I guess I misspoke somehow.
The question was is can you have both, clean tight fast LF and still have
the authoritative bass. Wouldn't it have to linger in the room and thus be slow(er)
and not as clean?
Thanks
Don
To get what you are calling authoritative bass you need to move a lot of air. The most common way to do this is to use a big driver with a long throw. But this comes with its own set of problems. A big driver adds comes with a lot of moving mass. When you apply a + signal to that drive it will move forward gaining inertia as it travel. When the signal switches polarity to _ the driver should immediately reverse direction and start traveling backwards. But because of the inertia gained by the cone the first few milliseconds of negative signal ends up acting as a brake and slowing the driver to a stop before it can begin traveling in the opposite directions. What you are sensing as the bass lingering in the room is actually the sound of the cones inertia. causing it to overshoot the point where it is supposed to change direction. This can be address in several ways, unfortunately all of which involve added costs.
You can make the cones out of some exotic (i.ie. expensive) lightweight material to lower the moving mass. This will help, but only get you so far.
You can employ some kind of feedback system that measures the speed and direction of the cone, compares it to the signal driving it and modifies that signal to add some extra "braking voltage" to counteract the inertia. This is commonly referred to as a servo system and while it can be effective it also adds extra circuitry to the system hat increases the cost.
And you can also lower the inertia by employing multiple driver. With multiple drivers the cones do not need to travel as far because each driver needs to move less air. The shorter throw means the cone builds up less speed and is easier to "turn around". The easier turnaround leads to less overshoot and therefore a tighter sounding bass. Taking this one step further, using multiple driver also gives you the opportunity to use smaller driver which have less mass and therefore less inertia and less overshoot. But more driver means not only more parts, but bigger cabinets and once again more cost. The best subs I ever heard were a pair of towers that each had if I remember correctly 6 five in drivers. Bass that kicked you right in the chest and as tight as I have ever heard. The dealer told me that the six drivers working together has the same air moving capacity as a 15 inch woofer but they only moved back and forth about 1/2 inch in either direction. But of course the price tag on then was $4500 in 1988.
So Don you were correct in that good bass is not cheap, but at least I hope you have a little better understanding of the hows and whys.
And I know there are others in our little circle that have more speaker design experience that me, so if anyone wants to jump in and add more detail or even correct something that I may have misspoken about, feel free, no offense take, I'm here to learn too.