Bill Fitzmaurice

The settings needed to get flat according to your amp is different with every amp, if it can be achieved at all. Even if the EQ controls are flat at 12:00 there's usually some voicing applied to the pre-amp that can't be removed or altered. I recall a big deal being made about flat response some years back. It pretty much went away when someone measured the response of a bunch of amps and found that flat response from bass amps was an elusive concept seldom realized. Having all the controls at 12:00 is as good a starting point as any, but there's nothing to be gained by leaving them at 12:00. If there were there would be no reason to have them at all.

The problem there is that pretty much nothing is flat. Just as with tone this applies to every link in the chain. If you did somehow manage to actually get flat response it would be as appealing as flat beer. Skunky flat beer at that.

Every model of bass has a different tone, every model of amp has a different tone, every model of speakers has a different tone, even strings have different tones, and every player has his own tone preferences. The only way to know what works best for you with your gear is to experiment.

It doesn't matter. I can show you many examples of how a 450w driver can be ripped to shreds with 50w input. Here's one: It's quite easy to do with a signal an octave lower than the speaker was designed to handle, which is very much what the OP described doing.

The power rating of a speaker is thermal, literally how much power it can take before the voice coil fries. How much it can take before mechanical damage may occur is seldom more than half the thermal rating. Besides, most amps are rated for their output capability at a very low distortion figure. Most are capable of at least twice their rated power at high distortion, albeit not long term. A sufficiently high pulse can fry a voice coil in a fraction of a second. A watt is the product of voltage x current, period. The TCs have been proven incapable of delivering the requisite voltage at the requisite amperage to come even close to their advertised ratings.

It's possible. You also could fracture the voice coil. PA subwoofers are designed to handle that usage, but standard electric bass cabs are not.

The Blackface and Silverface Bassman and Bandmaster were almost identical, the main differences being the Bandmaster had a tremolo circuit, while the Bassman had a high cut switch on the bass instrument channel. One of the earliest true bass amps was the 1960 Ampeg B-15. The next true bass amp innovation that I recall was the 1968 Sunn 200S. The amp was nothing special, but the bass reflex (mis-labeled as a rear loaded folded horn) JBL 2x15 speaker was a major improvement over other contemporary offerings.

That would have been the '59 4x10 Bassman, which for all intents and purposes was a guitar amp.

The description '6.5" 4 Ohm Hi-Fi Speaker Driver' confirms it's not a musical instrument driver. It's main shortcoming is that it won't have the durability of a musical instrument speaker that's designed to handle high level transient peaks.

It wouldn't hurt.

That's literally a tuppence driver. Replace it with an Eminence Alpha 6 and it will work as well as is possible. http://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=EMIALPHA6A

Schematic_of_SUPERFLY1.pdf

As I said, I'd never seen one, but it's not like I'm shopping cabs. That looks pretty good, and it's correctly configured. At first glance it would appear pricey, but as I said there aren't many eight inch drivers that work well for bass, and those that exist aren't cheap. It looks like it may be loaded with Faital Pro 8PR200, which is a particularly good option.

The usual configuration is paired 2x10 or 2x12 vertically stacked. I haven't seen a pair of 2x8 vertically stacked, but I haven't seen a 2x8 either. As for why vertical stacking works better, the horizontal dispersion angle is inversely proportional to the cab width. It also eliminates high frequency comb filtering across the sound stage.

There are some, though not many, eight inch drivers that work well for bass, and they have the advantage of much better mids. But in terms of midrange dispersion to the audience and the player as well they should be vertically aligned. Using four eights in the usual arrangement would give the worst possible result.

I didn't say they were dishonest, just that they and pretty much every driver manufacturer make recommendations that they probably shouldn't. Putting it in perspective, those drivers would have been state of the art in 1975, when the very notion of an electric bass driver was still new, and for the most part what was available were generic musical instrument drivers that were very much guitar oriented. That was then, this is now, and now if you want a driver that's going to work well in a small cab it's not one with high Fs and short xmax. It will be one with low Fs and long xmax. A necessary trade off when you do that is lower sensitivity, which you need to compensate for with power. That wasn't an option in 1975, when 100 watts was a lot, and if you wanted 300 watts it took an eighty pound SVT to realize. That's not a concern today, when you can get 800 watts from an eight pound amp.

Not all amp send/receives are configured the same. Some have the master volume before the return, some have it after. Only by trying it can you know for sure, assuming you don't have block diagrams for both amps.

63.5 Hz and 62.1 Hz Fs are both too high for electric bass. I've seen dozens of drivers advertised as suitable for electric bass that shouldn't have been. These are two of them.

My assumption is that it's the FTX1225. The TF1225CX is 250w, not 300w, plus the 2.5mm xmax and 63.5 Hz Fs make it unsuitable for electric bass.

If I was in the market for as small and light a cab as possible it would be a 1x10 that doesn't cram the driver into too small a space. I haven't seen dimensions for the GSS 1x12, but the FTX1225 works best in a cab with a net volume between 60 and 100 liters, exclusive of the port and driver. Any smaller than 60 liters will give weak lows and boomy midbass. Also, there's a mistake on the Celestion data sheet. It lists Vas as 12 liters, the actual is 120 liters. As for the Celestion BN12-300S, I would not use it for electric bass. The 62Hz Fs is too high, the 2.5mm Xmax too short. There are many tens that outperform it.

I'd be wary of getting the smallest 1x12" you can find. Search 'Hoffman's Iron Law'.

Clipping can hurt tweeters and midrange drivers, because it increases the midrange and high frequency content to much higher than normal levels. It's the main reason why tweeters in bass cabs fail. It has no more effect on woofers than does water on a duck's back.

There's no reason not to exceed the cab rating. That's only a problem if you run the amp at full tilt, while long before you reach that point the drivers will have run out of excursion and will be sounding quite horrible. A higher amp rating gets you more headroom. In the PA and hi-fi worlds, where clean sound rules, the recommendation is for amp power to be double the speaker rating.

Since the cab on EBay wasn't designed specifically to work with the drivers you are looking at the results will probably be less than optimal at best, and possibly really bad. If you're looking for an inexpensive cab buy used, with C-19 putting everyone out of a gig there's no shortage of used out there.

Make sure it's a fuse, not a bulb. A fuse would normally be in a holder that makes it easy to replace.