frequencies.”7 The implication is clear: at the limits of the audible, especially the
lower limit, the “jouissance of sonic physicality” is more powerful than any possible
content that conventionally audible music might possess.8 Let musicologists parse
the “domesticated” middle frequencies into networks of signification for the indi-
vidual ear; bass materialism will be a celebration of the irrational, the unknowable,
and the unstoppable power of deep bass to alter physical reality by vibrating, and
thus decolonizing, the body politic as a whole.
Timbre Incognita: Musicology below 100 Hz

It may not go without saying that this is a “materialism” in name only. In its unsub-
stantiated claims for the power of low frequencies, it comes dangerously close to
inscribing the subwoofer as a fetish object. Goodman, for instance, rejects “naïve
physicalism” that “merely reduces the sonic to a quantifiable objectivity,” and thus
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Sonic Warfare, although bracing as cultural theory, provides little practical infor-
mation about how bass culture actually works.9 It makes no distinction between
reality and fantasy; like the dark bass music produced by the Hyperdub label its
author founded, the book openly champions a paranoid epistemology where plot
devices from dystopian fiction and Internet speculation about the history of mili-
tary “black ops” count as much as scientific research on the psychological effects of
low-frequency sound.
Henriques’s Sonic Bodies, on the other hand, is based on serious ethnography
in Jamaica and spends quite a bit of time detailing the mindset of the legend-
ary audio engineers who manage the biggest sound systems on the island. But
although his informants are refreshingly practical about sound reinforcement
(“The note was kind of high, so I have to tune the box, you know, pad it, special
tuning on the equalizer . . . and then put the foam in it to kind of cool off the high
frequencies, let you hear the lows”), Henriques himself sometimes seems igno-
rant of basic acoustic principles, as when he attempts to define the key analytical
category of this book, timbre:
Timbre . . . is not an irreducible element in the manner of the three

dimensions of music or space. Instead, timbre is a mix of amplitude and
frequency [and to understand it] auditory perception has to be included.
Thus it can be said that sounding triangulates the objectivity of amplitude
and frequency with the subjectivity of timbre. . . . Of the three features
of vibrations, timbre is the most intimately material. At the same time, its
qualities are the most complex, subtle, and ethereal.10
This is at the same time highfalutin and disappointingly vague. In what sense are
amplitude and frequency more “objective” than timbre? The relationship between
sound-pressure level (SPL), measured in decibels, and subjective loudness, mea-
sured in phons, varies nonlinearly with pitch, diverging (as we shall explore) most
dramatically for frequencies at the lower limit of human hearing; since the famous
Fletcher-Munson curve of human hearing response was first drawn in 1933, literally
dozens of mathematical models, some ISO-certified, have been proposed for their
complex relationship.11 Such imprecision of language is characteristic of Henriques’s
gauzy take on sonic materialism, which often deploys scientific terms such as vibra-
tion, force, and wave impressionistically, as metaphors for social relations, not in any
sense that an audio engineer would recognize.
Henriques’s seeming unfamiliarity with the pragmatics of subwoofer design
sometimes leads him into serious cultural misunderstanding. Observing the mem-
bers of a Jamaican sound-system crew washing down the insides of their bass bins
with soap and water before turning them on, he discerns “a ritual practice” akin to
obeah, or African witchcraft.12 But any sound-reinforcement technician could tell
you that, unlike the sealed box speakers on our bookshelves, a large folded-horn
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bass enclosure often leaves the massive voice coils of its drivers unshielded and
open to the air, because venting the heat they throw off is the single biggest engi-
neering challenge in keeping a high-wattage system running. If even a few stray bits
of rust or metal shavings get loose inside such a speaker box, they can easily be
drawn into the strong magnetic field of the coils, degrading the performance of the
speaker over time.13 Washing out your bass bins is thus not fetishistic or “primitive”;
it’s simply good audio hygiene whenever complex electronic systems are exposed to
the elements.14
A materialist musicology should be able to sustain these distinctions. As
Cornelia Fales theorized more than a decade ago, the “paradox of timbre” is that
of an emergent phenomenon arising where the quasi-objective character of sonic
material and the idiosyncrasies of the human sensorium intersect.15 Nowhere is this
paradoxical nature more pronounced than in the sub-bass register, and thus, a mate-
rialist musicology of the lowest octaves of musical sound will pay equal attention to
both sides of the equation. We’ll need to get technical about the physical realities of
amplifying, transducing, and propagating large, high-energy sound waves through
the air and then filter those constraints through research in the sonic ecology of low-
frequency noise; together, these provide a material foundation for understanding
timbral perception at the lower threshold of human hearing. We must also pay close
attention to the practical knowledge of audio techs, speaker designers, and techno-
bass fanatics from all cultures. Only then can we begin to map the timbre incognita
that begins below 100 Hz.
The Sub-Bass Signal Chain

The following overview will have four parts, tracing the material constraints and
affordances of sub-bass along the signal chain, moving in retrograde (figure 4.1). We
begin with the sensation of bass in your face, the human body as ultimate receiver,
paying special attention to aural and visceral perception at the haptic-audible bor-
der, as well as the pain and pleasure on offer there. Heading backward, we encounter
the mysteries of bass propagation, noting the imperfect qualities of air as a coupling
mechanism, how large standing waves actually move through it, and reconsidering
the often-mythologized “nondirectional” nature of very low bass. Next is an over-
view and field guide to subwoofer design, the use of baffles, boxes, and horns to
amplify low-frequency sound, with special attention paid to the material interaction
of impedance and resonance to “tune” sub-bass enclosures, and the ways sound-
system operators “orchestrate” in the sub-bass register by combining different spe-
cies of subwoofers. Finally, we pay the piper and make an attempt to outline the
energy-money equation that every sound system must solve as it transmits the sig-
nals encoded on a set of dub plates to the row of bass bins at a rave. How is bass
“power” measured in the real world, and how much does it cost? (The specter of
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Figure 4.1. The sub-bass signal chain.
neoliberalism, insufficiently exorcised by the academic rituals of bass materialism,

will have a small cameo in this final scene.)
BASS IN YOUR FACE

Bass is something we feel. But the same can be said of every sound that goes into
music, and we don’t actually “feel” the sub-bass very much, in absolute terms.
A temptation of bass materialism is to foreground the lowest sensible frequen-
cies, but that is not how our hearing apparatus works. In fact—and this is perhaps
the single most salient perceptual fact about the sub-bass register—our ears did
not evolve to be efficient at transducing vibrations outside of the narrow band
(2–5 kHz) into which fall the strongest formants of human speech. Figure 4.2
maps generic audio ranges (how engineers parse the audio spectrum) and loose
image schemata (the “feel” of various frequency bands) onto an updated version
of the equal loudness curves first plotted out by Harvey Fletcher and Wilden
A. Munson in 1933.16 It becomes clear that the very notion of “lowness” in music
correlates with a decreasing sensitivity to sound energy that sets in around 1,000
Hz. At about middle C (250 Hz), the curve of equal loudness turns sharply up,
meaning increasingly more sound pressure is required to maintain the same sub-
jective audio level; here “low mids” give way to “lows” or “bass.” Many sound
engineers start talking about “sub-bass” around 70 Hz, where the slope of the
loudness curve reaches 30–40 dB; at the bottom of the sub-bass register, around
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Figure 4.2. Divisions of the audible spectrum.
30 Hz, the effective difference in SPL is more than 60 dB, which means it takes
roughly one million times the energy of the softest audible sounds for us to hear
anything at all.17 Hearing loss of 60 dB is considered severe; it would convert
almost the entire range of dynamics heard in a modern concert hall to silence.
Here, sub-bass materialism shades into a form of disability studies: below 100
Hz, all humans are hearing-impaired.
So it may be true, as Goodman says, that sound is force as well as text. But in
the sub-bass register, the force is largely wasted on us. Most bass pressure goes
around our heads, not into them. This can be a good thing, as any teenager who ever
curled up inside a bass bin will attest. Even the highest levels of bass “pressure” pose
almost no physical danger to human hearing. The topmost equal loudness curve
in Fletcher-Munson-style diagrams is traditionally called the threshold of feeling;
as figure 4.2 shows, like the threshold of audibility, it curves lowest in the range of
human speech and slopes up quite sharply at low frequencies. In the sub-bass reg-
ister, feeling starts at around 130 dB, and to reach the next physiological level, the
so-called threshold of aural pain, an SPL in the 160–170 dB range—that is, from a
hundred to a thousand times more intense than the loudest permissible amplifica-
tion level at a public concert—is required (figure 4.3). As we shall see, to sustain
anything close to such a level of sound pressure by using the lowest frequencies
alone, especially in a large space filled with sound-absorbing human bodies, would
be close to impossible, even with military-grade technology.
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Eardrum rupture Loudness

