True Bass or Fake Bass?

The so-called sub-woofers commonly used in home cinema or in-car entertainment systems are likely to be useless for organ or serious hi-fi work. Most of the time they are only called upon to radiate transients such as drum notes or the bangs and crashes inseparable from movies such as Jurassic Park. Such programme material is different in kind to that from an organ. In fact many sub-woofers are highly resonant at frequencies above our 30 Hz figure, and these resonances are merely excited whenever signals arrive of the sort mentioned above. When a dinosaur is rampaging through a primeval forest on the screen, it does not really matter whether the associated sounds are radiated with high fidelity or not. Similarly, when youngsters cruising around in cars advertise their presence with the high intensity drum beats which they seem to enjoy, it does not matter whether the spectral character of the original material is modified by extreme loudspeaker resonances. Who would know or care? Yet playing an electronic organ or an organ CD through such a loudspeaker system can be disappointing – the fundamental frequencies of the lowest notes are simply not there, and there may be some ridiculous emphases of other frequencies. The term "one note bass" is sometimes used to describe loudspeakers such as these, because they really only give an illusion of powerful bass by radiating at the resonant frequencies of the system. Such loudspeakers are entirely inappropriate for serious musical use.

Quoted from The Electronic Reproduction of Very Low Frequencies by Colin Pykett