Bill Fitzmaurice

Understood, but it shouldn't take him more than a song to sort it out, if not in sound check. IME the problem is sound men who don't know what they're doing, and I've seen them from pub gigs to stadiums. The best FOH engineers I've worked with tended to be bass players and recording engineers, if not both. One I knew who was particularly good, he was working with 'Journey' when I met him, would automatically high pass the bass at 60Hz, knowing that doing so would make the bass through a monster PA still sound like a bass. If they all did so it might make going to concerts an enjoyable experience again.

That's what happens to a sine wave, but music doesn't consist of sine waves. With music content what happens is that whether it's an amp, a stomp box or a speaker there comes a point where there's not enough rail voltage and/or driver excursion to go any louder in the low frequencies, so they don't get louder with additional signal applied. The midrange and high frequencies do get louder, and that changes the tone. When you do that using a Les Paul through an AC30 and Greenbacks that tonal change is for the better. When it's a PBass through an SS amp and tweeters it's like nails on a chalkboard. This is why you shouldn't use tweeters if you employ distortion, and why AC30s don't have tweeters at all.

Not exactly. Clipping doesn't send a square wave, no more than a pristine signal sends a sine wave. In all cases what's sent to the speaker is a complex wave form. What differs when the signal is clipped is that there's a lot of midrange and high frequency harmonic content present that's not in the original signal. With bass that can sound nasty, especially if you have tweeters. With guitar it's the Holy Grail.

That's a straw that an oddiophile or amp salesman might grasp, but unless you're running 50 meter or longer speaker cables damping factor is a non-factor. Besides, the damping factor of valve amps being much lower than SS it wouldn't explain the OPs situation. However, while his YBA-200 amp doesn't have Fender/Marshall circuitry it does have the same style of passive tone controls, which along with natural compression and high passing leaves me to believe that's the difference. It's not without good reason that heavy iron valve amps remain the standard for tone, if you can manage to lift them, or even better have roadies to do it for you.

If his Traynor is a Fender copy (that's how they started off back in the 60s) the passive EQ can't give much bass boost, while significant high passing is built in.

Knowing what model Traynor would help, but it's certainly possible. Another consideration is that the natural compression of the valve amp is the difference. That compression is what gave rise to the valve watts versus SS watts nonsense, which gave rise to the even more nonsensical TC watts.

I've experienced that a lot, starting with Ringo/Sheila E/Greg Lake 20 odd years ago. It wasn't their fault, it was the PA FOH engineer. The EQ was so AFU that whenever Greg hit a note from C on down it drowned out the entire band, but when he hit a higher note the bass disappeared entirely. When Ringo went for a stint on his kit the kick was so loud that even back on his riser he felt it, and told the engineer on mic in the middle of the song to turn it down. Gosh awful. There should be a special section of hell where idiot sound men who have no idea what bass and kick drums are supposed to sound like should spend eternity: polka music 24/7/365.

30 years in my unheated workshop hasn't bothered the stereo rig I have there. But it doesn't go from cold to warm in short order.

Who told you that? Let me guess: a guitar player. 🙄 There's a common trait among the bass players who have the highest reputation, be it Jamerson, Sir Paul, The Ox, Bogert, Geddy, Stanley, Sting or whomever: they're heard.

The problem lies when you take it from the cold into the warm and that results in condensation inside. That can cause component failure. If what you call cold is still above freezing it probably won't matter. What I call cold is well below freezing and I don't leave gear where that occurs. That said I'm headed out for my daily walk, where it's a balmy -7C.

Quite right. I ended up posting this in the FAQs on my forum in response to users toasting their drivers: When should I bridge? The answer is almost never. Forget about the silly power ratings that manufacturers post for bridged output, that's just advertising piffle aimed at the unwashed masses. Bridging isn't about power, it's about voltage swing. You use it when your amp doesn't have enough voltage swing to drive the speaker to its displacement limit. Nine times out of ten that's because the speaker has a high impedance, say 16 ohms. The tenth time is when your amp is rated at less than a quarter the power output that your speaker is. If you do bridge when you don't need to the doubled voltage swing quadruples your chances of blowing drivers. Bridging into multiple cabs also can cause the amp to overheat, as bridging typically doubles the minimum load impedance, while using multiple cabs lowers the load impedance.

Way too much talk about watts here. I suspect 'I want to get all the watts out of my amp' is why the OP is bridging into a parallel load. Don't do that. Even if the cabs were identical that wouldn't be the best idea, and since they're not each should be driven with their own amp channel. As for the level matching, if the Sans amp is made to feed a bass amp or PA console it probably lacks the necessary voltage swing to drive a power amp to full output.

