51m0n

The test demonstrates that the any preconception of a specific diameter cone's tonal emphasis is generally overshadowed by the design of the cab it resides in, so don't bother use your ears on the cab instead. If it does what you want/need its great, if it doesn't, move along....

Well then the owner/manager needs to get off their arse and put the posters up themselves, it takes 20 minutes and can make all the difference in the world to the venue's takings fo rthe night. Not doing so is askeing to have a crap evening. We recently played a gig in London (where we rarely play) and the manager had ensured there were huge posters up everywhere, the fb page had us on the bill alongside sone funk DJs. The place was rammed, people had a cracking time, so did we, everyone was happy. We'd never played there before... If he hadn't bothered though, there was no way we'd have pulled in a single punter off our web presence because we dont have much if any reach in Londin at the moment.

If you're running with 10ms of latency you are really going to notice it IME!

Of course if you had an anechoic chamber and a superb control room with flat (or at least very very good) monitoring you could blind test this thinking about it. You can set each driver on an infinite baffle up in the chamber a few feet apart Mic each one seperately Record the bass part direct and reamp it to the various cabs via the same amp always. Bring up the corresponding mic to the currently selected cab in the control room and listen to the playback. No visual clues, just the captured sound replayed. And everyone gets the same part to hear. Record the playback as well and you can post it on the internets as a double blind if you conduct the testing that way (ie the selector of the cab/mic in the array has no idea of which set up they are selecting either - blah blah blah). Expensive to run the test though

[quote name='Conan' timestamp='1426762403' post='2721605'] So maybe, instead of criticising, you could design a test of your own that would generate valid results? Could such a test even exist or are there too many variables? [/quote] What, now I can't point out potential flaws in this either?? If someone wants to post something like this on the internet then people with a valid point to make can make that point as a part of the discussion, that is the point of internet forums, its a two way interactive thing. Was I direspectful in any way at all here? I fail to see how, I just wanted to make something clear about what everyone is hearing. Did you think of this issue at all? No, I don't suppose you did, but you haven't mentioned it, so I'll assume you didn't.. Did the person doing the A/B testing? Possibly but we don't know and it wasn't mentioned, so I thought I would bring it up before people on here quote this clearly unscientific bit of fun as absolute gospel truth for the next five years. I'm sure this was targetted at the people present and a recording was made as a second thought. Furthermore if they close mic'ed it the people in the room would have an unfair clue as to what cab they were looking at, so I'm going to rule that possiblity out completely, unless told otherwise. So we are defintely listening to the interaction of driver and cab, you want to make the cone sound deeper, make a more efficient box for the frequency respondse you want to hear, which is entirely possible by the way, and not dependant entirely on speaker diameter at all, just ask Bill F! Is it a valid point? Well yes as a matter of fact it absolutely is in my opinion.... Does this mean I have to build a different, better, competing form of a similar test to back up my criticism of it? Err no, it doesn't as it goes, carry on with the fun and larks all you like, I joined in too, because thats all it is. I think the only way to make a test like this as similar as possible is to mic from the same points relative to each speaker and play each mic back seperately as well. And to fit each driver into an infinite baffle so as to try and remove the cab from the test as much as possible. But I'm not a speaker design guru by any stretch of the imagination, so that may not be the best way to go either. Plus I'm not sure how you would do that with an audience present and not give the game away visually.... [quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' timestamp='1426780272' post='2721882'] +1. If one wanted to one could measure the same cab with the mic in three positions, get three different results, then pose the same poll question and see how many saw through the ruse. [/quote] If I weren't utterly snowed at the moment I absolutely would do this, I may when I next get a chance to track some bass, just for a giggle, do exactly that, it would be a very reasonable point to prove I think.....

[quote name='EBS_freak' timestamp='1426755835' post='2721503'] You'd hope that all cabs were miced in the same manner, using the same mic... [/quote] Yes but even then the mic and position can really affect how you hear all of them And given the different speaker configurations you cant get the same on/off axis if the mic is in the same place relative to the cab. So they shouldnt have been close mic'ed (because just seeing where the mic was pointing would give it away to the people there). So if they werent' close mic'ed this means we are hearing the result of the speaker diameter and how it is interacting with the cab, which depends on how the cab was ported (different in each case) and a whole raft of other internal differences: so we aren't really hearing the speaker diameter as a differentiator on its own at all, but that cab with that speaker configuration, which isn't really the same thing at all..... So its a bit of fun but not actually all that scientific maybe?

