alexclaber

Ignore the clip/limit light on the Shuttle until it's on practically all the time. It comes on at 2dB below clipping and you then need to ask for four times as much power from the amp before it actually hits (there's 4dB of compression on the next 6dB of input, which takes you to full power). There aren't any 10" bass drivers on the market that can handle the Shuttle 9.0's 500W @ 8 ohms cleanly, let alone 900W @ 4 ohms, so all a 4 ohm driver will get you is an increased risk of blowing it!

I started writing a response to this but it was getting very complicated and taking too long to make it comprehensible! I shall write something more detailed when I have more time. But for now look at these links: [url="http://barefacedbass.com/technical-information/speaker-non-linearity.htm"]http://barefacedbass.com/technical-information/speaker-non-linearity.htm[/url] [url="http://barefacedbass.com/technical-information/understanding-power-handling.htm"]http://barefacedbass.com/technical-information/understanding-power-handling.htm[/url] [url="http://barefacedbass.com/technical-information/Volume-displacement.htm"]http://barefacedbass.com/technical-information/Volume-displacement.htm[/url] Realistically I'd say the Midget has about three times the real world power handling (i.e. the power handling before the response becomes too non-linear to be useful) of the 2.5XL so with enough power behind it it'll play louder, fatter and deeper. If response stayed linear then with a 4% efficient cab (decent 2x10") then 50W in would get 2W out, 100W in gets 4W out, 200W in gets 8W out, 400W in gets 16W out etc. In reality I think the 2.5XL would start going gently non-linear at about 100W, clearly non-linear at about 200W and hit a brick wall of output at about 300W (so adding more power in gets no more power out, just more and more distortion), so 100W in gets 3.5W out, 200W in gets 5W out, 400W in gets 6W out, 600W in gets 6W out (and probably speaker death!) Midget is maybe 2.5% efficient so 100W in gets 2.5W out, 200W in gets 5W out, 400W in gets 8W out, 600W in gets 12W out. All numbers approximate but the comparison should be accurate enough to be indicative of actual behaviour in real world scenarios.

If you're after minimal colouration in lightweight form I'd be looking at Markbass, Acoustic Image and Euphonic Audio amps. Unfortunately they all have rather a lot of knobs but you can leave them all at zero!

The more accurate sounding a cab and the greater its linear power handling then the more it'll show up the deficiencies of an amp. Cheaper cabs tend to have much greater colouration at low levels and then as you turn things up they become non-linear much sooner which increases the colouration further, and the amp distortion can be hidden to a degree behind that colouration. We saw this with our own original models - the Big One was actually slightly louder than the Compact but most bassists needed a bigger amp to drive it because the Compact would allow you to occasionally clip your amp without nasty sounds whilst the Big One would show up that clipping due to its greater transparency.

If your GB had 3012s in it then maybe they weren't the original drivers? GB launched that model before the 3012 drivers came to market and the GB website explicitly states that the drivers are 2.5" voice coil (whilst the 3012s are 3" voice coil).

I'm just listening to 'Come Up And See Me' on our studio monitors and what stands out is that whoever played bass on it is just really deep in the pocket! Lots of muting and ghost notes, really strong pulse, mellow top but enough growl from where he's plucking, fairly worn in strings I suspect but nowhere near dead. I think to get that 'tone' it's much more about the playing than what you're using - I'd say it isn't 'pure Ampeg tube' sound, I'd say it's 'bassist in the zone laying it down' sound!

Indeed, they look very similar in pictures - side by side the difference is obvious, with the 3012 being much beefier looking and substantially heavier.

I have an idea for a clever bit of javascript on our website to help explain this, as all my word based explanations keep on failing! Our EMS cabs (Midget, Compact, Super Twelve, Super Fifteen) don't need any more power to reach a given loudness than any other cabs of similar size - there's a very direct inverse correlation between how large a bass cab is and how much power it needs to play loud. The bigger the cab (or stack of cabs) the less power you need. The reason people think our cabs need lots of power is because if you downsize (not downweight - new word there!) then you need more power to reach the same loudness. Also if you want to get the maximum loudness out of our cabs then you need lots of power because they can handle lots of power - but there is no downside to that ability to handle lots of power, it's only a benefit. So our S15 would need less power than your Peavey 410, our S12 would need a bit more, our Compact would need yet more and our Midget would need loads more, to reach whatever dB SPL you require. If you regularly hear your amp clipping then you're using all the power it has (it doesn't matter where the knobs are pointing). If you don't then you're not. If you can only go a little louder than you normally play before hearing clipping (distortion) then you have maybe 1-2dB of headroom. If you can go a fair bit louder than you've got maybe 3-4dB of headroom. If you can go almost twice as loud then you have maybe 6dB+ of headroom. So with a 150W amp, if you're hearing clipping then you're using all 150W. If you have 1-2dB of headroom then you're using about 100W. If you have 3-4dB of headroom you're using 50-75W. If you have 6dB+ of headroom you're using less than 30W.

[quote name='gjones' timestamp='1323207953' post='1460688']Wow, your drummer must be a BEAST if your ABM at full blast can't keep up! If I ever hear of an earthquake in Ilford I'll know what caused it.[/quote] It isn't the ABM that can't keep up, it's the cabs. More volume displacement is required, either through increased woofer excursion, increased cone area or both.

I thought that might have been the case!

