alexclaber

[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwVL5RdEROM"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwVL5RdEROM[/url] Alex

I'd like to seen an SMPS instead of power transformer to lower the weight and then switchable rail voltage or variable number of tubes so you can get similar tube compression/break-up at quiet gigs as at loud ones. Alex

Before everyone gets too excited there are quite a few different sorts of coaxial speaker. Basically one family is those coax designs which use a separate woofer and tweeter with an electronic crossver. This tweeter can be mounted in front front of the woofer, centred within the woofer with a horn in front of the woofer, or within the woofer with the woofer cone used as a waveguide. This kind of speaker sounds very much like a conventional 2-way speaker but with better phase coherence due to the concentric sources. The other family of concentric speakers are the whizzer cone speakers, where a separate smaller cone is attached directly to the voice coil whilst the main cone is attached with a flexible joint which acts as a mechanical lowpass filter on the woofer whilst allowing the whizzer to produce more highs due to the lower moving mass. The response of these speakers tends to be somewhat peaky due to the break-up modes of the whizzer but they're a nice way of getting more highs from a basic speaker. Their big limitation with bass guitar is that no-one makes a whizzer cone speaker with good Xmax so although sensitivity tends to be high their excursion limited power handling and thus max LF SPL is very low. Alex

Is is a whizzer cone design like this? Alex

I'm pretty certain the casing is aluminium which would require specialist equipment to keep the aluminium from oxidising as it's welded. I recently had someone acquire a Barefaced Compact to supplement and possibly replace his Microbass. It's a bigger box but it is a very light and loud one cab solution. Alex

Originals. BritSkunk (tm). That's British Ska Funk for the uninitiated. Lots and lots of BASS! Alex

I like them, much better than anything I'm likely to get of my motley crew, but then we are Reluctant. Alex

Do you tend to anchor your thumb on the pickup? Alex

The fatness in a Stingray is lower than that from a J-bass which itself has lower voiced fatness than a P, whilst the dominant midrange character is voiced higher than that of a J-bass which itself has a higher centre to the midrange thang than a P-bass. A P-bass thus has an intense thick chunkiness to the sound whilst a Stingray has more depth to the bottom and and then a nastier edgier midrange higher up - RATM's first album is a good example of the tone. A P thunders along the bottom of the mix, above the kick and below where a heavy guitar sound might sit, whilst a Stingray adds fatness below everything and then punches and growls above many guitar sounds. Alex

Same that happened to Tobias, Steinberger and countless others - they were bought by Gibson. Kiss of death. Alex

Something else I noticed last night - you cannot believe the amount of bottom that the Marseer, U5, PLX & Big One can produce. It's not overblown by any means but it's there when you want it. I was laying down some reggae-esque lines and shifted my right hand from over the pickups to over the end of the neck and the fundamental output leapt through the roof. Like stomping on a good octaver pedal. Fat with a capital Ph. Alex

[quote name='Mr. Foxen' post='426673' date='Mar 5 2009, 08:55 PM']Guessing thats home stereo, thought all your cabs were 'hi-fi'.[/quote] I don't tend to think of them as hi-fi because if they were then they'd all sound identical! Also people tend to associate 'hi-fi' sounding bass cabs with the likes of SWR which have tons of tweetery treble and not a lot of midrange - that '80s sound - or they think of hi-fi sounding cabs as being transparent which too easily becomes the pejorative 'sterile' or lacking balls. So I'd be more inclined to say the cabs are accurate with reasonably even response across their passband and equally importantly exhibit lower distortion than others. The cabs with the midrange drivers have a noticeably wider bandwidth (both higher and lower) but they still don't go high enough to listen to music through them without noticing a lack of sheen on the top end but they are incredibly low distortion so the addition of a tweeter would make them very high fidelity. Much as I like clean bass sounds I also like dirty bass sounds, and anyway a lot of the clean bass sounds I like are very big and aggressive, not at all pretty. I think there's a tendancy amongst rockers to think that modern 'boutique' bass cabs can't bring the rock and that may be the case for some but it isn't for these. At some point I may get some t-shirts printed - a "Barefaced - Louder Than Lemmy" one for the rockers and a "Barefaced - Free Your Inner Afro" one for the funksters. Alex

Don't follow anyone! Just spend some time messing around with the bass without any accompaniment - see what riffs appear, see if any lead into any others, then call one a verse, one a chorus and make the guitarist and drummer follow you! If you have any money that you would have spent on strings, see if there's a teacher that will take it off you in exchange for some wisdom and direction. Alex

