Yeah… Let’s back up a bit… What’s the real issue? To you have few songs with weak bass or do you just like a lot of bass?
If you listen to live music you can usually feel the bass in your chest. If you have a good stereo (including big woofers/subwoofers) and you crank it up to “live levels” you should also be able to feel the bass in your chest. …So with most music you shouldn’t have to boost the bass.
But, the average home stereo can’t put-out that kind of deep-powerful bass.
With headphones you don’t experience bass the same way, although you might feel the headphones vibrating. And of course, some headphones will have more bass than others.
At more “reasonable” levels you won’t feel the bass, and the bass will seem to be reduced even more. There’s a characteristic of human hearing that when you turn-down the volume it seems like the bass was turned-down ([u]Equal Loudness Curves[/u]). I the “old days” most stereo receivers had a loudness compensation switch (usually labeled “Loudness”) that would boost the bass as the volume was turned-down. But, that’s gone out of style.
And there are a couple of other things going against you… Not you personally… Anybody that wants good bass…
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The equal-loudness curves also show that the ear is most-sensitive a mid frequencies (around 2kHz which are perceived as rather "high pitched) so it takes more energy for low frequencies to sound equally loud. 1 Watt at 1kHz sounds louder than 1W at 100Hz.
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Also, it’s “harder” to reproduce bass. It takes a big woofer to make strong-deep bass.
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Does “reducing the volume of everything” refer to using normalize?
Yes, it’s related…
I believe the default is for Audacity to [u]Show Clipping[/u]. If you go over 0dB Audacity will “show red” for potential [u]clipping[/u] (distortion).
Audacity uses floating-point internally so there is virtually no upper (or lower) limit and Audacity itself won’t clip. However, if you play the file at full-digital volume you’ll clip your digital-to-analog converter or if you export to (regular) WAV or make an audio CD, it will be clipped.
Most commercial music is normalized/maximized to 0dB (or near 0dB). If you boost the bass (or if you boost anything) you’ll usually “see red”. At this point,you’ve actually made it louder, but at the cost of distortion. But, at this point it’s only potential clipping and you can Normalize (or Amplify with a negative dB value) to bring the volume down to a “safe” level. (Normalize and Amplify can both bring the volume up OR down.)
MP3s can also go over 0 dB without clipping, and many do go slightly-over and they will “show red” when opened in Audacity. In fact, MP3 compression will boost some peaks and reduce other peaks so it’s not unusual to get potential clipping when the original (uncompressed) file was normalized to 0dB. (And, some commercial MP3s & CDs are actually clipped.)
Of course, it’s also possible to clip your amplifier (or headphone amplifier) if you boost the volume and/or bass too much… For example if you have a 100W amp and you try to get 110W out of it, you’ll get distortion.