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Whatever sounds the most convincing (life like). I'm guessing that would be flat.
Reader T. Bloom asks: "Do you tend towards bass frequency-response accuracy, or would you prefer either a little more or a little less bass than measures flat in your listening room?" In other words, how much bass is enough?
It all depends on what type of music I'm listening to. For rock, I want the walls to fall and the foundation to rumble; for chamber music, I want to hear the rosin on the bow. For jazz, I want to hear a realistic rhythm system. Bottom line: You need a system that can do it all.
It's all relative and relates to the task at hand. I want to feel deep, deep bass while at a party or being a DJ, but I belive in that the products I'm involved in at work should if I had the final say be so that I as the listner in a practical test get very close to flat. Now I don't get the final say but most people I work with that have an interest in the audio qualities (and most do - oddly ;) have a tradition of makeing sure that the person with the final say gets all sides of the case. Much to their headache.
I'm a bass freak when listening casually, but for critical listening, it needs to be as flat as my room and gear will allow. To wit, I have an inexpensive Infinity powered sub that I fire up when rocking with my Vandy 2Ce sigs, but it gets turned off when the critical listening starts (at least until I can replace it with a 2Wq).
It's more important that the bass be "tight" than just loud. A good example being the subs that go into cars that are generally parked in High School parking lots: They're just loud and boomy, accurate reproduction be damned. That said, I like to feel it in my gut a little bit.
I like it a little more than flat. Fortunately, I have a subwoofer in my system, so I can control the bass output. I find that many older CDs are very weak in the lower frequencies and I can increase the output so that it sounds full and well balanced. In instances when I have increased the bass too much, it appears to veil the clarity of the midrange and treble and is especially noticeable when listening to vocals.
One of my favourite reactions to a system I owned: A bunch of guys from Barbados, working on the farms up here in Canada, came in to my house and I had a small system with little acoustic suspension speakers. After searching through my LPs and put on some reggae music and promptly asked ,"How you supposed to move to these?" That about somes it up: If you want bass, you want it. I now have floorstanding speakers and it would be hard to go back.