alexclaber

Phil's explanation is correct but it's easily misunderstood because it's referring to ALL loudspeakers. If you look at the small subset that represent bass guitar drivers then there's plenty of room for 8"s to go lower than 15"s and 12"s to have more mids than 10"s. Look at SWR - their Henry the 8x8 is well renowned for having more bottom than all their cabs bar possibly the Big Ben. Ampeg - the 410HLF has easily the deepest lows out of everything they produce. Acme - lowest response on any cab on the market and they use 10"s, and now a 12". Barefaced - 12" Big Baby goes way lower than 15" Compact. Bergantino - HT210 has deeper lows and less mids than HT115. Eden - 210XST has more bottom and less midrange than 115XL. A more consistent thing is that any conventional cab (i.e. woofer only or woofer plus tweeter) which has particularly deep fat lows is likely to be subdued in the midrange.

[quote name='chris_b' post='1120973' date='Feb 9 2011, 09:08 AM']The "Brit" sound started in the mid 60's when referring to guitar amps and the difference between the rocky/dirty sound of British amps like Marshall etc and the super clean tone of American amps like Fender. I've never heard the term "Brit" sound used in the bass world before.[/quote] Exactly!

An interesting thing about the Walkabout cabs is that they have a passive radiator and a tuned port! Normally with PRs you need much more Vd from the radiator than the woofer so they're often larger in area. I guess in this case it wasn't big enough so there's a port helping out too. Complicated! How an enclosure is sized, shaped, damped and ported can have a pretty huge effect upon the midrange and treble tone. If you got a 10" and 15" with proportionally similar T/S specs and similar cone/suspension construction and then compared the two, one in a guitar style enclosure (no damping, unengineered shape) and one in a hi-fi style enclosure (thorough damping, acoustically designed shape), you'd notice the enclosure makes more difference to the sound than the speakers' nominal diameter.

Except that I've heard plenty of Peavey 2x10"s and 4x10"s with more bottom and less midrange than many Peavey 1x15"s and 2x15"s. And so on and so forth... It's still bollocks. The old rule of thumb only holds up if you ignore the numerous exceptions - but they really are too numerous to ignore.

2" and 3". And the beaming limits bit only holds completely true when the drivers are operating pistonically throughout their bandwidth, which would only be the case for those with incredibly rigid and self-damped cones, i.e. not bass guitar drivers! [url="http://barefacedbass.com/technical-information/speaker-size-frequency-response.htm"]http://barefacedbass.com/technical-informa...cy-response.htm[/url]

[quote name='lemmywinks' post='1115326' date='Feb 4 2011, 02:22 PM']Cheers Alex![/quote] No problem! I'm not posting because I want to sell cabs, they sell themselves, but this 'flat earth society' is just silly. Go back 20 years and I guarantee the same comments were being made about 300W+ amps. And now what's the norm?

[quote name='lemmywinks' post='1115254' date='Feb 4 2011, 01:39 PM']Which ones, if you don't mind me asking? Not being funny, i'm genuinely interested as i want one![/quote] The new Acme Low-B112, the new AudioKinesis TC112, the new Barefaced Big Baby and the barely any older Barefaced Midget. Notice a theme? There may be others too! [quote name='Musicman20' post='1115280' date='Feb 4 2011, 01:53 PM']I just don't see the point. More volume? Get more speakers. I like to be careful so Id never push an expensive 1x12 with masses if power.[/quote] The point of all the examples is to allow you to achieve your preferred tone and loudness with a smaller cab without it dying mid-gig. All the examples have different design goals and different sounds but all can handle big power if you need every last dB SPL. And there's nothing stopping you using more than one of these cabs. Comparing this approach to using a large traditional stack powered by a valve head is almost literally comparing apples and Oranges!

To add some perspective to this, in 1969 the Ampeg SVT was launched and it required two 8x10" cabs to handle its 300W output. Before that appeared we were putting 200W into a two 4x12"s with the biggest Marshall bass rigs. And valve watts or s/s watts put the same demand on the drivers, even though the former sound louder. Over the passing decades amplifer power has continued to rise as has the amount of power bassists typically use with a cab of any given configuration. By 2000 plenty of bassists were happy matching up a 300W amplifer with a 1x12". Why is it then such a crazy suggestion to put 500W into a 1x12" eleven years later? A decade ago it was unheard of to get a 150mph family saloon that could exceed 40mpg in normal use. It's called progress.

[quote name='JTUK' post='1115021' date='Feb 4 2011, 10:32 AM']If it was a good 500 watts then the 12" would jump...or it was a bloodsucking cab which I would think would be lacking in tone. There is no new physics here, no new laws invented, IMO.[/quote] You don't have to invent new laws or circumvent physics for a single 12" to handle 500W. Not only are there plenty of high-end PA 12"s that can handle 500W, there are four 1x12" bass cabs on the market which can quantifiably handle 500W amplifiers without problem and whose tone is greatly appreciated by those that own them. Obviously all those bassists could be deluded...

