How I learned to stop worrying and love sucky bass
Beethoven understood the pathos of the gap between idea and realization, and the sense of strain put on the listener’s imagination is essential.
—Charles Rosen
Bass, like sex, is something most young men desire in excess: To the novice, quantity trumps quality, and as long as he can hear from his playback system the deepest sounds of an orchestral bass drum or five-string electric bass (low string tuned to B-0 or C-1), he is completely satisfied. Meanwhile, bass texture, bass color, bass momentum, bass nuance, bass tension, and, especially, bass feel have now joined the short-nosed sturgeon, the Arkansas fatmucket clam, the Iberian lynx, and the teacher of European culture on the edge of extinction. And relatively few music lovers…
