Not long ago I posted a fairly detailed breakdown of my current system, including the recent addition of a pair of Legacy Focus speakers. Before the Focus, I spent several months with Legacy Signature III’s from the same era, around 2000. The Sig 3’s have three 10 inch woofers, arguably enough for any reasonable audiophile to live with. But being that as it may . . .  I still wanted MORE!

Now that I’m sporting a total of six, 12 inch woofers in my listening room, you might argue that, as far as bass goes, I’ve got more than my fair share of it. But as it turns out, having a speaker and a system that can produce a lot of bass does not necessarily equal hearing bass reproduced well. It is but a necessary first stop on the way to having bass the way you want it – tight, tonally right and adding just the right amount of weight and size to the instruments and vocals.

Before I had the Signature III’s, I was using an older pair of Verity Audio Parsifal speakers. Those speakers produced a surprising amount of bass for a speaker with only one 8 inch woofer apiece (I think it was 8, it might have been smaller?). And with the addition of an Anthony Gallo TR-1 10 inch subwoofer, the size and space the Parsifal could convey was remarkable.

But I’ve learned since that, for all their strengths, the Parsifal had at least one fatal flaw – they made just about every record sound good.

Now you might be saying to yourself, “Hey, wait a minute! Every record sounding good, isn’t that a good thing?”

Let me explain. . .

Making every record sound good is, it turns out, not a good quality to have in a speaker, nor in any other piece of equipment you use. At least it’s not if you want the best possible sound from your analog system.

The short explanation for why this is, is that if your speakers make nearly every record sound good, then they’ll likely make very few of them sound great and almost none of them sound incredible. The Parsifal were always a pleasure to listen to, but, as I was to discover, they sometimes relied too heavily on not showing me what I was missing. That is, they were rather a good pair of  speakers that were also rather good at hiding the flaws of the records they played.

Sometimes with the Parsifal, great sounding records did sound quite wonderful. Sometimes, it was a bit hard to tell. In fact, sometimes they made records that were not all that great, or even as I would later discover, clearly subpar, sound rather good. Interestingly, with the Parsifal, it was often the records that did not have enough bass that sounded right, and the ones that did that sounded wrong.

One of the very first records I ever bought from Better Records was a Super Hot Stamper of my single favorite Pink Floyd record, Meddle. That copy has a merely great A+ – A++ side 2 (which suits me just fine as I rarely find myself willing to sit through “Echos” anyway), paired with an absolutely fabulous Nearly White Hot A++ – A+++ side 1. It is a solid if not stunning example of how wonderful this recording can sound.

The Parsifal could mostly deliver the goods on this copy. They could handle a big rock number quite respectably, and they had very little trouble with the first track, “One of These Days,” as well as most of the other tracks on Meddle.

But on the second track, “Pillow of Winds,” the bass would distort so badly that my listening room would vibrate into a drone. And this fundamental failure to reproduce that particular part of the record made it very hard for me to enjoy this special copy of the record as a whole. With the Verity Parsifal, my system literally could not play that song, and the fact that it was being made all the more obvious to me made me wonder what the hell else the Parsifal were getting wrong that wasn’t so obvious.

Records can be a tricky business. Some records that sound great to me on first listen will, with what seems only a benign change to my system, sound not very good at all later. Other records might sound terrible at first and then, with the right system changes, come to life in completely unexpected ways. I’ve now been fooled by records more times than I care to think about, and in the majority of those cases, it was the bass, or often the lack of it, that fooled me.

How did the bass fool me? More often than not by simply being absent. Unless you have a system that can not only deliver a lot of bass, but also reproduce it well, it often gets in the way of what might otherwise be a wonderfully spacious and transparent record.

Bass, it’s important to understand, is not just bass notes. It gives nearly all of the other instruments and the vocals their size and their weight. It gives the elements of a performance a sense of presence, and the performance as a whole the space in which to live and breathe. Very few audio systems have enough bass to begin with, and therefore very few audiophiles need worry much about reproducing it, let alone reproducing it well.

Which, you could argue, is somewhat fortuitous. Bass not reproduced well causes congestion, murkiness, opacity and bloat, and these unpleasant qualities bleed into the midrange and the higher frequencies and rob the music of clarity, transparency and top end resolution. When the bass isn’t right you might very well have a hot copy of your favorite record playing and you’d never even know it.

Bad bass has the potential to ruin your playback, or at least degrade it to the point that, even on a good system, perhaps a system with a lot of good equipment but the wrong set of speakers, every record will sound good and no record will sound amazing. In these cases, you might be a whole lot happier listening to a record that doesn’t have a lot of bass to begin with. That way you don’t have to worry about bad bass ruining what would otherwise be a great listen.

