alexclaber

[quote name='Mr. Foxen' timestamp='1343815688' post='1755542']In the local venue that is a bowling alley, and with a big shiny walls theme, 4x12s work out better than combos for not sounding a mess, which I'm pretty sure is down to them being directional and not having as much highs/mids bouncing off the walls and being reverby.[/quote] I bet tall slim line-array-like cabs would work every better so you reduce floor and ceiling reflections and have wall reflections that sound more like the direct sound. I also think that acoustically difficult venues tend to work better with more linear sounding cabs because you're getting so much colouration from the room, and colouration upon colouration eventually turns into mud. Rather like how the more complex the chords you play on a guitar, the cleaner the tone you need - increasing the colour from the notes means you have to decrease the colour from the amp.

I'd have thought I'd have already said enough in my columns and on our website to get my view across and hopefully increase people's understanding of acoustics. [quote name='Musicman20' timestamp='1343778512' post='1755259']Aren't most high end pa type bass cabs just basically copied off bass cabs and tweaked[/quote] No, this couldn't be further from the truth - like way way WAY wrong! [quote name='Musicman20' timestamp='1343778512' post='1755259']I mean, is the perfect flat response tone even that interesting?![/quote] We're talking about musical instruments here. Put a great tone into a rig with flat response and you get great tone out. Simple. The absolutely MASSIVE point being missed here is that so-called 'flat response' and good polar response are two completely different things. Our much-delayed '69er isn't designed to have anything like 'flat response', it's designed to sound like the original 8x10" cab. However, we've designed it so that it sounds like that original 8x10" cab in every point of the room, onstage, off to the side, right up close, way far away, as much as is possible. The original 8x10" cabs have awesome tone but you only get that tone if you stand in a small selection of spots, because the polar response is inconsistent. Whether or not you want colouration from your bass rig, good polar response is always a good thing. The only exception is if you like to use controllable feedback a la Hendrix - but that's a pretty niche requirement. Good polar response means your cab sounds more consistent from venue to venue. Poor polar response means that in acoustically dead rooms your cab will sound more dull than in an acoustically live room. So if you soundcheck and get the perfect tone without the audience present, once the room fills up your tone will be too dull and boomy. A cab with good polar response will sound much more consistent in different room acoustics because the direct sound is much more similar to the reflected sound. So to repeat the main point - good polar response does not equal flat response. You can't design a cab for flat response without also aiming for good polar response (otherwise you only get flat response if you stand in the right place) but you can design a cab to have a distinctively coloured tone and still have good polar response.

[quote name='mrtcat' timestamp='1343681728' post='1753720']If it's aesthetics I totally agree as i think the rippled cab finish is awful and cheap looking.[/quote] If your reference point on Barefaced cabs' finish is based on older cabs, especially the early plastic cornered ones which were literally made in my spare time in my shed, then the current finish is nothing like that. Our cabs cost quite a lot more than when we started out (the rising cost of neodymium plus fancier models plus VAT) and the vast majority of customers now rave about how good they look despite the higher price. They still sound awesome and they're still very portable. But aesthetically, there has been massive progress - which shouldn't be surprising when you consider how everything about the business has changed!

Yes, it's always been like that! Reasons are thus: 1. Coaxial location provides more seamless integration, especially off-axis. 2. Front coax location causes the tweeter signal to lead the woofer signal so your ear hears the treble more clearly - BBE enhancers use this trick electronically. 3. The tweeter mount is sufficiently narrow to allow the woofer's output past unimpeded apart from the very highest treble output from the dustcap but that's where the tweeter has already taken over - in other words it works as an acoustic lowpass filter. 4. The Midget's cab is sized to control the woofer tightly so it can handle the same power as the Compact without over-excursion, therefore recessing the baffle further thus making the internal volume smaller and making the lows leaner and tighter isn't a problem. The Super Twelve's tweeter isn't coax for this reason (and on another subject a Super Twelve has much more bottom than two Midgets - it sounds as fat and deep as a Midget+Compact stack).

