Bill Fitzmaurice

I've heard the same bloated bass in venues ranging from pub sized rooms to stadiums, so it's not the room at fault. I've also heard results ranging from gosh awful to splendiferous in the same venue over the course of hundreds of concerts spanning decades.

I remember when those came out. They were considerably larger than the original Bandmaster and Bassman 2x12 cabs, nearly large enough to have housed four twelves. They were crap, but so were the smaller ones, because the stock drivers they used were cheap generic electric instrument drivers. Loaded with Altecs or JBLs they were pretty good.

The worst I ever saw was Greg Lake playing with Ringo's All Starr band. The low EQ was boosted so much that any note he played from D2 on down shook the entire arena, but when he played G2 and above it disappeared entirely. If I didn't see him playing the higher notes I wouldn't have known he was playing at all. As for kick, I saw Max Weinberg's band where every time he hit the kick there was a feedback rumble through the PA subs that masked everything else. The guy at the board didn't even notice it. 😒

By and large because it sounds better. Equal loudness curves show why. But it can be overdone, especially where electric bass is concerned. PA systems with large subs are capable of going far louder and lower than electric bass cabs, so it's all too easy for FOH engineers to create pounding lows that are nothing like what electric bass is supposed to sound like, often drowning out everything else. I've walked out on more than a few acts for that reason. IME the FOH engineers who really get it right are themselves either bass players or recording engineers, if not both.

Not necessarily too big, but there is a point of diminishing returns. Where a 2x12 is concerned they went well past it.

They're totally separate. They also have different maximum DCR, so the .4mH will probably be a larger gauge. The only commonality of the two filters are they both connect to the input jack(s) at the + and -. I recommend Jantzen coils and capacitors.

It's a better tweeter than the ST-304-SLF. This is the crossover for a 4 ohm cab, which yours appears to be. Make sure, it makes a difference. The low pass (woofers) and high pass (tweeter) are on separate boards so you don't confuse the wiring. On the low pass filter the capacitor is a non-polar electrolytic (NPE), rated for at least 50 volts. The coils may be solid or air core. What’s critical is that the DCR (resistance) of the coil be less than 0.2 ohms. On the high pass filter the capacitors are poly or mylar, rated for at least 100 volts. The coils are air core, of the smallest available wire gauge with no more than 0.5 ohms DCR. A plus/minus 10% tolerance of the component values is permissible. High pass: Low pass:

The tweeter/horn that I recommend is the Eminence BGH25-8, as it's specifically designed for electric bass. It can be used as low as 2kHz, where you need it for wider dispersion than woofers can give, and rolls off above 10kHz, where there's nothing of value for bass. However, it requires a purpose built crossover for best results. You probably need that anyway, no matter what tweeter you end up with. The crossover is where many manufacturers cut corners, with blown tweeters being one result.

It's a blown tweeter. The usual cause is a crossover inadequate to provide adequate protection and/or using distortion effects. The Selenium ST304-slf can't go lower than 3.5kHz, which IMO is way too high. If you like the way it sounds my advise is to leave it as is.

Every bass player should have Hoffman's Iron Law figuratively tattooed in their mind's eye. Whatever your guitar'd players are using you need twice that, unless by some miracle yours have volume controls that they don't always set to eleven. Your strings are neither the same length or diameter as guitar strings. The same physics that cause that also apply to your speakers.

I wouldn't consider an active speaker that's not designed for use with electric bass without first trying it.

Quite right. Clipped wave forms are harmful for tweeters, as they can increase the power in the high frequencies well above what what the tweeter normally receives. But no matter how hard the clipping the power will never exceed what the woofer normally receives in the lows. By the OPs description there's no obvious reason for the driver failure. Only an autopsy will reveal it.

Altecs and JBLs had aluminum dust caps ostensibly for the same reason. But the high frequency response of Altecs was considerably better than JBLs, while EVs with paper dust caps had better highs than Altecs, so...

In the real world you'll seldom actually draw more than 100 watts from your amp. Don't worry about it.

There's also kevlar, fiberglass, polyethylene, and my favorite, hemp. If you smoke that cone you really smoke that cone. 😁

Audiophiles would argue about which color sounds best. 😄

Something to consider is if aluminum was intrinsically superior why didn't the industry shift to it en masse? There are two reasons. One is that it's not superior. There are many materials that work well for driver cones. Aluminum is merely one of them. Every speaker manufacturer with any interest in it would have obtained free samples from driver manufacturers to find out for themselves if there was good reason to make the change. It would seem that they did not. Second is that none of them would want to be seen as copying Hartke, in so doing tacitly acknowledging that Hartke was better. There are a number of ways to configure drivers to give different results. Using aluminum cones is one of them, but hardly the only one, nor is aluminum used exclusively to realize better high frequency response. If that was the case why does this subwoofer driver have an aluminum cone? https://www.parts-express.com/Peerless-XXLS-P835016-10-Black-Aluminum-Cone-Subwoofer-4-Ohm-264-1648?quantity=100 Lastly, while Hartke seems to be the only major player that uses aluminum cones for electric bass, they're quite common in the hi-fi world. We're usually unaware of it, as most of them are painted black.

Watch this. All of it if you've got time, but what's most pertinent to this discussion starts at the 3:00 mark.

It's mostly confirmation bias. If you think a speaker will sound a particular way it will. Seeing an aluminum cone the natural assumption is that it will have a brighter sound than pulp, so it does. Going to an aluminum cone was a stroke of marketing genius on Hartke's part, as it separated them from the rest of the pack. The same applies to Markbass. There's nothing special about their drivers, but the yellow cones would lead one to think that they're somehow different. Confirmation bias in audio is pervasive; even those who you'd think would be immune to it are not. That's why good engineers never trust what they think they hear without confirming it with measurements. So are Hartke brighter? I don't know. I've never seen them measured. http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2009/04/dishonesty-of-sighted-audio-product.html

I bet he got it sorted, 12 years ago. 🤪

If it's not ported it's not going to give 'thunderous low-end performance' no matter what the advertising says. It still may suit you, but I'd try it before you buy it.

Good advice, in part because combo cabs tend to be undersized for portability. Amps keep getting smaller and smaller as that aspect of what physics allows is ever changing. The physics of how speakers work is chiseled in stone. Hoffman's Iron Law is just as true today as it was in 1970.

The Micro Stack had problems from day one mainly because it used a sealed cab. With one cab it got along OK, but with a second it couldn't handle the current demand when pushed hard, which with the low sensitivity of a sealed cab in the lows one pretty much had to do. Perhaps they've beefed it up since, but admitting they initially didn't get it right isn't typical corporate behavior.

A system with a few knobs set up by someone who knows what they are doing is always better than one with a lot of knobs set up by someone who doesn't.

Or a Vox AC-30. 😉