pos. level/phon
104 neg. Pain
103 150
102 120 HR
Rms Pressure/Pa
SPL/dB re 20 uPa
10
100
100 CR
1
80
10–1
Hearing 60
10–2 50 threshold
40
10–3 20
10–4 0
0
2
0 1 10 10 103 104
Frequency/Hz
Figure 4.3. Physical effects of high SPL at low frequency. (After Jürgen Altmann, “Acoustic
Weapons—A Prospective Assessment,” Science and Global Security 9 (2001): 165–234,
figure 2.)
All right, you say, but what about the haptic sensation of sound, the “full-
body” experience of low bass frequencies? Extraordinary claims are made for this
experience:
The crowd experiences such cellular intensities as the sheer immer-

sive weight, liminal force and substantive presence of the sounding—
impossible to escape or deny. The audible becomes haptic and the
intangible tangible. In the dancehall session particularly, listening depends
not only on the ears, but on the entire haptic sensory skin surface of the
body, as one hard-core Dancehall follower was quoted as saying.18
In fact, to register stimulus meant for another sense haptically, on the skin, usually
involves a radical attenuation of intensity. Think of turning your closed eyes directly
into the sun or of pouring hot sauce on your wrist, not down your throat. The ear
is so delicate, so sensitive to sound energy, that any other part of your body pro-
duces, by comparison, only a faint sensory trace when vibrated. Extensive research,
mostly focused on low-frequency vibration as industrial hazard19 or as noise pollu-
tion,20 has established that the resonant frequencies of the human body, with a few
interesting exceptions, are far below the ability of any loudspeaker to project. Our
organs and viscera resonate most strongly around 5 Hz (figure 4.4), so the claim
that even the heaviest dance music might cause joy, terror, nausea, or incontinence
by vibrating the abdominal cavity directly can be dismissed out of hand; no mov-
able sound system designed for music reproduction has ever tried to work in that
range. Haptic response to sub-bass sound in an electronic dance context is thus a
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Head (axial mode)

(ca. 25 Hz)
Eyeball, intraocular
structures (? 30–80 Hz)
Shoulder
girdle
(4–5 Hz)
Lung
volume
Chest wall
Lower arm (ca. 60 Hz)
(16–30 Hz)
Hand–arm
Spinal
column Abdominal
(axial mass (4–8 Hz)
mode)
(10–12 Hz)
Seated person
Hand grip
(50–200 Hz) Legs
(variable from
ca. 2 Hz with
knees flexing
to over 20 Hz
with rigid posture)
Standing person
Figure 4.4. Resonant frequencies of the human body. (After G. Rasmussen, “Human

Body Vibration Exposure and Its Measurement,” Brüel and Kjær Technical Review 1
(1982): 3–31.)
textbook example not of Henriques’s “substantive presence” but of the imaginative

presence of the Kantian sublime: we are aware of being surrounded, even gently
buffeted, by a phenomenon much larger than ourselves (moving through air, 50-Hz
sound waves are almost thirty feet long) but without any real physical pain or dan-
ger. Safe behind the evolutionary specialization of our ears, we can contemplate the
vibratory energies of the bass register in comfort.21
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It is true that old-school operators, those who cut their teeth setting up sound
systems for underground parties in the early 1990s, quickly learned how to tune
their sets so that most of the sonic energy went into the “big waves” below 100 Hz.
But this bass-dominated sound was not originally designed to produce dystopian
experiences of sonic domination. It was, rather, house-music culture’s utopian aspi-
ration toward community that gave rise to a distinctive sonic environment, one that
strove to envelope dancers in a shared physical experience of sound without pun-
ishing their ears. David Gleason is a trained electrical engineer and an old-school
house DJ. He is also the proprietor of Sunsonic, a San Diego-based sound-system
design and rental company. In a no-nonsense online primer on audio reproduc-
tion for dance music, Gleason quickly demolishes the fantasy of sound system as
weapon: “As far as the underground dance community is concerned . . . the sound
and lights must not be overbearing or intrusive, or otherwise obstructive to a posi-
tive, open environment.” As Gleason explains, a deep, full-sounding sub-bass foun-
dation is actually less fatiguing to the ear than the usual overamplified mess of mids
and trebles: “Dance music has an important yet subtle property that its appreciation
and effectiveness are not improved by utilizing high midrange or treble volume lev-
els. In fact, the opposite effect often occurs. Overly loud and harsh midrange and
treble sound pressure levels cause a temporary reduction in perceived dynamic
range in the listener, induce fatigue and stress, and cause hearing loss.”22
This psychoacoustic reality was already known to pioneering discotheque sound
designers such as the New York-based architects of the state-of-the-art system at the
Paradise Garage, who gave a similar warning thirty-five years earlier in a report to
the Audio Engineering Society:
The quality of the components, particularly speakers, is one potential

