Yet, the bass doesn't seem "right" - the only word I can use is "dry".

On real music (say piano trio) everything seems perfectly musical. Kick drum, the left hand of the keyboard seem just fine, realistic.

But on "fake" music the bass response just isn't there. Bob carver recommendeds Janet Jackson's Go Deep from "Velvet Rope" as a good bass response demo track - well, it's just not impressive, as in 1812-overture impressive.

There are some things that I know are not an issue: there's plenty of Xmax and plenty of power (500 wpc on each bass driver). Stroke and horsepower aren't the problem (if indeed there is a problem).

The driver Qts is 0.36 - I'm running them on 48" X 36" open baffles. As I indicated above the EQ is sufficient to support a pretty flat measured response to 25Hz.

So the bottom line is - Am I not hearing what I should? Or, is it that I expect to hear the bass response of systems that are bass-heavy?