alexclaber

[quote name='chris_b' post='518150' date='Jun 19 2009, 10:21 AM']I think you just answered your own question![/quote] Yep, but with a caveat that what sounds nice in one place might not sound so nice in another. Get a long lead and walk round the stage and as much of the venue as you can reach to check that you're not improving the sound for yourself but making it worse for your bandmates/audience. Tilting cabs up is usually a good idea, gets more midrange and treble up to your ears, but beware of too much tilt if you're in a venue with low ceilings. Alex

[quote name='escholl' post='517784' date='Jun 18 2009, 08:17 PM']as someone who does know all the tech stuff, i can tell you still that the only way to judge and amp really, is to play it at volume. most manufacturer's specs are dubious and/or meaningless at best -- and even if they weren't, amps and speakers are such complex things that it would be nearly impossible to qualitatively evaluate them, nevermind analyze all that data.[/quote] I agree. The most important thing is to actually ignore all the silly specs which abound, they're not only a distraction they're misinformation. Even some weight specs are way out (of date, Epifani!) Alex

[quote name='bigjohn' post='517607' date='Jun 18 2009, 05:23 PM']I am Mr Irony sometimes Well I was going to start by cutting out all the <40hz. That Alembic thing does look interesting but it's a bit pricey innit![/quote] An easier solution might be to find a power amp with a highpass filter in - or use an fmod between your preamp and power amp. And then roll the tone knob off on your bass for the lowpass requirements. [url="http://store.hlabs.com/pk4/store.pl?view_product=10"]http://store.hlabs.com/pk4/store.pl?view_product=10[/url] The Superfilter is hideously expensive for what it does. Cheap compared to their basses though! Alex

[quote name='bigjohn' post='517565' date='Jun 18 2009, 04:48 PM']I'd be happy with two knobs, one a sweepable high pass, and one a sweepable low pass. I don't need any other EQ as my pre-amp has low, mid (with a mid range freq selector) treble, and a graphic EQ on it. That's plenty.[/quote] [url="http://www.alembic.com/prod/sf2.html"]http://www.alembic.com/prod/sf2.html[/url] There has to be quite a bit of irony in owning a pair of the widest bandwidth cabs on the market but then wanting to bandpass them! What frequencies are you looking to have the filters set at? Alex

Don't do it! If you want to be able to mess with their tone independently then I'd use a stereo graphic EQ but I can't think why you'd want to. As soon as you stop the cabs working in unison you're cutting your sensitivity and power handling significantly and once you get more than about 10' away the wavefronts will be pretty much combined whatever you do. Alex

Exactly! However the upside of overdriven/distorted sounds is that they usually cut through the mix better due to having more midrange, which means you don't need as much power to get heard. Exceptions might be if the distorted sound you're using is too similar to your guitarist's sound, in which case it's quite easy for his sound to mask yours, hence you turn up more and more and release the magic smoke. Also if you're going for dirtier sounds then you're less likely to hear the complaints from your speakers as they run into mechanical (over-excursion) problems. The only time I've managed to damage any bass guitar speakers was when running lots of effects through a single Acme Low-B2 - impossible to discern the over-excursion moans amongst all the synth and fuzz and octaver noises. I used to regularly damage my old hi-fi speakers at Uni when turning them up too much at parties - I think the surrounds/spiders got pulled a bit out of shape due to over-excursion but I always found they recovered after being used more gently afterwards. Sadly high performance pro sound drivers are produced to much tighter tolerances than old hi-fi speakers (these were early 70s EMI ones) and so damage is more likely to be permanent. Alex

Yep, I'd try to find a 4 ohm 2x10" that contains two 8 ohm drivers wired in parallel. Then you can rewire it to series and get a 16 ohm load which will give equal power distribution between all the drivers in the 6x10" stack. Alex

[quote name='Kongo' post='516782' date='Jun 17 2009, 07:22 PM']How did you learn all of this?[/quote] Just picked it up over the years! I did do a mechanical engineering degree so I like to know how stuff works. But one of my first questions on The Bottom Line (email thing for bassists, before forums existed) was what can I do to get my 30W combo heard in a metal band... Alex

It's complicated. Basically your speakers have two completely independent limitations. The first is the thermal limit which is the ability of the voice coil to dissipate heat. Bear in mind that a typical loudspeaker is only about 2% efficient, so if you put 500W into a voice coil then 490W of heat will come out of it. The second is the mechanical limit, or how far a speaker can move without damage. Brief bursts of energy above your thermal limit will not cause a problem because it takes a small amount of time for the voice coil to heat up. So what matters is your average power, taking into account the varying power coming from your amp as you play (anything between zero watts when you're playing a rest and roughly twice the rated power when you hit a really loud note and take the amp right to its limits). If you're playing with little EQ, no compression and no distortion then you're unlikely to ever reach a cab's thermal limits, even with an amp rated at far more power output than a cab's power handling. The more compression or distortion you use, the greater the average power and the greater the risk of thermal damage. It's still rarely a problem though. What can be more of a killer is if you're also adding lots of bass boost, to get more bottom from a cab that doesn't naturally have much down there. This not only raises the the total power output (doubling it for every 3dB of bass boost) but it also raises the ratio of average to peak power (just as compression and distortion do). The more common failure method for bass guitar drivers and direct radiating subwoofers is mechanical failure. There are a few reasons for this: Firstly it only takes one really loud low frequency peak to kill your speaker. Secondly, too many players assume that because it's a bass cab you can crank up the lows, turn up the volume and everything will be fine because their cab is rated at more than their head. And thirdly, too many players think they can now turn up to a gig with a smaller rig than their guitarist and it'll be fine. It might be, but only if you appreciate that it has limits! Alex