But when you hear that same record with more bass, or rather, the right amount of bass, then you’ll have a hard time going back from that sound, very arguably the right sound, to the thin sounding bass shy record that may have been wonderfully transparent, but did not have the weight needed to anchor the top end and upper midrange.

Recently I took a deepish dive into Charles Mingus’s 1959 release on Atlantic, Blues & Roots. A friend of mine originally put me onto his title, and we agreed to each buy one of several available red and green label 70s reissues, each of which was mastered by a different mastering engineer. My friend bought the version mastered by the great George Piros, while I opted for a version with one side mastered by Chris Bellman and the other side mastered by Lee Hulko. The plan was to later send each other the copy we’d gotten so that we could each do a comparison.

When my CB/LH version arrived, I was initially pretty impressed with it. It was showing me a good deal of the “live in studio” sound that I value so highly in a jazz record. And that’s not to mention that the songs, a terrific collection of raunchy, bluesy, bowl you over tracks performed with a take no prisoners intensity that always seems one false note away from steering wildly out of control.

I went out and bought 2 more copies of the same pressing before it occurred to me I ought to hear an earlier blue and green label version. When I finally got hold of one of those, I realized I hadn’t been hearing the album quite right before then. The 70s remasterings, or at least most of them, didn’t have nearly as much bass as this earlier pressing.

With that bass came a level of size and weight I had not expected to hear on this recording. And where I noticed it first was not so much on the bass itself, although it was clearly audible there, but on the trombone. Most of the later remasters did not give the trombone its full bodied, deep, “throaty” sound the way this early pressing did.

On the track “My Jelly Roll Soul,” the trombone bellows along with Mingus’s bass on the left side of the soundstage. There’s just a ridiculous amount of bass here on this early pressing, so much in fact that if you’d never heard this version, you could easily mistake the better later pressings for having plenty of it. From the rear right, the drum kit was playing with a hefty presence. Considering the combined force of these instruments, I wondered if the horns might fail to emerge and free themselves from the weight of it all.

And, in fact, this is where the early pressing I was playing failed to deliver the goods. There just wasn’t enough transparency to “see” that drumkit at the back of the recording studio. And man, did I ever want to to see it! I’ve heard plenty of jazz records where I could see it, and on this copy, the pressing just wasn’t good enough to allow me to do that.

The surface noise throughout this copy also did not help. Some records are pressed well enough to overcome this type of flaw. I once heard an early pressing of Mingus’s Oh Yeah on which the quality of the pressing made it so transparent and open that the surface noise, rather than being a hinderance, seemed almost to add a kind of atmosphere to the recording, like a haze of cigarette smoke wafting through the studio.

Not so on this early copy of Blues & Roots. The size, space and weight was there, in spades, but it just wasn’t transparent enough to overcome the noise. Meanwhile, the better 70s reissues fared much better in this regard. They tended to play quieter, and were more transparent and revealing.

So what’s an analog audiophile jazz lover who loves Charles Mingus as much as I do to do? I suppose the answer to that question depends on how much time, energy and money you want to put into this hobby, and into this record.

Personally, now that I’ve heard how much having more, well produced bass does for the sound of a great sounding jazz record, I don’t see myself settling for some of the records I would have been perfectly happy to settle for in the past. In the case of Mingus’ Blues & Roots, for now I’ll take the size, weight and commanding  presence my early pressing delivers, even if it fails in other important areas.

I’ve already invested heavily on this title, but it would seem I’ll need to keep pressing on (no pun intended!). The uncompromising nature of this music deserves an uncompromising approach to its playback. So far I’ve only heard enough to know how good this record can sound, and now I want to experience just how good it does sound.

In the meantime, Blues & Roots has provided yet another lesson in how records can fool us, and how the essential role of bass in the sound of a record can sometimes be elusive. It’s also been a lesson in the trade offs we’re often forced to make in this hobby. No record is perfect, but there is much we can do in analog audio to reveal a heck of a lot more of a recording that we imagined.

Remember, just because we’ve yet to hear what’s on our records, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. In my experience, we’re missing a lot more than we even realize, and this is exactly what makes analog audio so much fun.

There’s a ton we can do to reveal more of what’s on our records. From turntable setup to isolation methods to improving our electricity to better cabling and more, we can make our system increasingly more revealing. And the more revealing our system, the more thrilling it becomes to discover wonderful “new” records, like Blues & Roots, that have eluded our radar in the past, and rediscover the “familiar” records already in our collection.