source of offensive sound, but even more important is the relative loudness
of the various frequency ranges. For example, sub-bass in the range below
100 Hz when played at 110 dB SPL is not annoying at all whereas upper
mid range from 2K to 4K Hz at 110 dB is extremely offensive. A prominent
mid range around 500 Hz with a lack of mid bass around 100 to 200 Hz
can be very annoying.23
Gleason’s Sunsonic recipe takes full advantage of a fact that researchers into low-
frequency noise pollution have documented: at the bottom end of the audible spec-
trum, the space between the threshold of hearing and the subjective experience of
“loudness” is heavily compressed.24 On the dance floor, objectively small changes in
SPL can thus generate strong perceptual effects:
Keep the mid and high volume levels as moderate as possible, so they are
clean, crisp, and audible, but not harsh or in-your-face. By having very loud
sub-bass below around 80 Hz, solid, clean mid-bass to 200–250 Hz, you
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can then set the mids and highs fairly low, but the system will still sound
and feel very loud. The resulting sound however will be very clear and not
at all harsh to the ears, and at the end of the night your ears will have suf-
fered no damage.25
This is the secret of dancefloor loudness without pain. As long as the treble is under
control, you can let slip all the bass you want. As one Jamaican sound engineer noted
to Henriques while adjusting his faders to push the 50-Hz band and bring more
“prettiness” to the treble, it’s really only “the high-end frequency that damage.”26
M Y S T E R I E S O F B A S S P R O PA G AT I O N
How is it that bass seems so “big” even though the energy it actually imparts to our
bodies is so small? A fundamental material reality little remarked on by chroniclers
of bass culture is the mechanical inefficiency of air, the coupling medium through
which sonic dominance is theoretically asserted. At both ends of the airborne sec-
tion of the signal chain—at the air-skin interface, where large pressure waves exert
tiny accelerative forces on the skin, and at the mouth of the loudspeaker, where
electromagnetically driven diaphragms push air through horns, around baffles, or
just directly out into the room—the disparity in specific density between air as a
medium and the vibratory bodies it is attempting to connect guarantees that large
amounts of energy will be dissipated. The problem is one of mismatched imped-
ance: there is a lot of vibrational energy “around” the loudspeakers and our bodies,
but not much actually gets across boundaries between the very different materials
that need to vibrate together for acoustic transmission to occur.
Once launched into the air, low-frequency waves actually fare better than higher
frequencies; large compression and rarefaction patterns do not disperse quickly,
and thus infrasound can carry acoustic energy over very long distances.27 But air
and our bodies don’t couple well; most of the long-wave energy simply bounces off
the surface of our skin, leaving a small fraction to vibrate the touch sensors in our
epidermis. In effect, the output of a subwoofer produces tiny changes in ambient air
pressure, which pull the surface of our body back and forth; researchers have not
been able to determine how deep the effect goes, but empirical data seem to imply
that, at least for the head and torso, this small surface displacement is what engen-
ders the feeling of bass “thump” or “punch” inside the body.28 Only at the ultrasound
border (20 Hz), where small waves can induce cavitation and heating effects, can
high energy transmitted through the air affect the body’s interior.29
Melodramatic accounts in which nausea, disorientation, and terror accompany
subsonic exposure usually turn on direct conduction through rigid media.30 For
workers with their hands and feet touching heavy machinery, jet pilots strapped
onto a turbine, movie theater patrons vibrated by coupled subwoofer, floor, and
seats, if the impedances match, significant vibratory energy can be transferred to
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the human body. But attempts to create whole-body haptic effects through airborne
sound alone are doomed to fail. Witness the misadventures of the enterprising sound
engineers inspired by “rock concerts and discotheques” to create a “tactile” sound
experience inside the iCone, an entertainment space operated by German logistics
giant Fraunhofer.31 They assembled three seventeen-inch subwoofer drivers into a
massive triangular enclosure that they dubbed, with some hubris, the SoundMaster
2000 and set it to rumbling out low frequencies. But patrons reported feeling the
vibrations only through their feet, conducted by the floor itself; no amount of tin-
kering with enclosures, siting, or amplification could produce the feeling of being
struck directly through the air.
The engineers then had the idea of using a “sound cannon” to fire shots of com-
pressed air at the iCone’s patrons. But this, too, was a disappointment: “it unfortu-
nately only produced slightly noticeable air balls up to a distance of about 2 feet.”
Let the bathos here stand as a warning. It should make us very skeptical of those
amateur audio engineers who seem to fantasize that balls of air can, like sticks and
stones, break your bones:
So an 18" driver with an Sd of 1150 sq. cm and an xmax of 5 mm can move
5750 cubic centimeters (cc) of air. Think of it like a big scoop that will hold
5750 cc of air and then get someone to throw that air at you very quickly
and repeatedly, that’s a speaker. Now take a driver like the Precision
Devices PD 1850, it has 11.25 mm of xmax and an Sd of 1150 sq. cm. So
its Vd would be 12,975 cc. Throwing 12,975 cc of air at someone is going
to hurt a lot more than 5750 cc of air.32
Is it really? The actual weight of 12,795 cc of air is, more or less, fifteen grams,
about the weight of a compact disc. Any of us might imagine ducking away from
a CD accelerating toward our face at 320 meters per second, the speed of sound
in air, until, remembering the principle of acoustic impedance, we straighten up
and dismiss the metaphor of being “hit” by sound waves as fundamentally mis-
leading. (You may recall that the “Chair Man” in the famous ad for Maxell audio
tape had to have his necktie attached to a guy wire and his hair lacquered back
with holding spray. Actual sound waves couldn’t transfer enough energy to any of
those objects to move them one iota.) To be fair, the notion that an audio speaker
is a machine for throwing air at someone in order to hurt them was, I suspect,
offered as metaphor only, a bit of fancy in the middle of a technical discussion on
a website otherwise devoted to the precise engineering of subwoofer enclosures
through knowledge of arcane driver parameters such as Sd (effective speaker radi-
ating area) and xmax (voice coil overhang). Much the same way, certain folded-
horn bass bins that use long-throw twelve-inch drivers are called “punishers” by
aficionados, not as implicit social criticism but, as the speakerplans.com FAQ
notes in some detail, because they add the technical ability to reproduce quickly
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moving audio transients in the “thumping” 70–90-Hz range where other, deeper
subs can falter.
Let us agree, then, not to confuse evocative language about bass “pummeling”
the body with material violence in the physical world. But what about another,
more seductive metaphor of control, somewhat better anchored in the psychophys-
ics of sub-bass propagation? “Infrasound is inaudible yet felt, and this can frustrate
perceptual compulsions to allocate a cause to the sound. Abstract sensations cause
anxiety due to the very absence of an object or cause. Without either, the imagina-
tion produces one, which can be more frightening than the reality.”33
Champions of bass culture tend to impute a uniquely insidious metaphoric
character to the sub-bass register; because “the bass requires the most amplifying
power and is the least directional of frequencies,” it has the subversive ability to
impinge on us from nowhere and everywhere at once.34 Inability to localize very
low frequencies is, in some cases, quite real. The Dolby 5.1 surround-sound stan-
dard, for instance, depends on general agreement that a single subwoofer, fed by a
crossover circuit that filters all frequencies above 80–100 Hz, can be placed more
or less anywhere in an enclosed listening room without calling undue attention to
its position. But how relevant is this trick to sound reinforcement at, say, a high-
end club or an outdoor festival, where batteries of subwoofers are deployed along
with sophisticated digital amplifiers that can control the phase and delay of each?
Even a cursory account of the brain’s strategies for localizing sound cues in various
spaces35 is beyond the scope of this chapter, but for our purposes, it is enough to
note that there are two quite different acoustic situations to consider. In spaces that
are smaller than the average sub-bass wavelength (thirty feet), there is indeed great
difficulty in localizing low frequencies. But in larger spaces, adept sound engineers
have developed strategies to cope with, and in some cases eliminate, the supposed
nondirectionality of bass.
Let us first consider bass propagation inside an enclosed reverberant space, such
as a club or concert hall. Different types of speaker have different levels of direc-
tionality in sound projection, but in general, low frequencies will tend to radiate
out from a loudspeaker in an omnidirectional pattern, thanks to wave diffraction
around the edges of the speaker baffle.36 In a typical home theater or the passenger
compartment of an automobile, the wavelengths emitted by even a small subwoofer
are bigger than the dimensions of the space; thus, sound energy bounces multiple
times off its reflective surfaces before reaching our ears, and the human brain, which
localizes lower-pitched sounds by comparing interaural time differences,37 can be
productively confused about the source of bass frequencies.38
On the other hand, if a space is scaled so that sub-bass frequencies have room
to propagate without immediate reflection, the situation is quite different. As
one sound-reinforcement professional puts it, in this world, “bass is just low-
frequency sound that obeys the same rules as sounds of other frequencies.”39
The easiest and cheapest way to take control of bass propagation is simple corner
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100 GEN RE
loading, in which the walls of the venue itself are used to corral the output of
subwoofers back onto the dance floor. At outdoor events, where there are no
walls or corners, the placement and provisioning of massed subwoofers can still
be manipulated to shepherd the big sound waves (more or less) where they need
to go. If you set a horizontal line of bass cabinets underneath midrange and tre-
ble speakers firing at the crowd—the classic “wall of sound” configuration—that
will, by itself, be somewhat directional (a line array). If more control is needed,
you can reverse the polarity of, say, every third sub-bass speaker—just turn it
around—and put a small digital delay on the signal to the backfiring cabinets.
Presto! You have just created a cardioid array and thereby taken advantage of
interference and reinforcement patterns to redirect most sound energy to the
front of the cabinets.40
In fact, now that we understand how bass is registered on the skin, we see that we
can’t have it both ways; we can’t herald bass pressure as both a slap in the face and a
thief in the night. Yukio Takahashi, Kazuo Kanada, and Yoshiharu Yonekawa dem-
onstrate a 30–40-Hz resonant frequency response for the forehead and face, which
is different from that for the back of the skull at 80–90 Hz; the vibrational response
of the chest is different from that of the back. Even if our ears cannot always localize
the boomy, unfocused bass from a small home-theater subwoofer, we rarely are in
confusion about where in space a concert promoter has dropped a massive cardioid
array of five-foot-tall bass boxes.
Henriques knows this; he heralds the physical presence of sound-system
speakers that “tower into the night sky,” creating an “accessible object” for the
adoration of the crowd.41 A logical conclusion, supported by extensive research,
is that seeing this massive speaker array and hearing the highly directional mids
and trebles blasting out of it will effectively override any sense of the bass as
mysteriously enveloping a given space.42 But Henriques has organized his entire
exploration of Jamaican sound-system culture around a quasi-mystical notion of
“propagation” as structural metaphor. In any musical culture, he claims, powerful
pressure waves must spread out through a specific medium in order for the affec-
tive energies of “sonic bodies” to flow. Sometimes his invocation of this “medium”
is overtly, almost creakily hermetic; we’re assured that on the sociocultural wave-
band, sound-system vibrations are “vibes,” traveling through some Jamaican
version of that old spiritualist standby, the “ether.” But Henriques clearly does
also want to ground his hermeneutic of bass culture in the material practice of
listening—in particular, in the way strongly patterned vibrations in air can draw
attention to what he calls “the material presence of the medium” over and above
any experience of music as an ideal mental construct.43
Musicologists are well reminded of the sheer weight of sound as a physical pres-
ence. It is too easy to assume that musical structures can be perceived indepen-
dently of their “absolute dimensions,” the relationship, familiar from architectural
theory, between the actual size of something and the affordances of the human
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101
Be l ow 100 Hz : Bass C ul tu re 101
body.44 But it is also possible to fetishize the medium’s presence. Even the brief
survey of sound-reinforcement practices just assayed shows that for engineers,
the moment when dancers and listeners start paying conscious attention to “the
material presence of a medium”—listening to the air instead of grooving to the
music—especially if that attention stems from disturbances in sound pressure at
key frequencies because of uncontrolled and avoidable interference patterns, is a
moment not of transcendence but of technical ineptitude.
BAFFLES, BOXES, AND HORNS

“And when it comes to enclosures—ah, what cults grow up around these mediums’
boxes with their ports and vents sized just so and their internal labyrinths of myste-
riously shaped pieces of wood glued and screwed in crazy-quilt patterns, each with
its unfathomable purpose and its exotic title!”45
Even if we accept its physical preponderance as given, can we not also assume
that producers and performers want the sub-bass to be musical? Henriques lauds
Jamaican sound-system engineers as “true audiophiles and connoisseurs of vibra-
tions,”46 and this is a characteristic they share with the generations of engineers who
have struggled since the early twentieth century with the acoustic challenges of
effective loudspeaker design at the low end of the audible spectrum. The defining
sound of the subwoofer in the popular imagination, the monotonous “boom” of
overclocked car audio systems, is an abomination to audio professionals. The small,
high-efficiency but low-fidelity subwoofers that make cars go “boom” represent
only one type of sub-bass speaker and not the most popular in professional sound
reinforcement, either. A bass-music entrepreneur can call on a number of quite dif-
ferent physical solutions to the problem of propagating large, high-energy sound
waves to a crowd, each with advantages, drawbacks, and a distinctive sound profile.
In this section, we explore how the three main types work, detail the way multiple
subwoofers can be harnessed to cover different sub-bass ecologies, and, finally, mark
correlations between subwoofer subspecies, their distinctive behaviors, and the
musical environments to which they are most adapted.
Most readers will be familiar with the iconic image of a Jamaican-style outdoor
sound system (see figures 4.5 and 4.6). In the aggregate, we all know what this “wall
of sound” is for, but what does each of those piled-up boxes in differing sizes and
shapes actually do? The first assumption, that the bigger speakers closer to the bot-
tom must be for lower sounds, is correct. But there’s clearly more to it than that.
Why are there so many? Some of the big boxes have a large open “scoop” or curved
exit for the sound; others are entirely covered by grill cloth, with one or more round
or rectangular “ports” in the front or the back; sometimes single or multiple speaker
cones are seen inside, but just as often they’re not. Presumably, the different boxes
make different sounds. On what basis would you choose one rather than another
for your system?
oso-9780199985227.indd 101 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