I wouldn't put it like that - you'll never have a problem hearing a dual Compact stack! I would say that two Compacts generate a huge sound which tends to surround a band whilst a Midget+Compact sounds more like a lone Compact but with more of everything. (That may seem counter-intuitive but it's because when you stack multiple matching cabs up the lows increase quicker than the mids and highs because the lows acoustically couple, improving efficiency down there). Regarding the watts you need, it isn't about turning up loud, it's about having enough power that your amp can push the cabs hard enough to get the SPL in the lows that you need. Halve the size of the stack and you'll double the power you need to reach the same LF SPL - so if you were using more than half your amp's power before you halved the stack size then you won't be able to get the same LF SPL with the smaller stack. If you weren't then you'll be fine.

The £150 I spent on some ER15s a decade odd ago was the best money I've ever spent on anything music related.

Get a good bass and a good bass player in a very quiet room and it will sound good unplugged. You can then change in the tone in numerous ways (starting at the pickups and going via all the electronics to the speakers and then any miking) and that's your individual artistic decision which should be made based on the musical content. You don't need distortions to sound good, and absolutely pure uncoloured reproduction (or at least the closest to it that can be achieved) can sound utterly fantastic (a Big Baby T or Big Twin T comes closer to this than any other bass cab ever sold and the sound is glorious - but won't hide your mistakes or cover up your amp's weaknesses). Or it can sound awful. It's all about context and application.

IIRC it was quite popular to stack a Bergantino HT115 on a HT210 because the former had more mids and the latter more bottom (and both had tweeters so you could turn the lower one down). So which company started the 4x10" on 1x15" stack thing?

If you stack our cabs you should put the one with the widest dispersion and/or most treble output and/or lowest mechanical voltage handling on top - so Midget on Compact, S12 on Compact, tweetered cab on non-tweetered cab, etc. The 4x10" on 1x15" arrangement makes no sense - that doesn't stop it sounding good but it doesn't mean it wouldn't sound better and/or work better in difficult acoustics and/or be more reliable and/or be louder if it was designed with more engineering intelligence.

[quote name='Dolando' timestamp='1322784839' post='1456005']Thanks for the great analogy alex, think I get what you're saying....So, with the same 300 Watt amp will perform better running a 4x10 that say a 1x15? Or are you talking multiple cabs.[/quote] The 300W amp will usually be louder with whichever cab is biggest, so 8x10", 4x12", 6x10", 2x15", 4x10", 2x12", 1x15", 2x10", 1x12", 1x10", in descending order. If you're comparing ported and sealed cabs, the port makes the cab act a couple of sizes larger than a sealed version in terms of sensitivity. However, you also need to consider the real power handling - the mechanical (excursion limited) power handling, which is how much air the woofers can move before farting out - which is often vastly less than the quoted (thermal) power handling. Your 410HE can probably handle about 150W excursion limited, whilst a ported 4x10" of similar quality would handle about twice as much. Our Barefaced cabs handle a lot more power than the norm, hence if you have the power (which most modern amps do) then they behave like they're much bigger than they really are. Lots more info on all things amp and cab related in the link in my signature - especially the articles from Bass Guitar magazine.

The power of tweakery! P.S. Rather snowy, lots of talking animals? Awesome!

With those cabs option 1.

With two cabs you could do something cunning by separating them and putting the bass body in a null point but that's much more effort than using a notch filter! On which subject, you'll probably get the best results from the notch filter by taking out the dominant resonance of your bass, which will be the same frequency regardless of the room. So find out where it is once and then remember it for future applications. We're just tooling up some wedges for mechanically isolating and tilting bass cabs so they might help - cab on the floor for more boundary reinforcement but tilted up so you can hear the higher frequencies better.

I'd bet good money that in the real world it won't handle much more than 100W without distorting, and running an LH1000 (which is a truly powerful amp) into a stack with a 4x10" on top will lead to premature 15" death if things get loud: http://www.talkbass.com/forum/f15/did-i-kill-my-cabinet-hartke-lh1000-content-829409/

[quote name='Dolando' timestamp='1322666827' post='1454185']I would like to know if a 300 Watt 8 ohm head would struggle to get a decent volume out of a 500 Watt 8 ohm cab? Only need it be loud enough for a 5 piece band practice and small/medium size gigs.[/quote] This isn't how it works. Forget the power handling rating you see on bass cabs - it's always the thermal power handling rating and that tells you almost nothing of use. If manufacturers quoted honest sensitivity and mechanical power handling ratings (that being the limiting factor with bass guitar) then that would allow you to work out the loudness - but very few do! Basically the bigger the cab the less power you need to reach a given volume (SPL) level. It's possible to make a smaller cab as loud as a bigger cab but only by giving up some fatness/bottom, so if you have to EQ that back in then you end up using more power so size wins out when it comes to sensitivity. Think of it like sailing boats. The size of the cab is like how big your sails are. The power you have available is like how strong the wind is. The bigger your sails the faster the boat will go for a given amount of wind. If the wind is less you can get the same speed by using a bigger sail. Boat speed = loudness, sail size = sensitivity, wind speed = amp power. A lot of people assume that you'll need more power to push more speakers - but you don't hear speakers moving, you hear air moving. So the more speakers you have, the easier it is to get more air moving. If you look at Ampeg's range of cabs, on the whole the bigger the cab the higher the thermal power handling (because it has more/bigger speakers in it) but the less the power needed to reach a certain loudness because the bigger the cab the higher the sensitivity.

Hard to say what's wrong then without doing an impedance sweep and/or opening the cab up! Not heard of any problems with a Markbass head and Barefaced cab before, though most are using the 500W Class AB or the 800W & 1200W Class D heads.

Does it work ok at lower volumes? Have you had problems with any other heads into the S12T? Is the F500 brand new?

If it's for relatively quiet home use then I'd buy a single active studio monitor.

Actually I don't think they're tuned low - a bit of googling suggests a 50 Hz tuning... And they've never sounded low-tuned to me, too loud and too much of a fat thumpy sound for that!