I'll play I've gone for 10, 15, 12 because at its simplest biggest is muddiest. But the absolutely enormous elephant in the room for me is that you haven't said how the hell the cabs were mic'ed up, and that can have the most enormous effect on the sound that we are now hearing, I can get a 10" cone to sound like the ultimate dub bass speaker just through mic choice (typically a ribbon) and position (off axis and angled at 45 degress), I can get a 15" cone to sound like a slapper's dream using a different mic (SDC) and positions (straight into the dust cover as close as it will go). So its all for larks and don't take it too seriously chaps

It could be set up to either let more transient through, or bring up level just after the transient. At the same time it is possible to pull the heft of the thumps back a bit compared to the pops giving the impression of louder pops after applying makeup gain. So yes, if you get a full featured device and know how to set it up it could... BUt you would do as well to check out your eq and your technique, both of those would easily have a greater detrimental effect on pops

Sure, when you record to tape you set the recording level, just like in digital recording. The difference is that whereas with digital you have a hard and absolute maximum level (0dBFs) which you cannot capture anything louder than at all (you just clip the input which sounds like arse) tape is truly analogue. As you raise the level on tape the peaks will encroach into an area above that which the tape can reproduce accurately, that is the maximum clean headroom of the medium. Instead of just crapping out at this point though you can keep pushing a bit more and rather tan sounding like arse the tape will saturate, there will be some distortion and a compression effect that sounds very very cool on a lot of sources, drums recorded hard onto tape is about as clasic a rock sound as you can imagine, but everyone in all pop genres used this technique. There wasn't a compressor for every channel in and some more for groups, and yet more for the 2 buss back in the day, but everything went to tape and you could use that to help you out both when tracking and when mixing down to 2 track, in both cases pushing the tape a little (effectively recording too hot for the cleanest reproduction) sounded better than clean did, more exciting, fatter with more impact and punch. Recording digitally you can not replicate this except with fx, unless you literally run your capture to tape and then run it back into your DAW (and yes there are studios that will do this for you if you send them your project file and wavs, its not cheap though because they'll be using big 2" 24 track machines and they cost a lot to maintain, not to mention the tape cost). If you want to get close there are several tape saturation plugins out there to play with, none of them is exactly like any specific brand of tape on any specific machine, but many of them can still give a reasonable facsimile. You can also roll your own if you want by chaining good saturation and compression plugins with the right settings, but its still not ever quite as nice as that fat tape sound (the grass was always greener over yonder blah blah). Of course tape has a tonne of issues that make it less good than digital (crosstalk, wow, flutter, head wear, tape wear, frequency response, dynamic range, sheer cost) but that sound of a great kit being pushed hard into tape is glorious

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1424864667' post='2701263'] You'll probably find that any signal that has passed through valves or been recorded onto magnetic tape has had some degree of compression applied to it even though it didn't pass through an actual compressor, simply because of the nature of the electronics and the way audio signals behave when recorded onto magnetic tape. [/quote] Very very good point, well said. Pushing tape hard especially for drums and bass is a classic way to get some lovely fatness from the inherent nature of tape compression and saturation. Sounds fantastic, and its why so many companies and people spent so long trying to get a great emulation of the effect. Not sure how prevalent tape compression was in the fifties but I would be surprised if no one tried pushing tape as hard as they could back in the day, even recording to mono, the hotter you record to tape before distortion the better the signal to noise ratio. So its all good....

[quote name='VTypeV4' timestamp='1424827243' post='2700989'] Compressors are one of the most useful things from an engineering perspective, probably only second to comprehensive EQ. IME at least. [/quote] Agree 100% The only thing more useful than eq and compressors are the faders....

Ha! They are fine for the price, I've used a lot of Focusrite kit, the best of it is superb, the cheapest stuff is what I'd expect, it services well enough for most just fine. The reason RME have th ebest drivers is they roll their own USB chips so their devices drivers are far better married to their hardware apparently. As a software engineer I can believe that without any trouble at all.

