Why do drum sets have descending toms?
>  Just as guitarists have cut back on amp power and now focus on tone<p>As much as I would like to think that this is true, all the concerts I went to prior to Covid had <i>WAAAAAY</i> too much freakin' bass.  These were bands with vocal and guitar gods and the bass was cranked up to like 9000 such that you could barely make out the vocals and guitars if the bass was playing.<p>The best audio at a concert I had was the one where the house amplification system died, and band had to play with their on-stage amplification and nothing else.  The sound from the band was <i>amazing</i>--the vocals were clear, the guitar parts were articulated, and the bass and drums were reasonable.<p>Funny how the bass levels are something reasonable when the bass player has to stand in front of the bass amplifier.<p>To be fair, I'm being a touch uncharitable.  Most of the fault lies with the person running the sound mixing board.  It seems most sound mixers are so used to dance, pop and rap that they can't conceive of the idea that something other than bass and drums exists in music.  It also doesn't help that modern solid-state amplifiers can drive amazingly low frequencies and really high amplitudes that the old tube amplifiers with transformers simply couldn't deal with.