Bill Fitzmaurice

You can get a recone, but it won't be cheap, and you'll still end up with a forty year old driver that, by today's standards, isn't all that good for electric bass.

I'd sell it as is. A replacement driver close to the capabilities of the original will cost you close to what the cab is worth.

I don't see any 410s on their site, nor any indication of what they use for drivers.

That's not a good thing. The Beta 10 is barely adequate for electric bass. With only 3mm xmax it's displacement limited to only about 50 watts. Many 2x12s will produce as much low end as a Beta 10 loaded 4x10.

You very well could have burned out the power transformer and a lot more. If you're very lucky you might have only blown a fuse.

Sealed or not a 15 doesn't have the dispersion of a 12. It may have less low frequency output than a ported 12, but the ported 12 is still more likely to distort at a lower power input. That said I'd rather matched 12s. You probably find that the 12 and 15 sound better together than either does alone, but that's the case with almost any cab pairing.

You want the cab with the wider midrange dispersion and lower excursion limited power on the top. In this case it's the 112. The the case of a 410/115 it's the 115.

What it means specifically could be just about anything. For decades Fender drivers were labeled 'Fender Special Design' and the only special about them was the label.

In the case of Eminence you tell them what you want for the basic frame/motor and a ballpark performance goal, so the conversation would start something like 'What do you have that's similar to the 2512'. Eminence will provide you with a few data sheets for the 2512 frame/motor with various cone, spider and voice coil options for you to choose from. If you see one you like they'll send you a sample for you to test. In most cases it won't be much different than the stock driver, nor any better. When Eminence introduces a new driver line they test dozens of versions, and the one they think is the best of the bunch is the one that ends up in the retail catalog. One notable exception is the 3012 family. I worked with quite a few OEM 3012s that had specs in between the 3012HO and the 3012LF. IMO they were better than either the 3012HO or LF for electric bass applications, and they did make their way into some cabs that I designed for manufacturers, including one voted 'Best New Speaker' by some sources.

Or other manufacturers over-rate theirs. In any event where the maximum output of a speaker is concerned the primary spec is xmax, not watts, so until manufacturers start revealing their xmax figures you simply cannot make a valid comparison between cabs.

If it is 2512 loaded that means it will take two of the Aggies to equal the output of one BFST. I'd say that it probably is 2512 loaded, as a Kappalite based driver would be at least 450w each, and they wouldn't miss out on the opportunity to advertise the new 212 as 900w.

Setting up a PA desk is different. The last thing you want is to have clipping at the input stage, so that procedure would be more or less correct, at least as far as the individual channels is concerned. However, a good desk would not have the 0dB setting the max, either on the individual channels or any of the outputs. 0dB would typically be at least 10dB below maximum. Also, you wouldn't start with both the desk outputs and the power amp attenuators at 0dB. Doing so might result in the input gains being too low for acceptable signal to noise ratio. A knowledgeable engineer uses the input LED readout to be sure that the applied gain puts the signal strength in the Goldilocks zone.

I don't know why they say that either. It has nothing to do with Class D.

Chinese gear using the name of a long defunct American brand. Nothing special.

Chances are that tone control is the same as the one in your bass, a simple high frequency shelving filter. You can change its knee frequency by changing the value of the capacitor, but nothing you can do will turn an inexpensive guitar combo into a capable bass amp.

This could be an example of because you can do something doesn't mean that you should.

I still have mine, but those aluminum heat retainers came off it before ever seeing a gig. One has to wonder if the designer had ever seen a heat sink, let alone understanding the concept.

You can't tell anything definitive by the position of the knobs, as there are many other variables, for instance his Fender J passives.

If an amp gets that hot and it doesn't have a decent fan it should. Even if it's not hot enough to cause short term damage it will probably cause long term damage. My Superfly was horrid, the aluminum handles/'heatsinks' didn't dissipate heat, they held it. I got rid of them, out the amp in a rack case with a 3" fan, no more heat.

There's no such thing as altruism in business. Offering amps and cabs that will still work with older gear is a business decision. It's not necessarily a bad decision, but if regulatory agencies were paying attention they wouldn't be allowed to put them in amps or cabs that their current rating isn't suitable for. They're not paying attention because it's a very small industry in the grand scheme of things.

That it will, and it will work as well as it ever has since its invention circa 1878. The issue is that for the last thirty years there has been a better option. If you're content with what you have, use it. If not, welcome to the 21st century. The only 'vibe' is to continue making sales. They don't want potential buyers to go elsewhere for the lack of having 1/4" inch jacks. They'd still offer banana jacks too if they thought that they could make more sales, and there wasn't the slight inconvenience of their having been banned in Europe.

SS amps hate very low impedance loads or shorted outputs, tubes hate very high impedance loads or no load. The one saving grace of a 1/4" output with tubes is that you can use a switching jack to short the output transformer secondary to prevent damage if there's no speaker plugged in to the amp. Fender has used that arrangement since the 50s. The Fender switch is on the Speaker jack, not the Extension Speaker jack, so if you plug into the extension rather than the speaker jack the switch remains closed and you get no output. I doubt there's a Fender owner who ever lived that didn't find that out the hard way, even to the point of thinking the amp was blown. Tubes are also almost immune to too low an impedance. Back when I didn't know any better I ran Fenders into 1 ohm loads all the time with no ill effect.

That's why I mentioned there was no SS when 1/4" were adopted. Tubes aren't bother by shorting the output. With the introduction of the first direct coupled SS amp whoever did so should have found a better connector, especially as early SS amps had no protection circuits. Many an output transistor and power supply died that way. Many more mics, effects, extension amps and even pickups died from being plugged into the speaker outputs. Where current is concerned Ampeg made an effort with the early SVTs, using five pin XLR connectors, but gave in to customer backlash when they wanted to use their SVT heads and cabs with different cabs and heads.

On average even the lightest speaker cables have 16 gauge conductors, whereas instrument cables tend to run around 24 gauge or lighter.

The only logical reason for doing that is if the cab being daisy chained off doesn't have dual speakons but does have one speakon and one 1/4", or if the second cab only has 1/4" and the first has both. But technically speaking you should run cables to the head from both cabs. With the PF500 one would have to be 1/4". Ampeg's jack choice is odd, as there are speakon/1/4" combination jacks. They should have used two of those rather than one speakon and one quarter inch.