Bass Station

Loud music can be annoying, especially in public places like bars. Certainly, music does serve to fill out the ambiance of a room and it would probably be noticed if your local watering hole was lacking in some tunes. But people crank music in order to carry the vocals over ambient crowd noise. Unless you're there specifically to hear music or dance, this is foolish. I avoid many otherwise wonderful bars because of the loud music. When I hunker down to share a pint with friends, I don't mind loud, but I also don't want to yell over both people and (possibly awful) music to have a decent conversation.

Enter the bass.

The Bass Station would provide all your favorite pop hits, sans everything but the bass. You get the backbone of the song, without the vocals, fills, solos, etc. so you don't have to compete with the jukebox. Bass is omnidirectional, and you can play it moderately loud without interfering with the frequency of a conversation. Also, it is arguable that some of the worst songs have some of the best bass lines. I would enjoy listening to a majority of the crap out there if the unfortunate vocals were usurped.

Simply equalizing down the mix won't do. I don't' want anything mid-range to come through. I don't want the music to sound like some consumer level karaoke boom box that just uses a bandpass filter to eliminate the vocals. I want it to sound good, simple bass lines and maybe a kick drum. This would require going back to the masters and pulling out the bass track, or in cases where the studio cuts were done as a live ensemble, actually re-recording the bass lines in an isolated fashion.

Most people can recognize a song by the bass line, so you'd still have the familiarity of the music. Hell, you could sing along if you wanted to, or make it a contest to see who could identify the bas line. More importantly, you might actually leave a bar with both your hearing and voice intact.