Bill Fitzmaurice

Having different phases isn't a real issue. Having outlets with different ground potentials is. If correctly wired you don't see that, but wherever electricity exists Murphy's Law is in full effect.

For that price as already mentioned used makes a lot more sense than new. Even if 12 channels pushes the budget envelope the saying 'buy once, cry once' applies.

Rookie mistake, though you see plenty of old timers dong it too. Everything should go into the PA. It's not about volume, it's about dispersion of the mids and highs. Every amp, including yours, has limited midrange and high frequency dispersion. Highpass all the instrument channels at 100 to 125Hz. This means buying a mixer with at least twelve channels. If you try to save money with a six or eight channel mixer you'll either lose money by having to replace it early on or lose functionality by not having enough channels.

What's often described as 'punch' is distortion when the driver runs out of excursion. Vintage drivers had that in spades, as they had short xmax and ran out of excursion at low volume levels. Modern drivers have longer xmax, so they can go louder with less distortion. If you like the sound of short xmax drivers you're most likely to find them in the least expensive cabs. You're least likely to find neo drivers with short xmax, as neo isn't used in low end drivers, being more expensive than ceramic.

Foam or polyester batting would add maybe a quarter of a pound.

Pedals are for guitards.

It's not neo magnets. Eminence for one designed their neos to sound as close as possible to their ceramics. A lot of factors influence the sound, but magnet material isn't one of them. However, any new drivers will tend to be brighter sounding than very old drivers. That's because new drivers have tight suspensions, which soften with time and use.

It's just a matter of having the right tools, and he who dies with the most tools wins. 😉

If I was going to take the time to do that I'd use biscuit joints.

The shiny face of MDF isn't glue friendly. You can make it better by opening the pores, but that takes time, time is money, and so it seldom gets done. Staples are great, I use them all the time, but only to hold parts in place while the adhesive sets. They're not structurally sound like screws.

MDF is fine, for home hi-fi cabs. It's gosh awful for anything intended to be portable. Put the blame on using MDF, particle board and worse on Electro-Voice, who used what they called Road-Wood back in the 80s-90s. They said it was 'a structural material made of layered and selectively oriented wood strands'. Translation: OSB! They started using it during a period when plywood prices were high. Ampeg used something similar for a while when it was run by St.Louis Music. It wasn't as heavy as MDF, but it was no more durable either. No engineer worth his salt would ever specify MDF or OSB. That decision would have been made by Bean Counters. 🤔

They all look OK at a small signal level on-axis. Where cabs differ the most is in maximum output and off-axis response.

I never said it couldn't. But if that happens and as a result the the driver is blown it's not because it was underpowered, it's because it was overpowered. Too much ado is made about clipping, but it's just another complex wave form, which is what all musical tones are. The sine wave versus square wave comparison lacks any validity, as with the exception of some synthesizer patches neither are present in music. Even when that's the case it does nothing to bolster the myth that clipping kills drivers. If it did the name Robert Moog never would have been known outside of his family and friends.

He seems legit, his post wasn't old stuff copied and pasted.

Keyboards work better with a FRFR speaker for their reduced coloration, but otherwise you're good to go.

+1. By the same token I do this loudspeaker stuff every day as part of my design work. 😉

Not so. Power density is highest at the lowest frequency of the woofer passband. Go up one octave it's down 3dB. Go up another octave it's down 6dB, and so forth. No amount of clipping will cause the power density of harmonics anywhere within the woofer passband to even equal the power density at the lowest frequency of the passband, let alone exceed it.

The bass isn't actually deeper, it just seems that way due to the reduction of midbass boom. The mids are smoother as the internal reflections back to the cone have been eliminated. From a technical standpoint what you accomplished was to lower the speaker Qa, which tames boomy midbass. The same thing happens when you fill the box with polyester pillow stuffing.

Only when those drivers are tweeters and the occasional midrange. The increase in power density {look it up} only occurs in the harmonics, not the fundamentals. That being the case woofers are unaffected. It's different with respect to tweeters and some midranges. The power density of a normal clean signal drops by 3dB with each octave increase of frequency. That's why pink noise is used to test speakers, as it also drops in power density by 3dB per octave increase in frequency. For this reason the actual thermal capacity of a tweeter rated for use in a 100w speaker will seldom be more than 10 watts. Clipping upsets the apple cart by delivering more high frequency content than normal, so said 10w voice coil may receive 20w or more. That's why clipping can thermally kill tweeters. The power density of the signal to the woofer is unaffected, so clipping doesn't affect them at all. This goes to the Myth of Underpowering, a myth long ago debunked, but like most myths it refuses to die the death it deserves.

Only in the sense that when you use them they can mask the distortion that results from pushing drivers past their linear excursion limit. The distortion doesn't affect the drivers at all, if they did guitar players would be swapping them from gig to gig, if not from set to set. But guitar drivers have far more leeway between when they reach xmax and when they reach xlim (look up those terms) than bass drivers. https://speakerwizard.co.uk/thiele-small-parameters-what-are-they-for/

One could do three 2x10 vertical, but the additional sensitivity of three versus two cabs wouldn't amount to much.

You may not need an amp. An emulator pedal or preamp with a number of presets direct to the board will be more versatile. One of the most prolific bass players of all time, James Jamerson, was always recorded direct at Motown. He had an Ampeg B-15, but that was only for monitoring.

The Barefaced can probably handle as much power as the pair of Ampeg before reaching the driver mechanical limits, but you'd need at least a 400w amp for that to be a concern. As mentioned when you're power shy you need sensitivity, where four drivers will probably be better than two.

They're still very useful. In part the results are speaker and amp derived, but they also reflect the fact that by no means does the fundamental define the tone of the instrument, it's defined by the harmonics, and that starts with the bass itself.

Blame Leo Fender. Good engineer, but a notorious skin flint. Telephone switchboard 1/4" jacks and plugs had been used for electric guitar leads probably from day one. When Leo came up with separate heads and cabs he used 1/4" because he had them on hand. In his defense there wasn't much to choose from, but still when Leo had a chance to save a buck he did. The same applied to his instruments. He didn't set out to build a better guitar, he set out to make a cheaper guitar, and the bolt on neck was how he did it. By the same token single coil pickups were cheaper than hum bucking, which were around since 1932. Fender was able to sell his guitars at 2/3 the price of Gibson. It was pure serendipity that they also sounded very good.