If you really like a song you probably like listening to it loud—but the mid and upper frequency sounds of the track have an upper limit; if you just crank your volume up to 9000, its going to hurt and your ears are going to bleed because high freq sound at high db level is painful (not to mention causes hearing damage).
But because of the lower frequency sounds in the bass section of a track, you can blast the bass on your subwoofer well above 9000 without making your ears hurt and without causing damage to your eardrum. Because the frequency of bass is low, the pressure waves are sort of pushing your eardrums slowly back and forth. It is moving them alot, to be sure, but the pressure waves arent really “crashing” into your eardrums like high frequency sound at high db level is.
Apparently the durability of a material depends on the kinetic energy of whatever is colliding with it. For example, if a pitcher throws a baseball to home plate at 400 mph, the ball will tear right through the catchers mitt, rather than being stopped by it, because the baseballs high speed makes the glove behave as if it was made of a much weaker material. This idea is what i have gathered from reading alot about firearm ballistics.
i assume this idea is why high frequency sound can much more easily damage your eardrum than low frequency sound can.
—now that all that is out of the way—
i think certain songs are set up in a way that you can take the bassline and turn the subwoofer volume up to insanely high levels and it will still make the song sound balanced and pleasing to the ear.
Turning the mid and upper frequencies up very high is not pleasurable bc it hurts your ears.
but certain songs are like a bottomless pit of bass potential. Certain songs have such a perfect and robust beat that when you crank the shit out of the subs the compendious whole is simply taken to another level.
the visceral physicality of a song like this that is sent to transcendence via huge bass can be incredible. If you have never sat in a car with a bunch of subs in the back and felt the music pounding on your chest and making you feel like you couldnt breathe, you should try it.
Generic bass songs are usually terrible tho, and i would avoid them. The practice of just listening to a stereo for the bass and not for the melody of the song is a completely stupid thing to do more than once to deflower the novelty of it.
the point is to find a great song that has a brilliant bass line that cranked to 9000 takes the song to a transcendent level of psychological amplification.