Pretty much. At that level it takes roughly 10dB higher at 60Hz to be perceived as being the same volume as the midrange. But it still sounds subjectively bass heavy because there's not much in the natural environment with that frequency tilt. Maybe a stampeding herd of elephants. On that subject, there is a theory why most men like loud low frequency sounds and most women don't. When our distant female ancestors heard loud low frequencies it very well may have been a stampeding herd, so their natural instinct would have been to go further back into their cave or climb higher up a tree to avoid the potential danger. Their men folk would have gone towards the sound, with spears at the ready to hunt that evening's dinner.

It takes about a month to fully kick in, and then you take it indefinitely. 2000mg a day to start, then after 30 days 1000mg a day for maintenance. I weigh around 100 kg, so if you're much smaller you might get away with less. It's not an analgesic, so you don't take it when you have pain and then stop. It's more like a daily vitamin that lessens the potential for pain to occur in the first place, and makes it far less severe if it does.

Drink the gin, bag the raisins. I've had back trouble for 35 years. Once it got to the point that only Vicodin gave me relief I finally did the research and found out about turmeric. It has been a life changer for me. This is what I take, not that you'd order it from the UK, but for comparison purposes: https://www.puritan.com/puritans-pride-brand-0102/tumeric-curcumin-450-mg-015419

Pelvic tilt is a symptom, not a cause. When my lower back gets inflamed I tilt, and it has nothing to do with carrying an uneven load, which I never do. It happens because when my lower back becomes inflamed it does so more on my left side than my right. That makes me lean to the right, because it hurts too much to stay straight. I've been to chiropractors, they were all quacks. None had any answer for my arthritis sourced lower back pain that regularly delivered me with crippling bouts of sciatica. Through my own research I found an effective treatment, turmeric capsules. I take two 500mg a day, every day. It's a low dose anti-inflammatory that builds up in your body to control inflammation. Thanks to it pain that used to last a week a more is now gone in a day or two, and I haven't had sciatica in seven years. It's effectiveness is increased when combined with black pepper, and you can buy capsules that contain both. I don't bother with that, as I consume black pepper with pretty much every meal. The supporting evidence can be seen in Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. They get arthritis at the same rate as everyone else, but don't suffer pain from it nearly as much. That's because they practically live on curry, which is mainly turmeric and black pepper. They also have some of the lowest death rates from Covid, because the main cause of Covid deaths is inflammation that blocks the airways.

This is an RTA of The Wailers, taken at the FOH. The spacing between the horizontal lines is 10dB. The bass drops off below 60Hz, while the content from 160Hz and up is mainly the other instruments. The vocals dominate at 1.6k-6.3k, so clearly the bass is a lot louder than the vocals.

True. While it seems to have a lot of low frequency content reggae bass isn't all that low, it's just loud. Most content is between 60 and 90 Hz. If it went much lower the Fridge wouldn't be the benchmark reggae bass cab.

Time was that bass cabs didn't go as low and loud as PA subs, but that's no longer the case. Cabs loaded with long throw high displacement woofers are just as capable. The trick is finding out which cabs are so equipped, as very few provide said information. Barefaced is one that does.

FWIW a high energy rock concert will measure 105 to 115dBC at 30 meters from the stage. Interestingly metal tends to measure no higher than other genres, because their guitar tones are highly compressed.

There's nothing wrong with mixing speaker sizes, if it's properly implemented, with separate driver chambers, drivers optimized for different pass bands and a crossover. That's SOP with PA cabs, with bass cabs not so much. That's not loud at all, so I suspect you used an 'A' weighted meter, which doesn't measure low frequencies. A 'C' weighted meter is required to measure the full spectrum.

'Seen' is the operative word. The back of the cab would have to be tight to the wall for there to be any audible effect, and that effect would be reduced low frequency output, not enhanced. However, if one sees the port is on the rear and thinks as a result that it will make a difference confirmation bias kicks in, and as a result it will be heard. 🙄

Port radiation is 360 degrees, so it doesn't matter which direction it's aiming. As for tone clarity, that's sourced in the mids and highs. Ports don't radiate mids and highs.

An isobaric configuration reduces the cabinet size required to realize a desired low frequency response. For those of you who know what T/S specs are the Vas is halved compared to one driver, and therefore so is the cabinet volume exclusive of the space taken up by the second driver. The downside is that the cone displacement exposed to the air, T/S spec Vd, is the same for the two drivers as it is for one, so maximum output is the same as with one driver, albeit from a smaller cab. Isobarics were somewhat logical decades ago, when Vas values of 600 liters weren't unusual, making cabs capable of going low really huge. Since the drivers used in the Orange have a Vas around 150 liters the size advantage gained isn't that much, and as you've found it doesn't go nearly as loud as a standard 212, by 6dB to be precise.

Not all that much in the last 15 years. The last significant tech change was to neo magnets, which allowed improvements in excursion without sacrificing sensitivity, and as a result higher output than previously possible. Most of the major alterations that neo allowed came circa 2004-2008. There have been further refinements since then, but nothing earth shaking or trouser flapping.