Stub Mandrel

Any correlation between Chris' hand movements and te vass sound appear entirely coincidental...

Yes and maybe. If you wire two in series they may work at 9V, but these £2 cheapies rely on the internal resistance of the power source to limit current.

Oh no it doesn't! 😁

A Honer B2 is the equivalent of a Steinberger Spirit these days, which retail at about $400. We live in glory days of inexpensive basses.

To me, expensive means paying more than you need to. So I'm firmly at £1,000 as that's where the law of diminishing returnd really kicks in. These days you can buy a bass perfectly capable of the standard required for any stage in the world for comfortably under £1k. I paid over that for a couple of basses and a couple that would have been more new. The extra pays for things that aren't actually necessary that take them into the realm of being luxury items where you choose to pay more. 25 years ago or more, you had to pay proportionally a lot more to get something of the quality you can get for £500-£750 these days.

Thanks. We're home now and she's sleeping at last.

Excellent, hope it's a banger!

It's also a demonstration that although high mass is different, different doesn't automatically mean better.

A few things have got in the way! I'm sitting next to my partner in hospital, she broke her humerus. Hopefully heading home soon, but as I will be at hers* for about a week things are on hold! *I'm not sure she would appreciate me setting everything up in her lounge.

Looks a cool venue. How did you tame the drums on stage? Surely you didn't actually get a drummer to tone it down?

On selling tickets, seems I missed out on a banger of a gig by my brother's covers band & support on Friday. 110 capacity, the sold 100 tickets at £8 in advance and kept back 10 for the night. They worried about struggling to sell them.

This is all fascinating.

This is interesting. Apparently in the early years those exported to the uk had the spelling 'Hofner' to downplay their German origin at a time when that was disadvantageous in the UK. In English the nearest equivalent of ö is œ. I posted a link to the German pronunciation above, closer to 'herfner' than 'hoffner' although the latter is almost universal in the UK. Œ is often pronounced as an 'e' in the UK (compare 'Phœbe'), I suspect Hugh Heffner's original family was closer to 'Höfner'.

Luvvit!

Nice lateral thinking.

Thanks Bill lots of useful stuff there. As far as I can tell the transducer in the horn is pretty well aligned with the main driver, so I'll experiment with changing its polarity to see what happens.

I've got another thread about testing microphones. I bought a cheap Behringer reference microphone and it seems to work pretty well using it with REW to get a reference trace from my cheap Thomann powered speaker (EQ set flat, 4 10 second frequency sweeps at 0.5m in a large room with plenty of soft furnishings and curtains closed). I asked a query there which has gone unanswered that I wonder of the likes of @stevie or @Phil Starr can answer. REW also produces phase plots, and the one for the speaker is below. It shows several phase reversals, mostly well beyond hearing range. One just above 100hz probably relates to the reflex port and is to be expected. Another is just below 2kHz and is accompanied by a dip in the SPL trace. My question is: Does this make it likely my tweeter is wired back to front, and could reversing the wiring help eliminate the dip? Any other observations welcome (yes I know this is not a very flat trace at all, although it sounds fine and works well as a monitor).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Iogrk4uDJko

Yes... I associate her with a mustang too.

Another thought .. here's the speaker curve using the reference mic. It also shows a phase curve, There are two significant phase reversals. One where the bass starts rolling off, no doubt due to the reflex port and relatively unimportant. The other is just below 2Khz and associated with a dip in output. I assume this is the crossover frequency. Is it likely that I could improve the response by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow, sorry, the tweeter?

Just saw this on Facebook from Macca: It is very sad to see Höfner go out of business. They have been making instruments for over 100 years, and I bought my first Höfner bass in the sixties. I have loved it ever since. It’s a wonderful instrument to play: lightweight, and it encourages me to play quite freely. It also offers pleasing variations in tone that I enjoy. So, commiserations to everyone at Höfner, and thank you for all your help over the years. - Paul

I've done my first test using the ECM8000 reference mic and my SM58. The problem is the advice stresses not changing the gain, but the sensitivity of the ECM8000 (condensor running of 48V phantom power) is over 15dB greater than the SM58 which means that just isn't feasible, I had to turn the gain up. Does this look right/plausible/feasible?

Dong

Went to the Earl Haig jam on Monday hosted by James Oliver Band. Some interesting new faces, some youngsters (boy drummer & girl bass player) and a band who looked like four brothers and plenty of familiar ones - yook a couple of mates who hadn't been before and were happy just to see what the situation is. Played some bass for Ken Wood with Mark Kemlo on drums. It was a nice Trace Elliot through Ashdown cab, but the previous bass was active and despite fiddling as I played I wasn't loud enough. Still had fun, first was a long, slow blues, so I based around a nice simple riff I stole from Leo Lyons who no doubt found it somewhere else... next was Crossroads, hard to really channel Jack Bruce (😂) when you're struggling to hear yourself, but folks said it was OK (if quiet).

Do you have an Elf? My brother's sounds fine through a Portaflex 15.