[quote name='phil.i.stein' post='1114672' date='Feb 3 2011, 10:42 PM']is there anything that will deliver down to 20 hz ? for synth/dubstep tones[/quote] You don't need to do that low for those sounds, and I doubt 99% of clubs playing dubstep do. The best PA rigs will be managing strong output about down to around 35Hz, a handful may go a bit lower.

Not unless you really push it to extremes. Most octavers don't track very well below A so you're unlikely to get much really low going on, and much of the sound from an octaver is the extra harmonic stack all an octave lower, not the fundamental of the octave down note. What's the pedal? You'll see the cone moving tons and then hear the increasing distortion well before damage occurs.

[quote name='LawrenceH' post='1114096' date='Feb 3 2011, 04:28 PM']This is an important point that often gets lost when people are talking about doubling wattage or similar. The whole '3dB being the lower limit of detection for changes in loudness' only really applies when you're talking about a sound in isolation - it makes a far more noticeable difference in clarity when comparing multiple sounds together. Playing around with multichannel recording mixes I've found even 0.5dB in the right place can make a difference in a decent monitoring environment, though admittedly playing live that kind of subtlety will be lost.[/quote] Absolutely! And I've heard that "3dB being the smallest detectable change" quote a lot and, frankly, it's wrong - in most situations 1dB difference is perfectly audible. When mixing in the studio the difference when knocking 1dB off here and there from the guitar, to let the bass through in one spot and the vocals through in another can be radical! Likewise just a little tweak of the guitarist's EQ at a gig can do the same - as can changing to an amp with identical tone that can put out about 50% more real power. If the increase in power is much less than that but it's more audible than before then the improvement is due to a change in tone. An interesting point to bear in mind is that if you practise at home through your gig rig, you're likely to be putting out 60-80dB, which from ~100Hz upwards is going to equate to somewhere around 0.00025-0.025W with a small-ish bass cab (you'll need to turn up the lower lows and thus demand more power due to your ears' deficiencies but still less than 1W will be required).

I used to practise at home in a terraced house using a 900W/ch power amp (definitely more powerful than the Streamliner if spec'ed the same way) and the neighbours never complained. When I was younger still I used to practise using a 20W all-valve combo and they did.

[quote name='wateroftyne' post='1114047' date='Feb 3 2011, 04:02 PM']900 watts is bloody loud, mind, but if it's there...[/quote] It's only bloody loud if: 1. There's enough gain in the system to reach full power for how hard you're playing and how 'hot' your bass is. 2. It's plugged into a speaker! 3. That speaker has enough sensitivity and power handling to turn that electrical power into a large amount of acoustic power. A good 1x12" will be about 2% efficient, a good 4x10" will be about 5% efficient (in the upper bass to mid mids - for low bass that much efficiency requires huge horn subs). So 500W in (assuming an 8 ohm nominal load) equals 10W of sound out, and 900W in (4 ohm nominal) equals 45W of sound out. And that's in a perfect world with enough of both varieties of power handling (ha!) and zero power compression. All the rest of the power (490W in the case of the 1x12") comes out as heat. Good for those unheated winter rehearsal rooms...

I like these big power micro-heads, they work extremely well for getting almost every last dB SPL out of certain cabs. Also, it should be noted that the difference between 400W and 900W is not terribly large, once you figure in power compression it's less than 3dB. Those extra few dB can make the difference between being slightly lost in the mix and sitting just right but it isn't a substantial increase at all. If you want to know what 3dB difference in loudness sounds like, next time you have an outdoor gig stand 10' from your rig. Then stand about 15' away. That's about 3dB difference in loudness. Not a lot is it?

Note that it won't really be the extra wattage from the amp (due to the 4 ohm nominal load) that makes things louder when you add a second cab, it'll be the increased sensitivity (3dB more) and the increased excursion-limited power handling (another 3dB), so if you were running out of clean lows with just the one cab you'll get 6dB more of them with two. And 6dB more is quite a lot louder - in the bass region at typical loudness it equates to almost twice as loud, due to the way our ears work. So to recap - you're not louder because you have 200W instead of 140W, you're louder because you have twice as much 'speakerage'!

No problem at all with 5/6 strings. Confusingly it's the tone you like and the loudness you need that determines the required low frequency ability of the cab, much more than what your lowest string is tuned to - hence all the questions we ask before we sell anything!