Figure 4.5. Reggae sound system with multiple subwoofers, 2004.
(a) folded horn (b) bass reflex (c) bandpass (d) air suspension
Figure 4.6. Subwoofer enclosure designs.
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103
A Field Guide to Subwoofers

In the most general sense, all speakers consist of a driver, a vibrating surface that
sets sound waves into motion, and an enclosure, a set of baffles that influence the
way those waves propagate into the air.47 The task of a loudspeaker is to manage the
impedance mismatch between the light, flexible material of the driver surface and
the large, inert volume of air it needs to drive; the lower the frequency, the larger
the mismatch. The history of bass loudspeaker design is thus a search for smoother
transmission—the most efficient coupling of driver to air, which equals the most
potential volume, for a given set of frequencies. The most basic solution, pioneered
at the dawn of the sound recording era, is to attach a large flared horn (visualize
the familiar outcurving petals of an old phonograph horn) to a small, stiff driver,
channeling its output into a smoothly and exponentially increasing volume of air.
Nowadays, horns are mostly used as tweeters, but you can get good, crisp sub-bass
from one—if you can afford to make it as long (thirty feet) as the deepest sound
wave you want to amplify.
Ingenious folding techniques aside, this is not a practical solution outside of a
movie theater or a sports stadium, so another solution for the provision of bass had
to be found. Most room-sized speakers allow their conical drivers to radiate directly
into the surrounding air, the requisite impedance matching taking place on the other
side of the driver, inside a large box whose volume of air functions like a baffle, isolat-
ing the speaker cone from interference. By the swing era, it had been discovered that
if the box behind the driver was large enough, it was possible to cut into it a port, a
pipelike opening of controlled length through which air could escape, and “tune” its
output, that is, maximize the efficient transfer of energy in a narrow band of frequen-
cies well below the resonant peak of the driver itself. Since the bass port was usually
at the back of the speaker box, these came to be called bass reflex speakers, and even
a relatively cheap one could transmit the driving power of a heavy four-on-the-floor
drumbeat—and sometimes not much else—to a crowded dance floor.
Combinations of these two basic design principles give rise to the three dis-
tinct species of subwoofers commonly in use within bass culture (figure 4.6), each
adapted to a specific niche in the sub-bass ecology of professional sound reinforce-
ment: very loud, heavy folded horns, whose exponential flare “throws” sound as in
the earliest days of sound reproduction; equally massive bass reflex boxes, fitted with
tuned vents to channel a deep, resonant boom from the backside of their speak-
ers; and elaborate bandpass designs that trade maximum efficiency for equalized
frequency response by using multiple resonating ports to configure a “passband”
where the speaker performs best.
Folded-horn enclosures are complex both to design and to build, but the expo-
nential horn is quite efficient at transferring energy (10 percent to 30 percent) with
smooth roll-off of frequencies at the lower end; thus, drivers can be less expensive.
The large opening of horn subwoofers projects bass energy directionally, provid-
ing longer “throw” of sound, and there is little tendency to “boom” or “ring” at a
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104 GEN RE
particular resonant frequency as with ported designs. Because of size issues, even
when folded, pure horn subwoofers are not usually optimized for the very lowest
sub-bass register (20–40 Hz); rather, they provide articulate, “punchy” sound at the
higher end (70–140 Hz).
Bass-reflex enclosures are relatively easy to design and very easy to build. They
are moderately efficient (up to 5 percent) but require high-quality drivers and strict
subsonic filtering to avoid mechanical failure below their resonant peak. Since they
harness waves from both sides of the driver, ported speakers are not highly direc-
tional. Poorly designed bass-reflex speakers will “ring” and often lack articulate
quality, but they can be tuned to produce extremely low bass frequencies (20–40
Hz). This is the classic reggae/dub sound-system speaker; it is also used as a “bot-
tom” or “boom” speaker in multiple-subwoofer arrays.
Bandpass speakers use multiple ports to tame the undesirable frequency-
response characteristics of bass-reflex speakers while retaining most of their effi-
ciency and low-end (30–35 Hz) “grunt.” Their relatively complex acoustic design
means they tend to be used in high-end sound-reinforcement situations. The pass-
band can be shifted wherever in the sub-bass range a designer wishes; the danger
of uncoupling the driver at very low frequencies is also lessened. They are relatively
nondirectional, since the drivers do not radiate directly to air.
Orchestrating the Sub-Bass
Henriques’s fieldwork confirms that Jamaican sound systems are imagined by their
users as musical instruments, and “as with a hand-made musical instrument, every
set is different, with distinct and unique auditory qualities.”48 As he notes, many of
the subwoofer enclosures used in Jamaica are heavily customized, a practice that
crops up wherever rich and articulate speaker output below 100 Hz in public per-
formance is highly prized. Henriques reproduces a snippet of engineering talk from
one Jamaican artisan, who describes the process of retuning a folded-horn design to
accommodate the local aesthetic:
Stone Love build three of them [“scoop” folded horns from the United
States] and started to play and it frighten the people. They never hear any-
thing like that here. . . . Them say them never like it. . . . The note was kind
of high, so I have to tune the box, you know, pad it, special tuning on the
equalizer . . . and then put the foam in it to kind of cool off the high fre-
quencies, let you hear the lows. But what I did I tuned it properly. Then
everyone start to use it. . . . Get that almost bass reflex sound. It is a bass
reflex but for out of doors.49
Armed with what we now know about bass-speaker design, we can translate: Stone
Love and his engineers found that using multiple “short-horn” subwoofers, with
their punchy, directional emphasis on the high sub-bass range (70–100 Hz), created
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105
a sound that was too aggressive and not deep enough for Jamaican listeners. Adding
damping material and changing the characteristics of the crossover circuit reduced
the horn quality and brought out the bass-reflex side of these hybrid enclosures, that
is, a lower, more sustained boom in the 25–40-Hz range. The resulting sound was
typical of dance-hall speakers but also had enough projection to be useful in mobile
systems.
One can eavesdrop on this kind of narrative at any number of online forums
where audio professionals and amateur EDM sound-system designers meet. Aside
from the perennial question of how to get the most boom for the buck (this is the
energy-money equation, to which we return below), the most involved discussions
are about which species of subwoofers, in which multiples, will produce not the
loudest or the lowest but the most musical response for a given genre of bass-driven
music. A successful system uses combinations of diverse subwoofer enclosures to
“orchestrate” the sub-bass register, so that the speakers both cover for one another’s
weaknesses and respond adequately to dance music’s overlapping strands of slow
and fast-paced rhythmic transients. In bass music, these occur contrapuntally on
at least three distinct planes of frequencies between the mid-bass crossover point
(approximately 100–150 Hz) and the lower limits of human hearing.
It is worth taking a moment to map out the territory (figure 4.7). For the first half
of the twentieth century, the lowest frequency in practical use in recording, play-
back, and broadcasting was 100 Hz; linear response below that level required a new
kind of dedicated sub-bass speaker and amplifier.50 The intervening years have seen
gradual extension of more musical content into this previously inaccessible register;
though the rated cutoff of many audio systems might technically be a few cycles
lower, the lowest frequency band in everyday musical use has long been around
50 Hz, a psychoacoustic anchor point that researchers, noting the first frequency
that regularly shows up in environmental-noise complaints, have designated as the
ear’s “lowest familiar frequency.”51 In the twenty-first century, thanks largely to the
spread of bass cultures, a new ultralow register has opened up, where “25 Hz [is] the
new 50 Hz,” as a frequent commenter on ProSoundWeb once epigrammatically put
it.52 Thus, in practice, the sub-bass register divides into three unequal sections: an
upper-sub range that starts around 75 Hz and shades into bass proper above the 100
Hz border; a narrower middle-sub band about ten cycles wide on either side of the
lowest familiar frequency at 50 Hz; and an infra-sub range down to the infrasound
limit, with a practical center of gravity around 30–35 Hz.
This tripartite division of the sub-bass register shows up in the everyday par-
lance of record production, as in this quote from producer Ben Allen: “I’ve defi-
nitely developed a sense of the different spaces that low end can inhabit. Punch,
thump and then boom is how I describe it to people. Punch hits you in the chest,
thump in the stomach and boom lower than that! Cee Lo and I have a vocabulary
based around that idea, so I can say ‘Are you talking about more punch, or thump, or
what?’ ”53 Allen’s localization of vibratory punch, thump, and boom to specific sites
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106 GEN RE
BASS REFLEX FOLDED HORN
“boom” (gut) “thump” (stomach) “punch” (chest)

