Phil Starr

Because most of my cabs never get truly finished I've a lot of loose wires in many cabs, and vibrating wires do happen but not often. I usually fix one end to the speaker itself with cable ties leaving enough slack to avoid stressing the connections but tight enough not to flap around. I bury the other end under any wadding and that stops that moving. I don't leave a lot of slack though, just enough to be able to remove the drive unit easily

I want to bring the string height down a little on some of my basses. I'm looking at nut files and they seem to be either less than £10 or over £200 with little in between. There are also some sets of two or three with plastic handles labelled sizes 3-5 without saying what 3-5 actually means in mm or inches. There are also setsof needle files for general purpose use but I already have sets of these, and I've seen people wrapping old strings in sandpaper and using that as a tool. It's Christmas and peopleare asking what to buy me. There's nething I really want but if I could find something that would make the job easier then files in the £20-30 range would be a great present I'd actually use. I hate the idea of people wasting money on something I wouldn't use. Any suggstions?

all the answers are good. The thing is that you really don't need to oversize. The resistance of the cable is going to be close to zero because you are dealing with a really short length. As to power handling you hve to remember the speaker is playing music not continuous current. Most of the time there is little or no signal and any note you play decays quite quickly. It's normal to think in terms of a duty cycle of 15-20% but that is allowing for a considerable safety margin, under 10% might be more 'real world' use so 20W for your 225W speaker would be a more reasonable rating. The voice coil of your speaker is wound with hair thin copper wire only slightly thicker than the strands in your cables and that doesn't burn out in normal use. Like @Stub Mandrel I use a couple of cores from any mains cable laying around most of the time, even 1mm lighting cable is plenty big enough. The reason speaker cables use thicker wire is to keep resistance to a minimum on longer cable runs. That's not relevant for the 40cm wire inside the cab.

CPC Farnell? V https://cpc.farnell.com/c/splitters/iec-splitters Studiospares used to be good for this sort of stuff before the takeover, they used to do a sort of IEC daisy chain thing. Terralec are good for leads but nothing very useful listed there as far as I could see at the moment.

I love that John, I find myself doing the same thing sometimes. We haven't mentioned the Sontronics much. I've got an older Sontronics I actually won at a raffle at the South West Bass Bash a few years back. It's the same body as the Solo but a cardioid and I think it might have beenthe predecessor of the Solo. It's a nice mic up with the quality of my Senny E935 but the Solo is cheaper. You need to warn people about the build quality of the Sontronics they make all other mics look flimsy, real heft. Made in the UK too.

I've just checked and cab sized pieces are still available. They also sell wholesale so you may need to re navigate their site.

I'm not sure you need to worry abnout sacrificing the bolts. the T-nuts will be well below the surface you are painting and you could always use blu-tac/chewing gum/plasticine to cover the nut, it's all going to be invisible once the speaker is fitted. I don't really like t-nuts much so I'm shifting to furniture nuts in future the t-nuts sometimes overhang the narrow strip of baffle left once you've cut the speaker hole so I'm hoping these will be neater

I was in Carlisle last week

I've fitted a few cabs now with 'Fender' cloth sourced from China, which appears to be identical with the cloth sold by the specialist dealers in the UK. What i didn't realise was that many of the 'Fender' cloths are shrink to fit. A bit of a shame as I warmed mine up to make it more flexible and it didn't fit after that. Fortunately I did buy enough for a spare. It's a joy to fit as you don't have to tension it as you staple. Just fit it nice and straight and let the hair dryer pull it into shape. Oddly they don't tell you the cloth is shrink fit so you'd have to test a small piece before fitting it. The 'Marshall' cloth is the old fashioned stiff stuff and much harder to work with http://www.kldguitar.com/Home/cph is where I ordered my cloth

I think that is right, the test was through Yamaha Club series speakers S112IV if my memory serves, and these had a real midrange peak due to the Eminence Delta's they used. At the time they were so much better than the Peveys everyone else used I quite liked them but they had to have affected what we were doing so hardly a fair test. My own anecdotal experience

Interestingly (to me anyway) I tried a mic shoot out with one of my bands who were using some ..... less than good mics. They included an SM58 and a XM8500 as well as a Samson of some sort. generally the band preferred the 8500 to the SM58 though I did have to resolder the Behringer to make it work! The Behringer does have a brighter sound and the resonance peaks are in a different place which could sound tinny if untamed. The shure had a lot less handling noise but the Behringer rejected feedback slightly better. Shockingly there are Three Behringer mics below the XM8500 as well as the XM1800 which is sold in packs of three. The singers husband went out and bought a Shure KSM9 sadly he didn't ask me and I didn't have phantom power at the time so it was never used in anger.

2 minutes from me, you'll have to call in for a cup of something some time Actually if you want to drop in I could lend you a Micromon I don't use it very oten, just to tempt reluctant singers to try in-ears

The Behringer Micromon MA400 is what you want. You can also feed in a monitor input so she can hear everything else and/or practice to backing tracks at home. Merry Christmas

I'm going to put this out there just once, in case Rob gets swamped. This is a really generous and genuine offer. Rob very kindly printed me a new grip for an ancient but expensive microphone, where the plastic had crumbled with age. He really represents the best of the BassChat community.

Depends upon what you mean by flat, it's pretty high build and you won't get rid of all the brush marks but you can get quite a nice 'linen' texture with a short pile roller. I have tried sanding TuffCab and i have multiple types of sander. It's well named and I gave up on that one