I remember being around four years old and all the adults in the house made the mistake of leaving me alone with the family hi-fi. The unit was a cassette receiver from a brand called Elizabethan, and I recall very little about it now apart from the stack of dials on the front and its rather fetching fake wood finish.
It was playing some classic Bollywood song from the 60s, and for the first time ever, I noticed the tone controls on the amplifier. Being so young, I had no idea what the words ‘treble’ and ‘bass’ meant at the time, of course. But once the dials were twiddled in a random fashion, I knew the one marked ‘bass’ did good things and should always be turned up to the max. The treble control, on the other hand, didn’t have any significant impact on the drums that the child-me was focussing so hard on and was quickly ignored.
My love of bass sounds started there and has continued ever since, though I would like to think my tastes are more sophisticated than just turning everything up to full as I did for most of my teenage years. Now, not only do I crave low-frequency power but I want grip, articulation and texture too. The harmonic richness of a double bass matters as does the agility and finer details of a typical Massive Attack bassline. To sum it up, I’m a bass addict and proud of it, but nowadays quality and balance matter more than outright quantity.
A recent listen to the Dali IO-8 wireless headphones annoyed me. These are excellent wireless over-ears (in most respects) and have the sonic talent to worry any alternatives vaguely near their £499 selling price, hence why they sit loud and proud in our best wireless headphones buying guide. Like just about every rival, these headphones give the user a way of boosting bass output. In this case, it’s not done through an EQ setting in an app, but a mode button on the headphones that switches between ‘Hi-fi’ and ‘Bass’ settings.
Given my tastes, the 'Bass' option should be right up my street, particularly as these headphones were designed by the very same people who engineered Dali’s new high-end Epikore speaker range (starting price of ten grand) and many other talented speakers besides. Surely, any engineer who has the well-honed sensibility to design what are undoubtedly fantastic speakers would be able to tune the bass setting just so? It turns out they don’t. The nicest thing I can say is that whoever fixed the final bass EQ curve had very similar priorities to the four-year-old me.
The lows swamp everything, leaving these otherwise excellent headphones sounding thick and sludgy. It spoils their articulate nature, unsettling their otherwise nicely judged tonal balance to a degree that I find unlistenable after a while. The standard ‘Hi-fi’ setting, on the other hand, is spot on.
Dali is not alone. Much of the industry seems to think that bass quantity trumps quality and I can understand why. It impresses on a brief listen, and that usually leads to more sales. I get it. The success of the Beats brand was built on a foundation of excessive bass, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony’s recently introduced ULT Series of headphones and wireless speakers, aimed at the youth market, are going great guns for the same reason. Yet, whenever I listen to such products, I can’t help but wish the manufacturers had intentionally boosted the lows with a lot more finesse to ensure satisfaction over the long term.
I know it is possible to do this. Mark Levinson gets it right on the No. 5909 headphones, as does Chord with its Mojo 2 portable DAC's clever DSP tone controls. On the more traditional hi-fi side, the Rotel A8 budget integrated amplifier still sounds articulate with the bass control turned up, and at the other end of the price scale, the PMC Cor does a fine job of it too. There are other examples, but you get the point.
While lots of bass can be fun on the right kind of music, that on its own isn't enough. Manufacturers need to realise that balance, articulation and definition matter even more over the long term. Even a certified bass-head like me recognises that.
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