DROP MEAT SMACK
reggae, house,
dubstep techno
(40–45 Hz) (50–60 Hz)
hip-hop rock
(30–50 Hz) 60–75 Hz
infrasound “category 1 lowest familiar “category 2 old transmission

border speakers” frequency speakers” cutoff frequency
25 50 100
32 organ pipe Lowest E on bass lowest E on guitar

(C = 32 Hz) (41.2 Hz) (82.5 Hz)
808 kick drum resonant head of
lowest A on piano (G = 49 Hz) 24” kick drum
(27.5 Hz) (74 Hz)
Figure 4.7. Functional divisions of the sub-bass register.
inside the body is, as we’ve seen, probably a haptic illusion, but the basic notion of
combining aggressive upper edge, relatively articulate midrange, and resonant, ring-
ing bottom—and all of this happening below, say, 150 Hz—is shared by many EDM
producers and speaker designers.
In June 2012, a self-professed “newbie” posted a question to the LAB Subwoofer
Forum, one of the moderated discussion groups for sound-reinforcement profes-
sionals on ProSoundWeb. He had been told that because of propagation and bal-
ance issues, you should never mix different kinds of subwoofers, but he had recently
read about elaborate festival systems that combined batteries of different enclosure
types to deal with the extreme-low-frequency challenges of what he called the
“bass-driven EDM stuff.” One of the forum moderators, Doug Fowler, stepped in
with a short framing post; before evaluating technical solutions, the musical task at
hand needed to be defined with sufficient precision. His response provides a con-
cise three-part taxonomy of sub-bass information, keyed directly to three specific
(and movable) frequency ranges below 100 Hz:
In EDM, I have found there are three important areas:

Smack—mid-bass, as Matt says.
Meat—where the majority of low frequency content lies, genre
dependent.
Drop—below 40 Hz.
For trance, house, and techno (mostly, not an iron-clad rule by any
means), the meat normally lies between 50–60 Hz. 55 Hz is a good target
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107
frequency for optimization. For dubstep, the meat lies lower, mid-40s nor-
mally in my experience.
Drop can happen any time, regardless of genre.54
As other tech heads chimed in, an orchestral picture of EDM’s bottom three octaves
assembled itself. What kind of speakers could be marshalled to handle each type of
sub-bass challenge? It would be elegant if each of the three types of enclosures—
horn-loaded, bass-reflex, or bandpass—correlated to a particular band of sub-bass
frequencies, but it’s not that simple. At the very bottom, the drop/boom is too low
for even the largest folded horns to handle efficiently; the best way to get enough
sound pressure in the infra-sub range is to create a narrow but very strong resonant
peak, just where you need it, by tuning multiple enclosures of either the bass-reflex
or bandpass type to max out at a chosen frequency well below 50 Hz. Scanning
audio forums for advice, one sees suggestions as low as 28 Hz for rap, 34–36 Hz for
EDM, and 40–45 Hz for modern rock.55 Conversely, the sheer amount of energy
and the number of fast transients in both the middle- and upper-sub range of dub-
step and related genres call for horn-loaded drivers, which, in this range, are more
“punchy”—that is, possessed of a lower Q (the measure of driver stiffness) and thus
less likely to overresonate. The articulate, efficient response of horns helps avoid
audible distortion as the n-octave harmonics of upper-sub frequencies rise into the
midrange of acute human hearing.
Here are some typical scenarios (see fig. 4.7). If you are playing old-school
techno and house, with no drops and the “meat” of the sub-bass at around 55 Hz,
you can get away with using nothing but folded exponential horns. They will easily
go that low and will be efficient (and thus quite loud), with a tendency to “throw”
the sound forward into the crowd, especially if you can site them against a wall or
in a corner. If, on the other hand, you are playing dubstep or reggaeton, where the
low-frequency “meat” is down at 42–44 Hz, surrounded by infra-sub drops below
and powerful mid-bass above, you might need to mix and match. Ambitious sound-
system operators will use very large bass-reflex cabinets for the “boom” and some of
the “meat” below 50 Hz and then supplement them with a set of (perhaps shorter)
sub-bass horns that max out in the 70–90-Hz range, both to make up for phase can-
cellation in that octave caused by the reflex ports and to throw an edgy “smack” from
the upper-sub register onto the dance floor. Finally, some EDM systems specializ-
ing in hardcore bass music use full subwoofer arrays for each range of the sub-bass;
a three-way setup of this type was lauded by poster Matt Long in the subwoofer
forum thread cited above:
The challenge lies in delivering both punchy mid-bass and deep bass lines
that often have fundamentals well below 40hz while avoiding IM distor-
tion in the woofers covering the range into the 1k area. So that is why I use
different sets of subwoofers that cover 3 ranges: bass 40–80, mid-bass
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108 GEN RE
80–150 and infra-bass 20–40. Note that each band is only one octave wide,
this really helps.56
T H E E N E R G Y - M O N E Y E Q UAT I O N
“This is the power process by which recorded music is amplified to give the dance-
hall audience in the session their unique embodying experience of the intensities
of sonic dominance. Currently the top-range sound system sets, like Stone Love’s
produce up to 20,000 watts of musical power.”57
In this final section, we briefly consider the political economy of sonic domi-
nance. To put it crassly, how much does all this bass cost? One effect of the preceding
survey should be to dramatize the sheer profligacy of a musical style whose Platonic
ideal consists of projecting high sound-pressure levels close to the lower limits of
human hearing to large crowds in the open air. There is a reason Goodman’s Sonic
Warfare focuses on state conspiracies to weaponize infrasound: only in the shadowy
military-procurement systems of our imagination is there enough money sloshing
around to combat the engineering reality of the sub-bass signal chain, which is a
staggering level of attenuation at all points. A brief review: (1) the human ear is
radically insensitive to the frequency band below 50 Hz, requiring signal boosts of
up to 60 dB even to notice it; (2) most sub-bass energy not only misses our ears, but
it fails to couple with our bodies thanks to impedance mismatch; (3) an even more
radical impedance mismatch obtains with the large sound waves leaving a speaker
cone, so that even the most efficient subwoofers waste most of the energy used to
drive them. Of course, thanks to advances in solid-state electronics, distortion-free
amplification has become so cheap that impressive feats of sound reinforcement at
the sub-bass level can be achieved by hobbyists and dance collectives, but it does
not come cheap.
The financial choke points are along the first section of the sub-bass signal chain,
the path from bass-heavy musical recordings through a series of amplifiers, cross-
overs, and digital signal processors, to the drivers that set sound-pressure waves
coursing through the various speaker enclosures and out into the air of a club, rave,
or festival. Subwoofer drivers are, in principle, no different from the flexible serrated
cones, hung from rigid cages and attached to electromagnetic voice coils, that popu-
late more or less every electronic device we know that emits sound. What sets them
apart is their size (fifteen to eighteen inches in diameter) and the extreme mechani-
cal and heat stress they undergo, which means that the heavy-duty subwoofer driv-
ers on which bass culture is built must be both well engineered and somewhat
overbuilt. A complete introduction to driver-design parameters is beyond the scope
of this chapter, but large, loud sound waves require large excursions of the driver
cone. Especially if the enclosure design is ported and tuned, the cone must have
its momentum heavily damped by rigid suspension and a large, powerful electro-
magnet long enough to encompass maximum excursion (xmax), which is most
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109
likely to occur when the source material reaches the critical low resonant peak of
the speaker—that is, in dance music, almost all the time. Pushing the requisite elec-
tricity through such a large, long voice coil also throws off large amounts of heat. (A
speaker driver is an almost fantastically inefficient device, dissipating up to 99 per-
cent of the electrical energy pumped into it as either heat or mechanical damping
force.) Subwoofers are thus rated by the maximum amount of energy they can han-
dle, continuously, while operating at their maximum excursion, without burning
out. An adequate home-theater system divides its 100 watts RMS output across six
speakers, of which one is a subwoofer; the multiple subwoofer drivers in a profes-
sional system can weigh upward of thirty pounds each and are individually rated to
handle 800–1,000 watts RMS all the way down to 25 Hz, in order to survive the rig-
ors of sound-system use. (Even so, they wear out, which is why independent sound
engineers become experts at driver reconeing and replacement.)
The Dayton UM15-22 Ultimax is such a driver (Web example 4.1 ). It has a
fifteen-inch cone, suspended from a heavy-duty dual cast-aluminum “spider” that
keeps it rigid in two dimensions; heat-dissipating vents in both the spider and the
voice coil; an exceptionally large xmax of 19 millimeters; and stated power-handling
capability of 800 watts RMS down to 15 Hz. Its Q is high, and its resonant fre-
quency (fs), unmodified by enclosure, is a very, very low 19 Hz. At the time of this
writing, if you were to buy four of these from a major online supplier of professional
audio equipment, you would spend about seven hundred fifty dollars, plus tax and
shipping, and that is the purchase with which an Atlanta sound-system designer,
“GordonW,” began his quest for dubstep nirvana, as self-reported on the hobbyist
website audiokarma.org in September 2013. It will be worth letting him go on at
length about it here, since he outlines his dream system in enough detail to allow
both technical evaluation and pricing:
Just ordered four Dayton UM15-22 Ultimax 15” subwoofer drivers.