[quote name='charic' timestamp='1332584836' post='1590249']But to play devils advocate the case of Ed_S's shouldn't have reached the customer in the first place. [/quote] But do you think Ed's cab reached him via magic, or is there a chance it got thrown onto a van, dropped onto a depot floor, picked up with a forklift (and possibly driven into!) dropped onto a conveyor belt, dropped into a truck, thrown out of a truck onto another another depot floor, chucked into a van, and finally delivered to his home, and at some point in the process it might have been hit so hard that a joint broke and started buzzing, despite being built tough enough to handle years of gigging abuse and packaged pretty damn thoroughly?!

If you want a truly clean sound then a 300W valve amp won't even be as loud as an equally good 500W solidstate amp. The dirtier a sound you like, the fewer valve watts you can get away with.

Circle K are the ones I was alluding to - I've known Skip for ages and he and I are on the same page regarding strings and instruments (longer scales, balanced tension, simple electronics but great pickups etc etc). Check out his awesome Knuckle basses too! Glad to hear that you can put together balanced sets with Newtone - the Circle K are hybrid nickel/stainless which sounds and feels great but it's the balanced tension which is the long overdue paradigm shift.

There's a long story behind why we ended up with a Shuttle 6.0 - lots of amps work well with the Compact (as this thread shows!) just a question of matching up preferred tone(s), required loudness, size/weight and budget. Email [email protected] if you want specific assistance...

[quote name='thepurpleblob' timestamp='1330607924' post='1560243']I don't doubt you for a moment... but it's a substantial investment and I need to look at the options. Are your cabs off the shelf or is there a waiting time?[/quote] You did doubt me, that's what your first post was saying! No need to be nervous about going from 6x10" or 2x15" to 2x12", as you'd actually be going from ~650cc or ~550cc to 660cc volume displacement in the case of those particular cabs. There's about a month's wait at the moment.

There's no point us recommending cabs that won't do the job, we'd just end up losing a bunch on money on shipping when they get returned after a month! Other customers will confirm that they've come to us asking for cab X and we've told them it won't do what they want and we'll only sell them cab Y or nothing. A Super Twelve will play louder and fatter than your TE 15" combo plus extension 1x15" stack and will match your 2x10" plus 4x10" stack in those respects but with more punch. Volume displacement is what matters - you move air with cone area multiplied by cone excursion. Our cabs have much more cone excursion so they move more air with less cone area: [url="http://barefacedbass.com/technical-information/Volume-displacement.htm"]http://barefacedbass.com/technical-information/Volume-displacement.htm[/url]

Bridge the power amp - a homemade Y-cable with one speakon at the amp end splitting to two leads will work just fine. We can add an extra speakon but with the cost of shipping them back and forth it's probably not worth it when the Y-cable will work well (all our 8 ohm cabs now have two speakons to avoid these discussions in the future!)They'll handle the 1500 fine but you won't get any extra useful loudness over the 1000 - get the former if you're thinking you might want to also use it for PA duties in stereo.

This is what I said in my email about the Classic 450: "The TC amps have a lot of compression and filtering built in which you can't avoid (which makes them sound louder than their true wattage - 236W in the case of the Classic) - some love it, some hate it, so it's very much a personal thing!"

If it is blown then we can recone it for you. I'd be surprised if it is but I guess one has to finally fail - apart from a few woofers which were faulty from new and thus covered by Eminence's warranty, we've never had one die...

Comparing amp's loudness at equal gain & volume settings is utterly futile - whichever has the greatest dB gain at that setting will win, not the one with the most power. By that method every old TE amp was way louder than my old SWR/QSC rack - but push both to clipping (which required much more knob turning on the rack) and the 3000W rack rig unsurprisingly left the 300W TE amp in the dust. A Shuttle 9.0 is only 1.8dB more powerful than a Shuttle 6.0 - which is only a slight amount. It isn't like going from 50W to 350W, it's like going from 50W to 75W. So if the Reidmar is an honest 250W it won't be much quieter than the other more powerful micro-amps, especially if their ratings are less honest.

