Beedster

US rapper plagiarises UFO Dr Dr

Beer loving bassist Boosy Collins

Cerebral 80's metal from Axon

Yes 👍 But all joking aside, I was like a kid in a sweet store when I first used amps - both bass and hifi - that could do decent lows and highs, largely as the result of having had to endure 15-20 years of inarticulate and undefined mids associated with poor quality audio.

In fact, perhaps in evolutionary terms the excessive highs and lows of a scooped audio system are shouting "Hey look what I can do" in the same way as a peacock extending his feathers, no use in real terms whatsoever, but critical in propagating his DNA

i think it's the same as hifi, there's a tendency among consumers to want to hear what are - in pure audio signal terms - excessive lows and excessive highs as a mark of the quality of the system. This I suspect is on the basis that the absence of these lows and highs was often a mark of the absence of quality, that is lower quality audio systems were very mid heavy. There's a huge difference between a system being mid-heavy because of poor quality components that restrict bass and treble response and being mid heavy as the result of accurate reproduction of the original signal, but I suspect that for many of us we still find that scoop pleasing for these reasons despite the fact that it's rarely a useable tone and distorts the sound of the instrument significantly. While I got there with bass quite quickly, usually as the result of drummers saying they needed more mids to hear me, it took me year to stop scooping hifi on this basis, in part because it also required that I had a good enough audio system to allow a mid-heavy signal to sound good to my ear. There's a evolutionary argument also (potentially dubious); narrow frequency responses are associated with limited environmental resources. In the environment in which we evolved a wide range of sounds from the lowest produced by large animals to the highest produce by the smallest indicated a diverse and therefore resource-rich natural environment. The absence of these often indicated the absence of life or the presence of predators, while lots of mids indicated insects etc. Lots of mids (which by the way are often used to create tension in movies etc), are apparently not appealing to our brains (keep in mind I did say potentially dubious above). So, perhaps scoop is to audio what sugar and salt are to food; for reasons tied into the way our brains are wired either through learning or evolution, we tend to buy more of the product the more it contains, consciously or otherwise?

Round here there's a shortage of bass players; always used to be drummists but now there seem to be plenty of those. Pretty much every conversation in which I mention I play bass ther response is "We're looking for a bass player/a mate of mine's band is looking for a bass player". I put it down to Brexit like everything else

The above resonated, thanks @agedhorse And 'true cost of ownership' extends from the individual to society and from there to the environment. The extraordinary volume of low price/poor quality/built to fail products being moved around the world to satisfy our retail urges will demand a high price (more correctly a high cost) from future generations. Music technology is far from the worst offender, but to compete many well known manufacturers have to join the low-price arms race, which results in the problem becoming worse not better. These days I nearly always buy used (in the context of the above post eBay and Basschat are forces for the good in most respects), aim to to buy gear that can be repaired and does not require replacement if it fails, and I look after my gear with all this in mind also. Oh, and in a dramatic shift, I only ever own one bass and one amp at any one time these days, leaving more of that lovely used gear from others 👍

Californication, I was 34 when it was released but it still feels like an album I first heard when I was 13. Takes me to good places. I’d love them to release a less compressed mix though 🤔

Yep, with all the hybrid Mesa amps when things got loud on stage a lot of the detail in the bass was lost, the para EQ helped as pushing low mids helped with the tone I wanted but the baked in tone of other amps works better for me, especially as having to push mids too far can leave the bass sounding a bit, well, unnatural. I always felt the mids on those units lack a bit of body, or dare I say heft 🤔

My Ampeg SVT power amp had a glorious tone with a Precision (no preamp) where it sounded very far from flat to my ear, but less good with other basses. But then I’m biased 😀

Ah, got you now, the baked in tone and EQ settings of the Walkabout didn't allow you to get the tone you wanted, even with everything theoretically flat. Yep, I found that with the whole range, M-Pulse 600, Venture, Big Block, Titan and Walkabout (I owned the whole bloody lot at one time or another). But is that about not doing flat per se? I know that I preferred the 'flat' or 'core' or 'baked-in' tone of the 400 and Buster ranges, but Re the OP getting a flat response, I'd ask why, is there some magic about something you 'know' to be technically a flat response that beats your ears and your brain's ability to identify the tone you want to hear?

Order is restored, all is as it should be, nothing more need be said

One that enables me to create the sound I want to create

No, it can't do flat in any simple way, sounds great with all controls at 12.00, but it ain't flat, it's that lovely baked in Boogie tone

Which means that you love it's baked in tone, which is why we choose the gear we choose. But it's not flat, if it was flat why would you love Handbox flat more than Ashdown or Ampeg flat?

I appear to live in a low end wasteland

Absolutely, play to what it sounds like to you, your bandmates and audience, the settings on the amp or bass are entirely meaningless. Certain neural signals trigger certain responses that we like or don't like. Flat perhaps suggests the latter but simply doesn't exist in any real sense. The 'baked-in' thing is as much product/market differentiation as anything else, as with all audio and instruments 👍

Human audio sensation and perception are very far from 'flat', and are also highly variable between different individuals and within the same individual over time (as is evidenced by audio fatigue in recording), so the rest is probably moot 👍

The Buster combos, even the more standard upright version, are the only time I've felt beaten by amplification, too big and too heavy for normal use these days, and given that I found an SVT-II manageable..... I think it's that they look small enough to be portable but they're just too big to be easily portable, and they are a one person lift but only just. They're just too close to the limit, and after a long gig getting one of them down one of those metal spiral fire exit stairs is just a little too much for even the most dedicated Boogie fan I suspect

I reckon you'd need to find something else to like! All joking aside, I think part of my initial reluctance with Yes was that EVERYONE who I played music with in my formative years loved them (mostly folks a few years older than me). This I'm sure meant that they were always going to disappoint just as I found with Genesis and a lot of the other bands at the prog/art interface in the 70's (e.g., Floyd). I found that I wanted to like the bands that the other (mostly rock) muso's didn't like, so I found myself listening to Kraftwerk and a few of the other German bands (Amon Duul II, Tangerine Dream etc), to Hawkwind, Man, ELP, all of whom seemed a little more accessible. I think it started some long-standing biases re Yes and Genesis

Questions here rarely define answers here