We’re building 6th order bandpass enclosures (vented on both sides) for
these. . . .
One of these should be able to do just over 126 dB at full rated power,
within the [27–45 Hz] passband. Four of these, with 900 watts each
(we have a Crown Macrotech 3600 to drive the four—it’s 1800 w/ch.
into a 2 ohm load) should be able to hit close to 138 dB, barring power
compression.
The crazy thing, is that MAX output (the loudest point on the response
curve) is at just over 29 Hz. . . . I’d think that should work well with some
EDM/dubstep type music!
The four of these will be supplementing four double 18 cabinets (loaded
with Eminence Omega 18s) and four single 18 cabinets (loaded with JBL
2240 clones). The bandpass boxes will be used to “augment” the front-
loaded 18 cabinets—kind of like the way a helper woofer works in a 2.5
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110 GEN RE
way speaker (the bandpass boxes will have an electronic crossover—DBX

Driverack, to be exact—set at a 40 Hz lowpass, while the 18s will go from
100 Hz and down). Mids and highs are going to be eight JBL 2226s (four
per side) and four Renkus-Heinz 2” horns with JBL 2445 drivers (two per
side) plus four Selenium ST350 supertweeters (two per side).
Power will be a Crown Macrotech 3600 for the four Ultimax “super
subs,” two more Crown Macrotech 3600s for the twelve 18s, two Crest
CA9 power amps (1800 watts) for the eight 15s, and a Crest CA6 (1200
watts) for the horns/supertweeters.
So, that’s a total of four Ultimax 15 bandpass cabinets, a dozen 18”
woofers, eight 15” midbass, four 2” horns and four supertweeters, on
about 15000 watts of power. . . .
I think the kids will find enough bass for their liking.
The first conclusion we can draw from this account is the sheer complexity of orches-
trating sonic dominance in all ranges—drop/boom, meat/thump, and smack/
punch—of the sub-bass register. This system deploys no fewer than twenty-four
bass drivers in twelve separate enclosures of three types. The four different makes
of driver used have natural resonant peaks that ascend in a tight stack from 19.5 fs
to 40 fs. The deepest, the new Ultimax drivers, also have a high enough Q and long
enough excursion (xmax) to work in large, double-ported bandpass enclosures, cus-
tom designed to maximize output in the range below the lowest familiar frequency
(bandpass 27–45 Hz, resonant peak at 29 Hz, crossed over at 40 Hz), exactly where
contemporary EDM executes its most dramatic sub-bass “drops.” Each bandpass
sub, in turn, supports two bass-reflex cabinets with less articulate (lower xmax,
higher Q) eighteen-inch drivers: a pair of Eminence Omegas in one and a single
JBL 2240 in the other, both fed through active crossovers set high enough to cover
the whole “meat” of the sub-bass register. (This coupling resembles an orchestration
trick described in the 19th-century composer Hector Berlioz, an early seeker after
sonic dominance, who noted that the deep resonance of a single bass ophicleide
in A-flat could reinforce the somewhat asthmatic bottom G on the old three-string
double basses of his time.)58 Over this foundation, like cellos doubling basses at
the octave, are set eight fifteen-inch JBL 2226 mid-bass drivers, whose natural reso-
nance is low but which, when placed in scoop cabinets, peak in acoustic efficiency
right around the “smack” level of 100–150 Hz.
It’s all very impressive. And expensive. Just the bass drivers for such a setup would
cost, conservatively, seven thousand dollars (by far the single greatest expense);
add in four dedicated low-end amplifiers and custom-constructed cabinets of high
quality, and the price rises to more than twelve thousand dollars for sub-bass and
bass alone. Note that it is precisely the quest for deeper and deeper bass that eats
up resources; the rest of the system, including the two sets of horn tweeters, their
enclosures and amps, and the crossover network, adds only about two thousand
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111
dollars more to the total.59 Here, at the end of our survey, it seems appropriate to
stop and ask who pays for sonic dominance and why. Unlike other icons of resis-
tance through musical collectivity—the gospel quartet harmonizing in church,
the singer-songwriter on the public square, the garage-rock band with pawnshop
instruments, even the beat slicers huddled around the buttons of an outmoded
digital device—the proprietors of a bass-heavy sound system need very significant
amounts of capital to make their voices heard and their vibrations felt. What kind
of investment is this?
If the preceding exploration of the sub-bass signal chain has made one thing clear,
it is that spending money to project bass energy is a largely ceremonial undertaking.
Despite Henriques, who at several places in his ethnography of Jamaican sound sys-
tems enthuses over their sheer wattage,60 sound engineers know that “20,000 watts”
is a meaningless specification by itself. Until one knows how efficient the speaker
drivers are, what kinds of compromises the enclosures make, how the placement of
subwoofers interacts with the room, and a dozen other sonic variables, the actual
effect of any amount of electrical power on human bodies is unquantifiable. But
we can try. As a final thought exercise, let’s trace through the whole signal chain the
low-frequency energy emitted by a typical 20,000-watt sound system. How much
physical energy reaches us, and how much can we actually feel?
1. Watts of electricity to watts of sound power, aka acoustic watts. As we’ve seen, most
of the amplification in an EDM sound system is devoted to reproduction of sub-
100-Hz frequencies. Taking the systems analyzed here as typical, we can assume
that 75 percent of the wattage assembled is dedicated to pushing out sub-bass;
but, as we’ve also noted, even the most efficient speaker designs waste more
than 90 percent of the energy put into them. So a 20,000-watt system devotes,
in practice, about 15,000 watts to sub-bass, which, given a typical array of horn-
loaded and bass-reflex speakers, would result in maximum SPLs of around 750
acoustic watts of sub-100-Hz energy directly in front of the cabinets.
2. Watts of sound power to decibels of sound pressure level. Expressed in decibels, 750
acoustic watts could reach an impressive theoretical SPL of 148 dB. But in the
real world, decibels of SPL must take into account directionality and distance.
Let’s assume the bass speakers are sitting in a field or on a street, without corner-
loading effects; at six meters, the effective SPL would be around 121 dB, about
the same volume as a symphony orchestra in full flight in a concert hall—loud,
certainly, but not weapons-grade loud.
3. Decibels of sound pressure to pascals of air pressure to phons of loudness. An SPL of
121 dB in air is equivalent to approximately 20 pascals or, to put it in everyday
terms that dramatize the mechanical weakness of air-coupled systems, around
0.003 psi. (Good luck trying to fill the tires on your bicycle with dubstep.) I’ve
gone to considerable trouble above to dispel the notion that such pressure lev-
els can cause noticeable effects on the interior of the human body, though the
oso-9780199985227.indd 111 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

112 GEN RE
infinitesimal fluctuations do register on the skin. Of course, the human ear is

extremely sensitive to changes in air pressure; at 1,000 Hz, it will easily register
fluctuations a thousand times smaller than this. But not in the sub-bass register.
Imagine the bass amplifiers and speakers of our reference 20,000-watt sound
system devoted entirely to reproducing a 29-Hz sine tone as loudly as possi-
ble, and imagine that they can indeed reach 121 dB of sound pressure at the
eardrums of a listener standing a reasonable distance away. According to the
Fletcher-Munson curves of equal loudness, 120 dB at 29 Hz is equivalent to no
more than 100 dB for any frequency above 150 Hz. In fact, although 100 dB of
environmental noise—or even 100 dB of continuous full-frequency music—
will eventually damage hearing, the situation with sub-bass tones is quite differ-
ent. Those we mostly feel as resonance on the surface of our bodies, where the
possibility of damage is minimal.
Envoi: The Timbre of No Timbre