The angled thing acts as an acoustic lowpass filter, so you really only get lower mids and lows from the side speakers, which fattens up the sound and compensates to a degree for the cab having less deep bottom due to its small size. Alex

[quote name='phsycoandy' post='515951' date='Jun 16 2009, 11:54 PM']Alex, Im sure all this thermal rating stuff is perfectly valid etal, but all us guys want to know is how the f@ck does it sound in practice[/quote] In practice most cabs totally wimp out if you actually hit them with their rated power. That's one of my points. The other one was that because a cab has a high power rating it doesn't mean it needs that much power - in fact as I just said it will rarely actually handle that power in the lows. I have a 14 day trial period on the cabs. Generally when people talk about a tighter sound what they actually mean is less bottom, and the 410L is tiny for the number of woofers in there, so not much depth to the lows. The Compact certainly goes deeper than that. Sometimes however a lack of tightness is due to cabs being undersized and thus boomy, which the Compact certainly isn't. Alex

[quote name='steve-soar' post='515939' date='Jun 16 2009, 11:44 PM']Chill dude, it was the 80's. Digital all the way. [/quote] Ah, that'll be digital before they worked out how to make it sound good then. Not that I'm some sound obsessed speaker designing audiophile weirdo or anything... Alex

Fire-damaged Avalon U5. Doom-heavy and if some of the innards are burnt out so should be the tone. Alex

Does anyone else find the mixing/mastering horribly weedy? Sonically it's not a patch on Aja. Alex

NS-10s are an acquired taste. If you try to mix on them having never used them before you will end up with a disastrous mix with the kick hideously loud and the snare rather absent. Get to know them and they're pretty good but they never sound nice. I wouldn't want to listen to music on monitors all the time, they tend to get rather wearing. I would however like enough space and an excuse (and a substantial windfall) to get a pair of these: [url="http://www.meyersound.com/products/studioseries/x-10/"]http://www.meyersound.com/products/studioseries/x-10/[/url] Alex

[quote name='doctorbass' post='515593' date='Jun 16 2009, 06:52 PM']Fair enough......which cab would you pair with the V4BH to get the best out of it? Im talking P Bass with flats, blues/soul/r&b sounds....[/quote] Well I gather this is a rather nice and stupidly loud rig: [url="http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?s=&showtopic=47013&view=findpost&p=515652"]http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?s=&sho...st&p=515652[/url] Alex P.S. However I am clearly not at all unbiased!

In my experience and based on real specs aluminium cone speakers are often actually less sensitive than similar quality paper cone ones. But if the Hartke has a better speaker than the Ashdown it'll make more difference than the wattage difference, especially as the relatively feeble 15"s you find in combos can't handle much power. Alex

[quote name='doctorbass' post='515473' date='Jun 16 2009, 04:54 PM']So having said that, would you say that the 410HE is more suited to a 100w valve head (Ampeg V4BH) than the HLF?[/quote] Yes I would, but I'd only recommend it for quieter fat sounds or louder overdriven rock sounds. It's not a rig for fat high SPL bottom. Alex

You do have a world of choices and few of them bad ones. If you're aiming for something smaller/lighter how light do you really want? Big difference between a Shuttle and an M6! Would you want something that can drive one cab loud enough to keep up with your drummer or would you always take both cabs? If the latter then the Shuttle 3.0 is plenty of power, or even the older Eden micro-amps. I'd recommend checking out the Shuttle 6.0 - I really liked how it sounded with the Compact, so much so that I almost bought one. Alex

WHSmith's or Borders tend to have at least one. Alex

They're completely different designs. The HLF uses high excursion woofers with little midrange, lower sensitivity and higher excursion limited power handling in a large ported enclosure, whilst the HE is basically half an SVT 8x10" - a small sealed cab with much lower excursion limited power handling, less bottom and more midrange. The HLF is definitely tuned higher than 28Hz and the HE isn't 'tuned' as it's a sealed cab. I've noticed some bassists buy the 410HLF hoping for the classic Ampeg sound in a smaller box than an 8x10". Unfortunately it sounds nothing like it. The 410HE does sound like half an 8x10" but because it has half as many speakers and doesn't have ports to help out on the bottom like most 4x10"s it can't move all that much air before starting to distort. Fine at lower SPL or if you're more midrange focused in your tonal leanings. And unfortunately you can't rewire a 4 ohm cab to 8 ohms or vice versa! Alex

If you can get that P-Audio driver for much less than £200 then it will do doom-ish lows at a good price. As will all 21"s the midrange is hopeless but you don't want it for that. At 44lbs for the driver alone the load-in should be as painful as you're hoping for! Alex

Greenboy has lots of the data here: [url="http://www.lowdownlowdown.com/greenboy/DL/WinISD/"]http://www.lowdownlowdown.com/greenboy/DL/WinISD/[/url] Nothing will move more air for the money/weight than the 3015LF. If you can find some pipe that's ~10" in diameter then you can use one of the exisiting 10" holes as a port. In fact if you can find a bigger pipe as well then you could put it behind one of the 10" holes at the top to act as a sub-enclosure and then chuck a guitar driver in there for your mids. Alex

If you're expecting to push your rig hard then I'd look at amps with decent limiting and high pass filtering and I'd be more reassured by having something designed to handle subwoofer duty in a big PA, not something that DJs will use to push cheap 'mains'. Crown Xti aren't much more expensive and are light and well specced. QSC are more pricey but still great. Yamaha have some similar ranges too. It is more expensive to design an amp to fit in 1U than 2U and what's the point if it ends up twice as deep front to back? Alex

It entirely depends on why the Ampeg rig is being sold! Weight? Size? Tone? Money? Alex