For years and years and years I’ve had the Yamaha monitors (8 I think) during that time I’ve come to understand that they have terrible bass translation. Way too weak and when id play a song anywhere else it wouldn’t be mixed properly because I wasn’t accounting for the bass. I’m looking for new monitors now and my question is does anyone have any recommendations for monitors with accurate bass translation? Also with accurate frequency translation no matter where in the spectrum.

I googled and I got back the rockit 8’s but when you look further into that. They have enhanced bass. I don’t want enhanced. I want accurate. Thank you so much for your advice that I anxiously anticipate.

 

As far as i know, they go down to 45 Hz pretty straight ... so it is good enough.
I bet it is your ROOM.

Simple to test :
-loop a sweep sine bass test (at low level) :

-now walk in your room, you will probably realise you can ear and feel the bass at some spots ... and not at some others.

Congrats !
You know now your room s*cks ! (like all non treated rooms)

Come back here when you done the test

 

Yes, the first eight listed loudspeakers here: https://www.spinorama.org/?quality=high&page=1&power=active&sort=score

 

For speakers with the most accurate bass response possible, you'd need to look at the rarer and rarer sealed enclosures. Most speakers have ports or passive radiators which, although often lead to greater bass extension, lead to more distortion and an audible delay of the low frequencies compared to the rest. These sealed speakers are quite rare to find. Barefoot, Unity are all sealed, and some ATC ones and the Neumann KH310 are all of those I can think off. However, I would recommend none of them due to other reasons. Luckily, you can more easily find sealed subwoofers, and combine them with speakers that are good in the mid-range and high-end.

In my personal home studio, I use APS speakers, which use a dampened bass port. In short, you still get the delay of the low-end, but with less resonance and a bit less distortion. So it's not as a good as sealed, but it's a good compromise, and sufficient for me.

However, although good speakers than can go deep cleanly are important for accurate bass reproduction, good room correction/DSP is even more important in my opinion. And I'm not talking about bass traps or room acoustics. As an acoustician, I can tell you that no matter how much acoustic treatment you have in your room, you will need DSP if you want a clean response down to 20Hz (unless if you're in a multi-million dollar anechoic room, if the room is the size of Walmart, or if you're not in a room at all). And with the power of DSP, you can also put your speakers right against a wall, or in the corners, giving you a huge SPL boost without distortion, and with a tighter sound/less decay. But you need DSP to tame that boost to the right levels.

So with that in mind, here are my recommendations for the most ideal speaker setup for bass reproduction :

1. Good room correction/DSP. When using stereo speakers, the correction has to be based on the two channels summed in the low frequencies, meaning that the same filters need to be used on both speakers for the low-end. This is a common flaw in software like Sonarworks, as they create a correction that is based on an individual channel, independent of the other. This assumes that both speakers, if they are flat, will add up to a flat response. This is almost never the case, and that's a problem because bass is mostly mono. The best room correction is always manual, check how to do it properly with REW.
2. With a stereo system, speakers with enough range and headroom to go down to 20Hz cleanly. We don't care about flatness as we use room correction. Generally speaking, if you can find speakers with less than 1% of THD, it will sound completely clean. It's quite difficult to achieve, so most people will aim at 3% in the low-end. Ideally, they should be sealed, as this gives the best time response. Placing them in corners is best.
3. If you can do it, subwoofers are ideal. The ideal setup is a horizontal line facing you, ideally right against the front wall. Usually, the more subs the better. This isn't about giving you stupid amount of bass levels, it's about giving you the cleanest bass possible. Creating a full line of them will greatly reduce room modes, meaning a tighter sound. 3 of them, one below each speaker, and one in the middle, already yields excellent results that 2.0 systems can pretty much never achieve.
4. If you achieved all of that, you can think about acoustic treatment. For bass, nothing beats active treatment. You can buy plug and play solutions (PSI AVAA for example) or do it yourself with secondary subwoofers and the appropriate convolution filter. It's quite challenging to do however. For passive treatment, look for VPR bass traps, these are the best.