Badges were ordered a couple of weeks ago, must chase them up! Weighed the rack and cab on some proper scales this morning - almost dead on 47lbs for each of them. Slightly heavier than expected but not bad for a 6x10" killer. The cab does feel weirdly light though because of its size and when being pulled along on its casters it skips and jumps over bumps due to its lack of mass. Alex

Having found that the Big One doesn't need much power to get loud, I have also found that it can handle utterly incredible power without distortion. QSC PLX 3002 bridged into it for over 2000W of power - during a break in rehearsal I conducted some full power tests and had clear the room to do so. Took the amp all the way to clipping with both fingerstyle and slap, going down to low B. Was so loud I couldn't stay in the room for long despite wearing ER15s, went into the corridor and shut the door and continued to try to abuse it. Insanely loud yet still clean, I swear no drummer could overpower this cab, no way. Crossover components didn't blow and still felt cool to the touch. Bandmates could clearly hear it outdoors from the other side of the building with a number of closed doors between us. Cab sounds noticeably smoother, fatter and less aggressive with the new crossover but still has tons of clarity. The switch does make a difference to the highs but it's only really audible with slap, however my strings are getting on for a year old. Absolute doddle moving it with the tiltback casters - put my rack on it and rolled it all the way. Need to get it on some scales and test the weight - it does seem lighter than my rack but I'm sure that can't be possible. Hopefully my local post office will let me check that today. I think some players will like a tweeter as well but they'll be few and far between. Once I've tested the response I can design a switchable tweeter to have as an option. Alex

New crossover is in! Briefly tested with some Chilis and Elastica, off to band practice later. Have put together a bridging cable so I shall find out if >2000W RMS (150 volt peaks) is enough to blow up the crossover. Will also report back on how it sounds. Could hear the effect of the switch with music, not sure how obvious it'll be on bass guitar... Alex

[quote name='EBS_freak' post='429544' date='Mar 9 2009, 05:04 PM']...but the US have moonshine.[/quote] True dat. But a 16 fl oz. pint is just so girly. Alex

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' post='429528' date='Mar 9 2009, 04:47 PM']Even better: you'll get just as drunk after quaffing two pints as you will with one quart.[/quote] But you'll get more drunk on two British pints than you will on two US ones! Like our watts, they are better. Alex

[quote name='stevie' post='429495' date='Mar 9 2009, 04:05 PM']What you are saying is that if you increase driver size from 10” to 18” and then take that 18” driver and stick it in a box designed for the 10” speaker you are not going to gain much from the driver’s extra size? Well, that really is a bit of a doh statement and I can’t for the life of me figure where you are going with it. The bigger driver will clearly need a bigger box. How does this relate to driver size and fs?[/quote] Because that is the kind of thing that many bass cab makers do all the time! Look at the AccuGroove Whappo Grande where they put a 21" driver in a cab that would perform better with a good 15". Look at all those 18"s that would perform better with a 15" in there. And so on. Fs on its own does not matter. You also need Vas and Qts to have decent idea of how the driver will perform in a typical box and a larger driver's higher Vas will usually demand a much larger box than the layman would expect or be willing to carry. Alex

I've played a fretless 4 that sounded fantastic and I think the recorded sound on BSSM which is predominantly Wal is fantastic. Are they really that expensive compared to the price of a Fender in 1960? Alex

But if you double the cone area you also increase the suspension size by ~1.4 and thus reduce the compliance so it makes less difference than you suggest, all else being equal. And more importantly once you load that driver into a cab you raise the Fs due to Vas being greater than the box volume. As Vas is proportional to Sd (if everything else remains the same) then the larger the speaker the more Fs will be raised by loading it into a cab of fixed size, so what you gained by using a larger driver for the lower free air resonance is lost once the speaker interacts with the enclosure. Which brings us back to my oft repeated point that nominal diameter is a very poor indicator of tone or performance. Alex

Definitely needs to be airtight because otherwise the compression and rarefaction caused by the driver's movement will result in hissing/whistling as air is blown out of or sucked into the cab. Alex

[quote name='51m0n' post='429235' date='Mar 9 2009, 12:01 PM']That rocks, is it me or is she quoting another of her tracks through this??? Something damned similar to one of hers any way.[/quote] My thought exactly - something off Plantation Lullabies. Fantastic playing! Alex

The cross-firing and upwards firing woofers would improve dispersion but the downwards facing woofer is a v bad idea and the internal volume is hopelessly compromised. Could work ok as a guitar 3x10" though. Alex

I could be wrong but from the front it looks very much like a Celestion BN12-300S8 - does the back look like this? [url="http://professional.celestion.com/bass/pdf/BN12-300S8.pdf"]http://professional.celestion.com/bass/pdf/BN12-300S8.pdf[/url] Alex