Bill Fitzmaurice

That's not really all that bad. I bought a Jazz Bass new for $300 in 1965. Figuring in the rate of inflation that would be $2300 today.

You can obey your wife or you can obey the laws of physics. In this case it's very much an either or situation. Do you know what they call blokes who can use a small combo? Guitar players.

I used a 2x15 in the 80s, now I use a 1x12 that I like better, especially when I have to move it. But I won't compromise my sound for convenience. I have not.

That would be the Grand Tetons.

I don't know offhand what they use for drivers, but from what little actual factual data there is on their website I don't see them as anything special one way or another. To paraphrase George Augsperger (look him up), there are hundreds of ported bass cabs out there, this is one of them. I do know that there are cab manufacturers who's engineering expertise extends no further than using the likes of this to determine their cab dimensions: www.eminence.com/pdf/Basslite_S2012_cab.pdf I agree that the Markbass are ugly as sin, but that's intentional. Like Hartke before them they wanted a unique look that no would mistake for anything else when they saw them on stage or on the tube. In that they're quite successful.

Not a bad profit margin for a cab loaded with a pair of these, and Aguilar pays a lot less for them than Blue Aran does: https://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=EMIEDP12450A

They're aware. Aguilar is a small company, with a business model of selling small numbers of high priced goods rather than larger numbers of lower priced goods. They price their gear with the intent of attracting those who perceive high prices to equate with high quality, and there's no shortage of those. This cab won't work any better than one of the dozen or more other cabs using the same 2512 driver that sell for as little as half what the Aggie does, but so long as Aggie customers are willing to pay their prices they'll keep charging those prices. Can't say I blame them.

It has an Eminence Deltalite II 2512 driver (120 quid at Blue Aran), which is what most makers use in their price point neo loaded cabs, so yes, the price is insane, even in the US, where the street price is $799.

I put a couple of inch high rubber feet on the top of my cab near the rear edge, which my amp rests against.

The AC121 looks to be around 2 cu ft net volume, which isn't bad for a 112. Far too many 1x12 combos try to get away with 1.5 cu ft or less, and when you do that the low end response will suffer, while the midbass will tend to boom.

Combos are an exercise in compromise, and the first thing they compromise on is the size of the speaker enclosure. Playing guitar you can get away with that. Playing bass you can't, Hoffman's Iron Law rules it out.

It depends on where it's orange. The heater in the core is OK to be orange. The black jacket around the core shouldn't be orange, that indicates it's lost its vacuum seal. It's nearly impossible to test tubes. It used to be every corner drugstore had a tube tester and sold tubes, but they're long gone now.

Speakers should always be placed with the drivers vertically aligned. Placed horizontal the dispersion angle in the mids is halved compared to vertical, while comb filtering will be present in the highs. On stage in front of the cab you probably won't notice the difference. Out front it will be. If your rig is considerably below ear level it should be lifted and/or tilted back so that you can hear the mids and highs.

I see that view expressed often, but never by audio engineers. You know, the people who invented music reproduction. What is important to music reproduction is well known and has been for quite some time. What we can measure exceeds what we're able to hear by at least two magnitudes of order. It's not our knowledge that's limited, it's the dissemination of that knowledge to the masses. For outfits like Wilson that's a good thing, otherwise they'd never sell a single piece.

Those Wilsons don't sound any better than many speakers at 5% of that price, if not less. They're not marketed to people who know what good sound is, they're marketed to people who equate quality with price and don't know that the one doesn't necessarily give you the other.

Yes, the Donald Trump signature model, expressly designed for those with far more money than brains.

While valves have their place in instrument amps it's not due to how they sound when driven clean but how they sound when driven dirty. For those who think valves are superior for stereo/HT watch this starting at the 3:20 marker. It wouldn't hurt to watch all of it, for that matter.

34C maybe.

What would happen if you got a pair of large speakers?

What's to argue about? The price? That's not unusual for a large set of Tannoys. For instance: https://soundapproach.com/tannoy-arden-15-dual-concentric-floor-standing-speakers-pair.html?gclid=Cj0KCQjwh7zWBRCiARIsAId9b4oFs1k_AI6L_Hbt-CZmH0GEnrbix6TJY_CikzCaA5nR3NJzP3kn-swaAuCEEALw_wcB https://www.ebay.com/itm/Tannoy-15-Gold-Monitor-Speakers-in-Brand-New-GRF-Folded-Horn-Cherry-Cabinets-/152963494167

http://www.bcae1.com/xoorder.htm I already explained that there are piezos that have added circuitry to present a resistive load that allows them to be used with a standard high pass filter, although I've never seen one myself, they are that rare. I use high pass filters with standard piezos, but they're specifically configured for piezos and would not work with a dynamic driver. There's also the possibility that those cabs used standard piezos with high pass filters when they should not have. I've seen worse foul ups.

A piezo would not use the same crossover as a dynamic driver unless the piezo was one specifically configured to present a resistive load. Piezos of that sort exist, but they're rare. While on the subject, there are two issues common with most tweeter equipped cabs, those being the tweeters are crossed over at way too high a frequency, often an octave or more, and the high pass filters have inadequate slope to provide adequate protection. IMO tweeters that don't work down to at least 2.5kHz and high pass filters that aren't at least 3rd order as about as useful as screen doors on a submarine.

Depending on the crossover circuit, if it has one, removing the load presented by the tweeter can cause damage to your amp. If you want to ditch the tweeter you need to eliminate all the associated crossover components as well to be safe.

Tweeters don't create hiss, they only reproduce hiss created by the electronics. Replacing the tweeter won't get rid of hiss.

Well , yeah, them too. I did say that it's an industry wide issue.