If DC alternates then it isn't DC anymore! And then if you do an FFT on that square wave you see that almost all of the increased power density is in the higher frequencies, which the inductance in the woofer's voicecoil blocks - so the amp might try to put out a square wave but a square wave isn't what flows.

I'm not talking about guitar clean, I'm talking about absolutely clean. Different thing entirely. Are you comparing two amps into the same cab? And do either of them meet stringent specs or are both the power ratings 'marketing specs'? Even if both amps have exactly the same power output at 0.1%THD, the valve one will allow you to push it to maybe many more %THD (maybe 20%) before it starts sounding anything other than clean, whilst the solidstate one could start sounding nasty (not obviously distorted but more edgy and harsh) at 1% THD. That means you can get much greater average power out of the valve amp than the solidstate amp, even if the peak power is basically the same.

That's exactly what I'd expect from two 30W guitar amps - the valve one plays louder before it starts sounding dirty because the way it clips is nicer to the ear. When I use the phrase 'absolutely clean' I'm taking about a sound that is miles removed from a typical 'clean' guitar sound.

You need the voltage to drive the current flow - you increase voltage and current flows in response, not the other way round. As impedance drops then current has to increase to maintain power output, hence the minimum impedance ratings and how amps don't consistently double max power as you halve impedance. If you want an absolutely clean sound then valve amps aren't any louder than solidstate amps of equal power. The success of the RH450/750 shows that you can get away with quite a lot of compression and valvelike distortion before many bassists consider the sound to be no longer clean - it doesn't appeal to me for most of my sound(s) and likewise I'm not a fan of valve amps for most of my sounds. Yes, a 200W valve amp can sound loud but you can hear it squashing the transients compared to an 800W solidstate amp when cranked up - whether you like that or not, that's up to you. Guildbass - have a look here for enlightenment: [url="http://barefacedbass.com/bgm-columns.htm"]http://barefacedbass.com/bgm-columns.htm[/url]

Yes, it's rot. P=VI V=IR Therefore: P=(VxV)/R Amps are tested with resistive loads so you can take R to be impedance. There are established standards which PA power amps adhere to for power measurements. Bass amps don't, presumably because the figures would be rather embarrasingly poor for most of them...

And yes, it's fine for home practice, just turn the amp down plenty! I've always preferred to practise through my gig rig rather than a little combo - removes an area of variability and gives you more time to get familiar with what all the knobs actually do to the sound.

MM: Email us! [email protected] That way we can more accurately ascertain if it's the best of our cabs for you, and then if it is whether a tweeter will be of benefit. Or indeed if you'd be better with something else entirely! S12 is currently £780 shipped. +£100 for a tweeter, +£35 for a silver cloth grill.

Pushing your cab right back towards the rear and side walls usually helps with the boundary reflection problems which Bill mentioned.

Two things I'd add - if you're playing in a rock band, do you need a tweeter for your tone? Possibly not... And if you're playing in a rock band you need a cab that can make full use of your amp's 600W output. The S12 can, whilst some of the other cabs being discussed can't - despite their higher prices they use inferior woofers which can't move as much air. Doesn't matter if you're in a quieter band but it sounds like you're not!

It isn't a clip light, it's a soft limiter AND clip light. It doesn't matter if it's lighting up, just ignore it! I think the Shuttles are great amps but that LED is a complete design fail - if only they'd set it to come on once you reach actual hard limiting (like the limiting on Markbass amps) then you'd never see it light except on the very loudest moments at your loudest gigs. Has it ever gone into protection and shut down?

From a manufacturing perspective, once you've made a power amp, a power supply, an input stage to the power amp and a casing (let alone a DI or any other features!), then the cost of adding some more preamp circuits and knobs is fairly minimal - so you'd have to sell a micro-power-amp for almost the same price as a complete micro-amp. And as not many get sold it would be prudent to charge a premium to compensate for either the increased production cost due to smaller volume, or the increased capital tied up in slow moving stock if you make them in higher volume production runs. Hence they remain a bit of a rarity!