May The Force Be With You!
Infrasonic Bass is a vital part of any truly high-performance home cinema. Operating below the range of the human ear, this type of bass ‘pressurises’ the room and adds a vital layer of immersion that the audience ‘feels’. But what exactly is it? and how is it achieved?
Humans can detect sounds in a frequency range from about 20Hz up to 20kHz, but we can ‘feel’ sound waves at lower frequencies. If you have ever been to a loud rock concert, heard a Formula One car scream past or a jet taking off, you will have experienced Infrasonic Bass.
Image Credit – Keith Yates Design
The very best commercial cinemas have systems that include Subsonic Bass, as they know that it is a hugely important part of many film’s audio tracks and adds extra drama, impact and immersion to many titles.
The effect is not always easy to quantify. It can be subtle and be present during quieter sequences where the director is trying to build suspense, thrillers and horror films use this technique often, or at other times it can be more noticeable such as during percussive sequencies like explosions in action movies; you ‘feel’ the sound in the stomach and the chest rather than hearing it with the ears. We all know this feeling from our lives and that it generates an emotional response, so to have it in a true high-performance home cinema is necessary, but not easy.
How do I achieve Infrasonic Bass?
The correct bass response within a home cinema is one of the most difficult things to get right, infrasonic bass you can’t hear but can only feel is even harder. It takes specialist equipment and specialist knowledge to install, calibrate and tune to the taste of the customer. Creating bass that delivers performance in single Hz digits is a highly specialised process. Many factors like the amount of amplification needed to drive speakers, size and character of the room, and the personal preferences of the customer, all have to be taken into account to create the correct performance curves.
However, that is why companies like Prestige Audio exist, to use our skills, experience and provide for our customers the very best performance available. Infrasonic Bass is something we always discuss with customers, particularly new ones as we want to ensure they fully understand how we create a genuinely immersive experience.
World-class home cinemas generate many layers that when experienced altogether create a legitimately immersive space. The visuals, the audio, the construction of the room, and for the purposes of what we are talking about here, audio that you feel, all come together to deliver an unforgettable experience customers will want again and again.
Installing some high-performance equipment and hoping that the engineering present will deliver a world-class result, is simply never going to work. World-class engineering needs world class engineers to make it sing the way it should and creating Infrasonic Bass is yet another way that Prestige Audio ensures the force is always with you and customers get performance you can feel.