Below 100 Hz, the combined effect of massively inefficient transmitters (speak-
ers), an inefficient coupling mechanism (air), and evolutionarily inefficient receiv-
ers (human ears) means that all but a vanishingly small percentage of the electrical
energy put into a sound system is simply wasted, as heat, mechanical friction, air
molecules bouncing around, tiny motions on the surface of the skin, trouser legs
flapping, and so on. The “power” of deep bass appears to be our intuitive percep-
tion of how difficult it is to hear these frequencies at all, the mathematically sub-
lime incommensurability of means and ends which I’ve tried, laboriously, to outline
here. In the final analysis, then, the “sound” of the sub-bass is a timbre of no timbre,
a tone whose expressive effect comes largely from that which we cannot hear. In
this regard, it is typical of the social phenomena that we generally refer to as tone.
To think otherwise is to fall prey to a characteristic deformation of sonic material-
ism that we might call acoustic fundamentalism, the erroneous belief that certain
sounds, by virtue of their physical qualities, have more “thisness,” more reality, than
others.61 If the preceding trek through the psychoacoustics of low-frequency sound
has succeeded at all, it will have destabilized such quasi-mystical notions. To under-
stand bass culture, we must understand bass as culture. Any other option would
simply be unsound.
Notes
1. Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2009), 84.
2. Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 84.
oso-9780199985227.indd 112 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

113
3. Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of
Knowing (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 13.
5. Henriques, Sonic Bodies, 38.
7. Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 379, 142.
10. Henriques, Sonic Bodies, 55–56.
11. Esben Skovenborg and Søren H. Nielsen, “Evaluation of Different Loudness Models with
Music and Speech Material,” paper presented at the Annual Convention of the Acoustical
Engineering Society, San Francisco, 2004.
12. Skovenborg and Nielsen, “Evaluation,” 114.
13. Gary Davis and Ralph Jones, The Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook, 2nd ed.
(Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1989), 237.
14. Connoisseurs of UK rave music may recall a number of tracks from around 1991 (e.g., Dune’s
“Too Much,” Altern-8’s “Infiltrate 202”) that used a sampled voice to call out sub-bass drops
with a cheery “Wash your bass bins, I’m tellin’ yer!” It remains good advice.
15. Cornelia Fales, “The Paradox of Timbre,” Ethnomusicology 46, no. 1 (2002): 56–95.
16. Fletcher, H. and Munson, W.A., “Loudness, its definition, measurement and calculation,”
Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 5 (1933): 82–108.
17. A decibel can be a measure of sound intensity (watts), sound pressure (joules), or sound-
pressure level (pascals), the last calibrated to a reference level normally set by the SPL at the
threshold of human hearing for 1,000 Hz. Increasing pressure by ten times produces a hun-
dredfold increase in intensity and raises the SPL by 20 dB. Frequency-weighted according
to perceptual curves—dB(A) through (G) in the ISO system—they correlate with phons, a
mechanically calculated measure of loudness level, and with sones, a psycho-empirical mea-
sure of loudness. Glenn Ballou, ed., Handbook for Sound Engineers, 3rd ed. (Boston: Focal,
2002), 30–33.
19. J. Randall, R. Matthews, and M. Stiles, “Resonant Frequencies of Standing Humans,”
Ergonomics 40, no. 9 (1997): 879–886.
20. Colin H. Hansen, ed., The Effects of Low-Frequency Noise and Vibration on People (Brentwood,
UK: Multiscience, 2005).
21. Experimental results produced in Japan by subjecting test subjects to pure tones produced
from an array of commercially available subwoofers show a noticeable spike in vibratory
acceleration levels (VAL) across the skin of the forehead in a narrow band between 31.5 and
40 Hz; Yukio Takahashi, Kazuo Kanada, and Yoshiharu Yonekawa, “Some Characteristics of
Human Body Surface Vibration Induced by Low-Frequency Noise,” Journal of Low Frequency
Noise, Vibration, and Active Control 21, no. 1 (2002): 9–19. Together with intraocular and
head resonances that appear more evenly through the 30–50-Hz band, these results confirm
the validity of the old raver’s longing for “bass in your face.” In (the mask of) your face is
where you actually feel the pressure.
22. David Gleason, “Sound for Underground Dance: The Technical Foundation.” Sunsonic
Sound System, 2015, www.unrec.com/sunsonic/sound2.htm, accessed July 15, 2016.
23. Alan Fierstein and Richard Long, “State-of-the-Art Discotheque Sound Systems—System
Design and Acoustical Measurement,” paper presented at the Annual Convention of the
Audio Engineering Society, XXXX, 1980. http://www.acoustilog.com/disco1.html, fac-
simile of original manuscript accessed August 8, 2016.
24. Christian Pedersen, “Human Hearing at Low Frequencies with Focus on Noise Complaints,”
PhD dissertation, Aalborg University, 2008, 22–23.
25. Gleason, “Sound for Underground Dance.”
oso-9780199985227.indd 113 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

114 GEN RE

27. Michael A. Persinger, “Infrasound, Human Health, and Adaptation: An Integrative Overview
of Recondite Hazards in a Complex Environment,” Natural Hazards 70 (2014): 524.
28. Experimental results from 2002 are unusually relevant for students of electronic dance
music. Not only did experimenters focus on precisely the range of frequencies (20–50
Hz) and SPL (100–110 dB[A]) found in contemporary bass music, but they produced the
low-frequency vibrations using an array of twelve commercially available eighteen-inch
bass drivers functionally equivalent to those used in high-end sound systems optimized
for EDM. Takahashi, Kanada, and Yonekawa, “Some Characteristics”; Yukio Takahashi,
Kazuo Kanada, and Yoshiharu Yonekawa, “The Relationship between Vibratory Sensation
and Body Surface Vibration Induced by Low-Frequency Noise,” Journal of Low Frequency
Noise, Vibration, and Active Control 21, no. 2 (2002): 87–100. Reprinted in The Effects
of Low-Frequency Noise on People, edited by Colin H. Hansen, 250–264. Brentwood,
UK: Multiscience, 2005.
29. Jürgen Altmann, “Acoustic Weapons—A Prospective Assessment,” Science and Global Security
9 (2001): 165–234; A. J. Swerdlow et al., “Health Effects of Exposure to Ultrasound and
Infrasound,” UK Health Protection Agency, Report of the Advisory Group on Non-ionising
Radiation, 2010, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_
data/file/335014/RCE-14_for_web_with_security.pdf, accessed July 22, 2016.
30. G. Rasmussen, “Human Body Vibration Exposure and Its Measurement,” Brüel and Kjoer
Technical Review 1 (1982): 3–31.
31. Ernst Kruijff and Aeldrik Pander, “Experiences of Using Shockwaves for Haptic Sensations,”
Proceedings of the 3D User Interface Workshop, IEEE VR, Bonn, Germany, 2005.
32. Speakerplans.com, http://www.speakerplans.com, accessed July 26, 2016.
35. See Jens Blauert, Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human Sound Localization, rev. ed.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).
36. Douglas Self, The Design of Active Crossovers (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2011), 32.
37. Blauert, Spatial Hearing, 141–142.
38. Ryan, Timothy J., William L. Martens, and Wieslaw Woszczyk, “The Effects of Acoustical
Treatment on Lateralization of Low‐Frequency Sources,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America 117 (2005): 2392–2392.
39. Jeff Berryman, “Subwoofer Arrays: Discussion and Analysis of a Variety of Bass Coverage
Patterns,” ProSoundWeb, 2012, http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/subwoofer_arrays_
a_look_at_bass_coverage_patterns/, accessed July 29, 2016.
40. Self, The Design of Active Crossovers, 456–467.
42. Vance Dickason, The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, 7th ed. (Peterborough, N.H.: Audio
Amateur, 2006), 247.
43. Henriques, Sonic Bodies, xx, 40.
44. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Radio Symphony,” in Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music, edited
by Richard Leppert (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1941), 256.
45. “Loudspeakers and Enclosures,” Audio Magazine, August 1954, p. 27.
47. Where not otherwise cited, technical background on speaker design has been based on theo-
retical presentations in Dickason, The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook.\
50. The earliest description of a working subwoofer I have been able to find—although it does
not use the word—is from 1949. See Saul J. White, “Below 50 Cycles,” Audio Engineering
(December 1949): 16–18, 31–33.
oso-9780199985227.indd 114 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