But with all of that said, I really like my sort-of-affordable APS pair. By placing them in the corners, I achieved an F3 of 20Hz following the Harman Target, which has a bass boost (so basically I can achieve F0=20Hz in a flat target). There is a bit of delay and distortion in the low-end, but to me, it's part of a good real-world translation. Even IMAX sound systems have this. In the real world, it's only in outdoor concerts and festivals that you could experience a true, clean and accurate bass reproduction. This, and headphones/IEMs, but it's a different feeling kind of bass.

 

Last edited: Jul 22, 2025 at 10:51 PM

look into a subpac or similar type thing. They make these things you can mount to your chair that shake it.

The cool thing about that is you actually feel the bass outside of hearing it. its awesome for production! Mixing might be a little different

 

I have never had problems with my JBL 4411's. have had em for going on 30+ years. every room they have been placed in they have been checked for room/speaker interface issues and any anomalous behaviors were dealt with easily. there isn't a loud speaker made that will not have issues with the room they are placed in. this is why we have spectrum analyzers.

 

Last edited: Jul 23, 2025 at 3:26 AM

ADAM Audio A7V - 2x 599 € ----> www.adam-audio.com/de/a-serie/a7v

Adding the matching Yamaha HS8S subwoofer precisely calibrated can help for genres that
need sub-bass, but only if your room and placement are treated and measured. 525 €

 

In a crappy room i had, there was a massive -18dB hole around 60 Hz ... so NO, changing speakers or adding subwoofer will NEVER fix this kind of things

 

I had a room like that about 20 years ago, - 18dB like yourself, only my null was at 100 Hz. Even though I had compensatory equalisation it was absolutely terrible, nothing could be trusted. I had to constantly check mixes via headphones and in outside locations. Unbelievably, there was multiple commercial releases mixed and mastered in that room. Despite satisfied clients, I couldn't listen to any of those recordings now as I can hear the rooms influence in them.

 

Square rooms are actually the *worst* - ideally you want different dimensions along each wall, and this is why you'll see many control rooms have angles all over the place - to break up the standing waves. But most of us are stuck with the room dimensions we have, so have to work with what we have accordingly.

Any respectable monitors will be plenty accurate enough - but that's meaningless if you're in a bad, untreated room with significant problems. Tl;DR; It's almost certainly a room problem, not a speaker problem, unless your room has been properly treated.

 

Square rooms are actually THE worst shape, unless they're so large that they exceed the propagation wavelengths that result in problematic standing waves. The main problem with square spaces is the even build up of particular frequencies due to the reflections being multiples of one another.

Eg. if a room had parallel walls that were 5 metres apart, that would create a standing wave at 68.6 Hz, which would be multiplied by each additional reflection. The more surfaces that correspond to that measurement, the bigger the increase in the standing wave. The very worst scenario being a 5 metre cube. Not only would there be a problem at 68.6 Hz but also at every harmonic interval (including half wavelengths), so 34.3 Hz, 173.20 Hz, 259.8 Hz, 346.40 Hz, etc.

Of course it's actually much, much more complex than that example, as reflections don't behave themselves in a simple two-dimensional manner. Every possible distance between two surfaces is another reflection angle which compounds the result. As those various angles also repeat throughout due to symmetry, all those frequencies, plus their harmonics, result in many more problematic standing waves, that then all interact with one another to produce an uncontrollable mess.

In theory, the ultimate dimensions for a room is based on the golden ratio, or phi, which is: 1(H) x 1.6(W) x 2.56(L). This creates an even response throughout the frequency range with no discernible standing waves.

 

Last edited: Jul 23, 2025 at 4:52 PM

Lol, that's some synchronicity going on right there. We should jam.

 

Kinda, it's best to keep the room rectangular, at least initially, because it's easier to know what you're dealing with and how to solve whatever problem that might arise, which may include changing the geometry of the room in a controlled manner. Rectangular rooms are not the best in theory, but they are better understood than anything else which is way better for planning and problem solving.