GETTING DOWN TO BASS-ICS
Like Godiva chocolates and quick trips to Amsterdam, the promise of deep bass
tends to work as a powerful hedonistic lure that can trap even the most
outwardly sensible of audiophiles. There was a time when I would preach that if
we could simply ignore the bottom couple of octaves, getting terrific sound
would suddenly become much easier. This, however, was in the days before big
pounding home theater soundtracks––back when you could still get away with some
little mini monitors, especially if your musical diet consisted primarily of
Vivaldi flute concertos and early Joan Baez records.
 | Available at www.av123.com for $399, the
R-DES offers four parametric bands of equalization and four separate memory
settings. You can create settings that offer various levels of correction, or
compensation for one or many seating positions. |
Nowadays, most of us
want something with a lot more kick, which usually means resorting to the use of
a separate subwoofer. Adding that much low bass can, however, become a bit of a
double-edged sword, along with the newfound bottom-end bliss, we might also end
up with a stack of room interaction problems. When you stick a sub in a corner,
it will often produce an in-room response that is about as flat as Pamela
Anderson stretched out on a beach towel. Bass has a nasty habit of exciting room
resonances at certain frequencies causing huge response peaks, while other
frequencies might cancel themselves out resulting in big dips or suck-outs.
Flattening things out can be tricky, and while careful positioning and the
judicious use of a good equalizer will help, most basic EQs simply don’t have
the level of control needed to do the job properly.
Enter the R-DES, a
remarkably versatile EQ (available at www.av123.com) that has been designed
exclusively to correct bass response. Going well beyond the typical box covered
with an array of sliders that you push around until it “sounds right,” the R-DES
is what is known as a four-band parametric equalizer, with a bit of a twist in
that you set up and adjust it through a connection to your computer. Luckily,
the computer is only needed during the setup period, and once you’ve entered
your adjustments in one of the R-DES’ four internal memories, you no longer need
to keep it connected.