115
51. Piet Sloven, “LFN and the A-Weighting,” Journal of Low Frequency Noise, Vibration, and Active
Control 24, no. 3 (2005): 157–162. Reprinted in The Effects of Low-Frequency Noise on People,
edited by Colin H. Hansen, 199–218. Brentwood, UK: Multiscience, 2005.
52. Art Welter, forum post on ProSoundWeb, August 14, 2013, http://forums.prosoundweb.
com/index.php/topic,146076.0/prev_next,next.html#new, accessed August 17, 2016.
53. Quoted in Tom Flint, “Gnarls Barkley and the Atlanta Sound (Ben Allen Interview),” Sound
on Sound, December 2006, http://www.soundonsound.com/people/gnarls-barkley-atlanta-
sound, accessed August 17, 2016.
54. Doug Fowler, post in LAB Subwoofer Forum, ProSoundWeb, June 27, 2012, forums.pro-
soundweb.com/index.php/topic,138505.0.html, accessed August 17, 2016. Emphasis
added and orthography adjusted for clarity.
55. Countless discussions of tuned resonance in subwoofers can be found at caraudio.com, pro-
soundweb.com, and speakerplans.com.
56. Matt Long, post in LAB Subwoofer Forum, ProSoundWeb, June 23, 2012. forums.pro-
soundweb.com/index.php/topic,138505.html, accessed August 16, 2016.
58. Hector Berlioz, Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (Paris:
Schonenberger, 1843), 227.
59. Prices were determined by a search of online audio retailers on August 18, 2016. Where
items are no longer available new, eBay auctions of comparable units were used to set approx-
imate resale levels. Cabinet costs assume use of furniture-grade wood, with minimal decora-
tion or added functionality. Not included: mixer, effects rack, lighting system, DJ hardware
and software.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. “The Radio Symphony.” In Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music, edited by
Richard Leppert, 251–269. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1941.
Altmann, Jürgen. “Acoustic Weapons—A Prospective Assessment.” Science and Global Security 9
(2001): 165–234.
Ballou, Glenn, ed. Handbook for Sound Engineers, 3rd ed. Boston: Focal, 2002.
Berlioz, Hector. Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes. Paris: Schonenberger, 1843.
Berryman, Jeff. “Subwoofer Arrays: Discussion and Analysis of a Variety of Bass Coverage Patterns.”
ProSoundWeb, 2012. http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/subwoofer_arrays_a_look_
at_bass_coverage_patterns/, accessed July 29, 2016.
Blauert, Jens. Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human Sound Localization, rev. ed.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Davis, Gary, and Ralph Jones. The Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook, 2nd ed. Milwaukee: Hal
Leonard, 1989.
Dickason, Vance. The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, 7th ed. Peterborough, N.H.: Audio
Amateur, 2006.
Fales, Cornelia. “The Paradox of Timbre.” Ethnomusicology 46, no. 1 (2002): 56–95.
Fierstein, Alan, and Richard Long. “State-of-the-Art Discotheque Sound Systems—System Design
and Acoustical Measurement.” Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the Audio
Engineering Society, XXXX, 1980. http://www.acoustilog.com/disco1.html, facsimile of
original manuscript accessed August 8, 2016.
Fletcher, H. and Munson, W.A., “Loudness, its definition, measurement and calculation.” Journal of
the Acoustic Society of America 5 (1933): 82–108.
oso-9780199985227.indd 115 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

116 GEN RE
Flint, Tom. “Gnarls Barkley and the Atlanta Sound (Ben Allen Interview).” Sound on Sound,
December 2006. http://www.soundonsound.com/people/gnarls-barkley-atlanta-sound,
accessed August 17, 2016.
Gleason, David. “Sound for Underground Dance: The Technical Foundation.” Sunsonic Sound
System, 2015. www.unrec.com/sunsonic/sound2.htm, accessed July 15, 2016.
Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2009.
Hansen, Colin H., ed. The Effects of Low-Frequency Noise and Vibration on People. Brentwood,
Henriques, Julian. Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing.
London and New York: Continuum, 2011.
Kruijff, Ernst, and Aeldrik Pander. “Experiences of Using Shockwaves for Haptic Sensations.”
Proceedings of the 3D User Interface Workshop, IEEE VR, Bonn, Germany, 2005.
“Loudspeakers and Enclosures,” Audio Magazine, August 1954, p. 27.
Pedersen, Christian. “Human Hearing at Low Frequencies with Focus on Noise Complaints.” PhD
dissertation, Aalborg University, 2008.
Persinger, Michael A. “Infrasound, Human Health, and Adaptation: An Integrative Overview of
Recondite Hazards in a Complex Environment.” Natural Hazards 70 (2014): 501–525.
Randall, J., R. Matthews, and M. Stiles. “Resonant Frequencies of Standing Humans.” Ergonomics
40, no. 9 (1997): 879–886.
Rasmussen, G. “Human Body Vibration Exposure and Its Measurement.” Brüel and Kjoer Technical
Review 1 (1982): 3–31.
Ryan, Timothy J., William L. Martens, and Wieslaw Woszczyk. “The Effects of Acoustical Treatment
on Lateralization of Low‐Frequency Sources.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 117
(2005): 2392–2392.
Self, Douglas. The Design of Active Crossovers. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2011.
Skovenborg, Esben, and Søren H. Nielsen. “Evaluation of Different Loudness Models with Music
and Speech Material.” Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the Acoustical Engineering
Society, San Francisco, 2004.
Sloven, Piet. “LFN and the A-Weighting.” Journal of Low Frequency Noise, Vibration, and Active Control
24, no. 3 (2005): 157–162. Reprinted in The Effects of Low-Frequency Noise and Vibration on
People, edited by Colin H. Hansen, 199–218. Brentwood, UK: Multiscience, 2005.
Swerdlow, A. J., et al. “Health Effects of Exposure to Ultrasound and Infrasound.” UK Health
Protection Agency, Report of the Advisory Group on Non-ionising Radiation, 2010. https://
www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335014/RCE-
14_for_web_with_security.pdf, accessed July 22, 2016.
Takahashi, Yukio, Kazuo Kanada, and Yoshiharu Yonekawa. “The Relationship between Vibratory
Sensation and Body Surface Vibration Induced by Low-Frequency Noise.” Journal of Low
Frequency Noise, Vibration, and Active Control 21, no. 2 (2002): 87–100. Reprinted in The
Effects of Low-Frequency Noise on People, edited by Colin H. Hansen, 250–264. Brentwood,
Takahashi, Yukio, Kazuo Kanada, and Yoshiharu Yonekawa. “Some Characteristics of Human
Body Surface Vibration Induced by Low-Frequency Noise.” Journal of Low Frequency Noise,
Vibration, and Active Control 21, no. 1 (2002): 9–19.
White, Saul J. “Below 50 Cycles.” Audio Engineering (December 1949): 16–18, 31–33.
oso-9780199985227.indd 116 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

Below 100 Hz. Toward A Musicology of Bass

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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Wed May 23 2018, NEWGEN

The Politics of Frequency

oso-9780199985227.indd 88 23-May-18 10:01:12 PM

Bel ow 10 0 Hz : Bass C u lt ure 89

Timbre Incognita: Musicology below 100 Hz

oso-9780199985227.indd 89 23-May-18 10:01:12 PM

Timbre . . . is not an irreducible element in the manner of the three

oso-9780199985227.indd 90 23-May-18 10:01:12 PM

Bel ow 10 0 Hz : Bass C u lt ure 91

The Sub-Bass Signal Chain

oso-9780199985227.indd 91 23-May-18 10:01:12 PM

Figure 4.1. The sub-bass signal chain.

neoliberalism, insufficiently exorcised by the academic rituals of bass materialism,

BASS IN YOUR FACE

oso-9780199985227.indd 92 23-May-18 10:01:12 PM

Bel ow 10 0 Hz : Bass C u lt ure 93

Figure 4.2. Divisions of the audible spectrum.

oso-9780199985227.indd 93 23-May-18 10:01:12 PM

Eardrum rupture Loudness

The crowd experiences such cellular intensities as the sheer immer-

oso-9780199985227.indd 94 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

Bel ow 10 0 Hz : Bass C u lt ure 95

Head (axial mode)

Figure 4.4. Resonant frequencies of the human body. (After G. Rasmussen, “Human

textbook example not of Henriques’s “substantive presence” but of the imaginative

oso-9780199985227.indd 95 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

The quality of the components, particularly speakers, is one potential

oso-9780199985227.indd 96 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

Bel ow 10 0 Hz : Bass C u lt ure 97

oso-9780199985227.indd 97 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

oso-9780199985227.indd 98 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

Bel ow 10 0 Hz : Bass C u lt ure 99

oso-9780199985227.indd 99 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

oso-9780199985227.indd 100 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

Be l ow 100 Hz : Bass C ul tu re 101

BAFFLES, BOXES, AND HORNS

oso-9780199985227.indd 101 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

Figure 4.5. Reggae sound system with multiple subwoofers, 2004.

Figure 4.6. Subwoofer enclosure designs.

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Be l ow 100 Hz : Bass C ul tu re 103

A Field Guide to Subwoofers

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Be l ow 100 Hz : Bass C ul tu re 105

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BASS REFLEX FOLDED HORN

“boom” (gut) “thump” (stomach) “punch” (chest)

infrasound “category 1 lowest familiar “category 2 old transmission

32 organ pipe Lowest E on bass lowest E on guitar

Figure 4.7. Functional divisions of the sub-bass register.

In EDM, I have found there are three important areas:

oso-9780199985227.indd 106 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

Be l ow 100 Hz : Bass C ul tu re 107

oso-9780199985227.indd 107 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

oso-9780199985227.indd 108 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

Be l ow 100 Hz : Bass C ul tu re 109

Just ordered four Dayton UM15-22 Ultimax 15” subwoofer drivers.

oso-9780199985227.indd 109 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

way speaker (the bandpass boxes will have an electronic crossover—DBX

oso-9780199985227.indd 110 23-May-18 10:01:13 PM

Be l ow 100 Hz : Bass C ul tu re 111

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