[quote name='Lord Sausage' timestamp='1424733322' post='2699944'] I wonder what musicians sounded like before compressors and limiters etc were invented. How did they get by with all those peaks and troughs. You can imagine audiences at gigs saying "well i'm not enjoying this, there isn't enough fatness to that bass", or "can you believe his upstrokes are slightly louder than his downstrokes". Or even "i came to really enjoy the vibe and the music but all i'm bothered about is what the bass player is or isn't doing with his tone". "I wish this pesky human ear was better equipped to notice audible volumes" I think sometimes we think to much! Never used one by the way, live. I do when mixing songs [/quote] Well to be honest you have to go back to the fifties to get to a time when some form of auto levelling (or compression or limiting) wasn't in use on recorded output as pretty much the norm. By the sixties it was very very common, Motown, Abbey Road, Joe Meek, all [i]big [/i]exponents of the use of compressors and limiters. In order to cut a decent level to disc you need to manage low end significantly, in fact the low end is eq'ed out of the signal before it hits the disc and then eq'ed back as best as possible by the record deck on playback (just one of many reasons that vinyl is not as accurate as digital is that the eq curve on the record deck is often not the same as that on the record pressing, and adding bass like this adds noise, but I digress). Proper use of compression doesnt get rid of all the peaks and troughs at all either, yet another common misconception, but it will change the envelope of the signal, preferrably for the better, if you know what you are doing Its a tool, its also a tool that people are very very used to hearing without even knowing it. Use one if you want to and you know how, or dont if you are against the dreaded compressors that have infiltrated the purity of music for more than 50 years....

I just got tried of playing the "Is it the drivers?", game a while ago ☺

Do love a bit of parallel compression on drums, as well as smashing the knackers out of room mics or core mics and blending a bit of that signal into the kit as a whole, can really bring out some extra life and energy

I generally record at 48/24 personally For the music I'm making its neverbeen an issue wrt sound quality at all, you will get far more imprssive increases in quality by concentrating on mic position, phase issues when multiple mics are involved, gain staging etc etc. Decent mic pres are pretty much a given in higher quality interfaces (RME, Apogee etc etc), decent mics needn't cost the earth either, but all of that is meaningless if you're not prepared to spend time on mic position and listening, decent headphones a re a must, and I fully recommend studiospares m1000 for tracking, probably the best bang for the buck tracking cans I've ever found, really good.

Not so sure about that OldG, 88.2 vs 48 is not nearly the immense difference that people tend to make it to be unless you have some extraordinay monitors IME, I've made perfectly excellent sounding albums at 44.1KHz and 48KHz, certainly not lacking in quality or clarity in any way. The 24 bit part is important if you are wanting to record at lower levels to preserve transients - which you should be.

Record your practice session such that you can solo the bass part if possible. Listen back critically and evaluate what leaves you underwhelmed in your attempts Figuring out what is actually wrong may require the help of a more experienced player but once you know what to work on and how to work on it you can Until you do this you are just guessing about how you really sound to the rest of the band and the general public IMO

Great Mic on snare or guitar cabs in place of a 57! No idea where you can get it repaired though Sorry.

Fletcher Munson curves.... http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher%E2%80%93Munson_curves

Well for one thing the clever digital bits to tailor the output of the amp to the cabinet will have been tuned by Jim Bergantino to match the output perfectly to his cabinets to absolutely maximise the effect of the amp and cab combined in each case. So it will be the first bass amp I can think of that uses DSP to tune itself to one of a range of cabs as chosen by the end user. And given the success of the IP range in achieving a remarkable sound from its cabs given their size and power handling, it promises to absolutely maximise the impact of all the modelled for cabs. I cannot begin to imagine how good an ae410 will sound with this in front of it......

Bond two or three together?

[quote name='xgsjx' timestamp='1423246703' post='2682824'] In G major? I transposed it to C to play it on 4 string bass. Another you might enjoy playing is Fur Elise. Again in the original key. [/quote] Yep absolute killer on a four string, can only be played with a 24 fret bass and I had to do a sort of mock db thumb position thing to do the run at the end and the final chordy bit right. Fantastic to play though, although i cant remember the middle third of it any more...

And never forget there are no hard and fast rules If it sounds good and didn't release the magic smoke then it is good....