Phil(?) The biggest advantage the Midget has over all the conventional 1x12"s is that it has a much heftier woofer and larger port so it can handle far more power without distortion - thus you can use one cab in a loud band. The GS112 is a very well proven and sweet sounding design but everyone rocking out with one seems to need a pair. There are plenty of other differentiators - see the website! Compared to an Acme Low-B1, it's simply a completely different animal with vastly different design goals - the Big Baby is similar to the Acmes but usefully louder. None of the Barefaced models are covered in tolex, we use a texturised polymer coating. Best regards, Alex

[url="http://barefacedbass.com/bgm-columns.htm"]http://barefacedbass.com/bgm-columns.htm[/url] The article about polar response (aka directionality) is the relevant one. I'd been wondering what to write about next - masking and 'frequency slotting' shall thus be the topic! Mixing a studio recording with your band can really help show the importance of leaving each other sonic space. One other thing - if your band is quite loud and your guitarists have had a lot of bottom in their sounds, then I'd expect your combo to struggle to produce enough clean lows. And once lows stop being clean they become boomy and then the midrange starts getting muddy. Get them to turn down their lows and everything will become better.

[quote name='kingforaday' post='1112169' date='Feb 2 2011, 11:43 AM']ahhhh so the extension socket thing is just a feature so you can hook everything up without having to get longer speaker leads or something? thanks for your help![/quote] Yes, or for when your amp hasn't got enough outputs to connect all the cabs directly.

[quote name='krispn' post='1110824' date='Feb 1 2011, 11:54 AM']The amp will do 900w bridged at 2 ohms if the memory serves me correct.[/quote] I think it's more like 450W @ 2 ohms per channel or 1000W @ 4 ohms bridged. The minimum nominal impedance when bridged is always twice the minimum impedance per channel (because each output stage is only seeing half the load when bridging).

[quote name='kingforaday' post='1112147' date='Feb 2 2011, 11:15 AM']ok i've searched through all the various information on here and i think i'm just confusing myself even more! basically ever since i started using my 1st amp & cab setup (hartke 3500 head and an 8 ohm vx410 cab) i've linked them based on the information in the manual for that cab. when i bought another cab i linked the 1st from an output on the amp and the 2nd from the 'extension' output on that cab so the cabs would be linked in parallel and the impedance would be 4 ohms (as it said in the manual)[/quote] Correct! [quote name='kingforaday' post='1112147' date='Feb 2 2011, 11:15 AM']so two 8 ohm cabs linked in parallel via the extension socket there is 4 ohm impedance but if i take two 8 ohm outputs from the back of my amp thats series (?) and it says for cabs wired in series, the impedance is the 'sum of the speakers individual impedance'[/quote] Two 8 ohm outputs from your amp will be parallel, not series. So the cabs are still in parallel, two 8 ohm nominal cabs resulting in 4 ohms nominal. [quote name='kingforaday' post='1112147' date='Feb 2 2011, 11:15 AM']the other day i bought a new head and started looking for cabs but noticed not many had 'extension' sockets on the back so that got me thinking maybe i don't understand this afterall! [b]so once and for all, if i link everything up in series and use the two 8ohm outputs from the head and go into two 8ohm cabs is the impedance reduced to 4ohm well? [/b] if so why does the manual for the cab say to link in parallel to achieve this and completely glosses over the series linkup option?! confused.[/quote] You wouldn't be linking the cabs in series, they'd be in parallel, that's why. In summary - the two (or more) outputs on the back of an amp are in parallel (unless its a valve amp with various impedance taps or a 'stereo' amp like a handful of bass amps and all PA power amps, i.e. two amps in one box). The two (or more) inputs on the back of a cab are in parallel. Any of them can be used as inputs or outputs, so you can daisy-chain cabs (again, parallel wiring). There is only one situation where a standard product and standard lead will result in a SERIES connection - that is with the handful of combos on the market that are stable down to 4 ohms, contain a 4 ohm nominal internal speaker and have an extension cab output. This output should be labelled as a series output and it allows you to connect a second 4 ohm cab, for total nominal impedance of 8 ohms. (The extension cab should really be identical to the combo's enclosure because of the issues with series wiring). The only example I can think of with this is some of the older Nemesis combos and possibly some H&Ks, though I'm sure there are more. However it's not at all common. Some combos give you the choice of a 4 or 8 ohm speaker, like the Walkabout - in that case you're not meant to connect an extension cab to the 4 ohm version but because Mesa build rather nice 'overspecced' amps you can get away with running it below 4 ohms nominal. With all heads and cabs, unless you specially make up unusual leads, all the wiring is parallel, all the time.

[quote name='LawrenceH' post='1111896' date='Feb 2 2011, 01:06 AM']What kind of 'agro' is the OP talking about? If it's bass guitar inducing acoustic resonance in the kick drum then it's a very different situation to the kick drum being swamped by bass guitar or vice versa.[/quote] Exactly! And an appropriately tuned and damped kick drum should not require the bass guitar to be EQ'd around it. Unfortunately most tend to be incorrectly tuned and heavily overdamped to compensate (which is why so many drummers need their kick micing in small venues).