Bill Fitzmaurice

There's more than one way to make a dual chamber bass reflex. For that matter there's more than one way to make just about any alignment.

With 1/4" outputs it's better to use both, because being originally intended for telephone switchboards they don't have high current capacity, so with more than 200w amps it's prudent to split the current to two sets of connectors. That's not a concern with the far higher current capacity of Speakons.

That pretty much describes a double chamber bass reflex box. The oldest example of that design that I recall was in 'Designing, Building and Testing Your Own Speaker System', by David B, Weems, first edition 1981. I doubt that Weems invented that alignment, so it probably dates back further than that.

If you want to see how little there is in the way of new speaker technology read 'Elements of Acoustical Engineering' by Harry Olson, 1957. http://cyrille.pinton.free.fr/electroac/lectures_utiles/son/Olson.pdf The only major item missing is the use of Thiele/Small parameters, which came along eight years later. Most of what's contained in the 1957 printing was contained in the 1940 first edition. The math (or maths, if you prefer) hasn't changed. What has changed is the hardware, which has allowed significant reductions in enclosure size and increases in output, although much of the alteration in driver technology is tied to amplifier technology. When 20 watts was the largest amp available speaker power handling mattered little, while speaker sensitivity mattered a lot.

Assuming the amp jacks are parallel wired, which nearly all are, the two options are electrically identical.

I've yet to see a technical description or a picture of the innards that shows what it is. It may be a double bass reflex with a passive radiator connecting the two rear chambers as opposed to a port, but that's purely a guess without any evidence to back it up. There's no defying physics, nor much new under the sun for that matter. All reflex cabs reduce cone excursion. While most do so only at the tuned frequency of the box it's possible to have more than one tuning frequency, as in a double bass reflex, to reduce excursion at more than one frequency.

My 2x12 '65 Fender Bassman sounded good at bedroom levels too, but being loaded with guitar drivers, as most bass cabs were back in the day, War Volume was more of a skirmish than a battle.

The source doesn't matter, and an interface isn't necessarily required. The issue is that the output of an iPod is probably at line level, about a volt. The output of passive pickups is closer to 1/10 volt, so an iPad could overload the input stage. That normally would only cause the sound to be very distorted, but if one's not careful it could pop something in the amp. If anything valves are less likely to suffer damage from a high level source.

Did you check the fuse?

You're right, 35 liters isn't fantastic for bass. It's barely marginal, and assuming you didn't account for the space taken up by the ports it's not even that large. I'd move on.

A 12" driver doesn't mean it's good for bass. If it's really optimized for guitar the xmax will be too short and Fs too high.

It's not likely A, which you see in valve amps of no more than 20w.

It does depend on the amp. Where the DI out taps the signal isn't the same with all amps.

The minimum protection required is a full inch of polystyrene foam beneath heavy cardboard.

If you were a guitar player I'd say a power soak, but you're not. You shouldn't have to run the amp loud to sound good. Now if your preferred tone comes from pushing the speakers hard you can't do that at low volume.

I've never owned an Orange amp, but over the last 56 years I've owned quite a few amps, and never found any of them to be genre specific. Having played pretty much every genre there is I wouldn't even know what would make an amp genre specific.

If you're looking for a head that sounds half as loud as 800 watts then 80 watts will suffice. Considering how small and light your RM800 is I don't see the need.

I noticed that. I guess they don't want to have to pay a royalty to Sir Paul or whoever it is that has the rights to the Beatles name.

I woudn't use a 1x8 anywhere other than my house, and then only when alone. I consider a 1x10 the minimum for gigging, even with PA. As for it sounding like the original, I played through some Super Beatles back in the 60s, didn't care for them at all. Besides, even back then what was heard on a record was seldom pure mic's bass cabs. Very early on they used a mix of mic'd and direct. Sounding like Paul isn't difficult, use flat wounds and a pick, with not much high end. No one ever mistook his tone for the Ox.

https://www.eminence.com/support/understanding-loudspeaker-data/

He had a valid question, whether playing bass through a guitar driver would damage it. In fact you're less likely to damage a guitar driver with bass than with guitar, because it will sound horrid at power levels well below the voice coil thermal capacity. As for excursion, exceeding xmax doesn't hurt drivers, reaching xlim does. Guitar drivers tend to have xlim to xmax ratios in the vicinity of 4:1, because they're intended to be pushed past xmax. Bass driver xlim to xmax ratios run around 2:1, so you're more likely to mechanically damage a bass driver by creasing a cone. One manufacturer was well known for their drivers creasing, because the driver xlim to xmax ratio was only 1: 0.6.

Carol Kaye probably played on as many records as James Jamerson and Duck Dunn combined. She was originally a guitar player who got pressed into playing some bass tracks with a borrowed PBass through her own Fender Concert, and that became her standard rig. She was paid homage to last year in Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, by the Carole Keen character playing bass in the fictional Shy Baldwin's band. Kaye never actually toured in the 60"s when the show was set, so I guess one of the writers wanted to come up with a female member of the band that bore some resemblance to a real person, as do most of the characters in the show.

Ever heard of 'The Beach Boys'? Most of their bass tracks were played by Carol Kaye. Her main amps were Fender Concerts and Fender Super Reverbs. Bass can sound quite good through open back guitar cabs, provided the volume isn't too high.

You may be fine with the combo speaker. Guitar speakers will distort long before their power limits are even approached, let alone exceeded. If you don't play loud enough to cause distortion you're good.

It used to be a very common format, if not an obvious one. For instance, the ubiquitous Hartke 3500 is a 19" rack mount. You wouldn't know it to look at it in the factory case. There are fewer now, with the proliferation of micro heads.