funkle

Thanks JTUK and Policesquad. Really interesting. TKS cabs look like they have got a great thing going here; 1126 for the 'full range' crowd and the S112 for the 'traditional bass cab sound' crowd. The Baer ML112 had my attention due to the 6" mid and bigger box giving big lows, but the weight (at 37 lbs) is just a little higher than I want. The fearless F112 which I have also been vaguely contemplating is I think similar to the 1126, but has to be custom ordered and costs more. My CN112 x2 combo is keeping me happy, but it's great to know there's a European builder doing a nice full range box which doesn't cost the earth. And a decent 1x12" with a 'traditional' sound. Going to have to check out these cabs sometime.

I also liked the GK MB800 with my Berg setup. Not so much the GK MB Fusion 800. The Tecamp Puma 900 won out over the GK MB800 as the GK fans were loud and annoying when practicing at home. The Puma was silent, and still runs cool. I think I probably liked the EQ on the GK a bit better than the Tecamp initially, but the Tecamp Puma has proven itself to me over time. I tend to cut more than boost with it. My playing is finger style funk, jazz, and fusion. Occasional slap.

I use a Tecamp Puma 900 or Streamliner 900 as my amps with Berg CN112 x2. The Puma has recently nudged into top spot but both give excellent results.

Bergantino CN212 or 2 x CN112 cabs. Plus Tecamp Puma 900 or Streamliner 900 head. I use the 2 x CN112 set-up and it is voiced just right for my needs. Loud, light; -3db point prob around 60 Hz so it catches the first harmonic of B and therefore goes low enough for my needs. 1 cab for quiet rehearsals and small jazz gigs and 2x12 for everything else. More volume needed than that and I get FOH support. The Streamliner was inexpensive 2nd hand and works well with these cabs. The Tecamp I got from Thomann new - and it was expensive - £550 - but it is again well voiced with these cabs. If you have the cash and value your back, 2 x CN112 gives you a lot of modularity for total weight of 56 lbs or so. The CN212 is 46 lbs and covers what my old Flite 4x10 did. TBH, a Streamliner 600 or Tecamp Puma 500 would probably work just as well. I just went for overkill on the headroom. I'll be at the Voodoo Rooms later this month in Edinburgh showing what 2 x CN112 cabs can do. Pete

I had a G Bass 4 that I gigged for years when I was a student. Excellent bass; the single pickup limited it a little but I got a lot of mileage out of it. Great neck and sound. Loved it. Shouldn't have sold it, but GAS. Story of my life. Tried an Indonesian Peavey Mill 5 AC BXP and thought it had a great feeling neck, good balance, light weight, and decent B for the money but needed proper luthier work to get it set up right and thought I could maybe snag a secondhand USA Peavey at some point for not a lot more cash. Managed to snag a G Bass V earlier this year from the USA and thought it sounded great and had a wonderful feeling neck. However the graphite had weakened at the headstock and the headstock was starting to fold in on itself - rare defect I should think, but not one that the seller had let me know about. Returned it and got my cash back. Good sounding bass, balanced well, thin and comfy neck depth wise and also in terms of nut width. Have been looking out for one since but couldn't find one, then a friend was selling his Modulus Q5 cheap so I thought I'd go with that instead. Happy days... ...until.... Someone got in touch from Talkbass and said they had a USA Millennium 5 they were selling that was pristine (I had put an advert over that side a while back). Price was right, import duty acceptable, and waaay cheaper than the prices that Peavey UK were looking for on their eBay store. I mean, come on....they have a 4 string USA Millennium Plus for £950 right now. Great bass, but I assure you my 5er from the USA was significantly less. And, there's a nice sparkle gold USA Mill 4 on eBay right now for £350 shipped to the UK. THAT is a steal if you want a 4 banger, even after import duty etc. So, here's a photo of what I bought...[attachment=175126:728144_4d8046129d7f6778a09f1c637d5d8216.JPG] I wonder if I can justify keeping the Millennium as well as the Modulus...

Just picked up a Peavey USA Millennium 5. Cleaned it up, awesome neck, great pickups, rather sparkly gold finish (which I am a little mixed on, but from a distance it's cool). Still deciding if I like the EQ points, but the sweepable mid is very cool indeed. Just getting some new strings on it/do a final set up on it and get out and play on it. After that will report back. First indications....an excellent bass indeed, better balanced than my Modulus Q5, weighs less than my Q5, great great great neck. Nice spacing too. A serious contender for my main 5er for much less dosh than my Modulus...very impressive. Pete (Yes, I will post pics at some point.)

I've used Fender BBOT, Babicz, Hipshot A and B bridges. Swapped them about on various basses over years. I do think they make a very very slight difference to the sound. Not significant enough in my experience to warrant changing it though - expense, hassle. If your bass sounds crap, changing the bridge won't do you much good. Number one in tone generation is right hand technique; after that pickups, strings, woods make much much bigger changes to the sound than the bridge IMO. Unless I don't like how a bridge works, or the string spacing, I have learned to leave the bridges just as they come on my basses. I have swapped around some saddles on my Celinders - from solid brass ones to vintage threaded ferrules type ones - as a cheap and effective way to get narrower string spacing. No significant change to sound as far as I can tell. YMMV Pete

Found the Talkbass quote where Roger talks about the changes for Series II: 'I think the ML112 is a pretty unique cab, so we tried to focus on improving the performance of the cab without changing the tone too much. Basically, here’s what we did with the Series II design: Decreased depth front to back to 16” deep Redesigned crossover, built with higher quality components Larger ports for better airflow Eminence did some modifications to the woofer that gave us about a 25% increase in low end power handling capability. All in all, the cab sounds very similar to the old model, but I think it sounds a bit smoother and sweeter in the upper mids with more punch in the low end. It handles bass boost better and the very top end sounds a hair more bright and crisp due to the slightly reduced upper mid response. I think the cab just sounds like a little better, more refined version of what it was.'

I see that the Series II ML112 cabs are coming out soon. Roger is quoted on Talkbass as having made a few changes to the cabinet to incrementally improve it further. I'm definitely interested...though I need more cabs like I need a hole in the head.

Thanks Stevie. If it's all a bit of a faff, I might give it a miss. I had hoped you might have a quick method (5 mins). I do like the idea of a manufacturer coming up with a combo + mic where you turn up, stick the mic in front of the cab, quickly do the pink noise sweep (ideally built into the head), and the head then automagically does its DSP thing to allow for your favourite tone shape to come through. Or 'flat', if you want. I guess you'd only need it for small to medium gigs, as otherwise you have FOH. JTUK, on the theme of trying to get the home practice sound live...agreed, but room acoustics do make it a challenge......The absolute best sound I get from all of my basses is direct through a little Behringer mixing board into Audiophile 2496 in my PC into Beyerdynamic DT440 headphones for recording. No room resonances, the response is super fast, etc. Maybe a tiny bit of bass boost at 100Hz and cutting off everything below 50 Hz if I mess around with EQ. Clean and beautiful. It is impossible to reproduce live, but that doesn't mean I can't have fun trying. Most of my gigs are quick jazz affairs. Plug in, play, get out. Only for bigger gigs - and rarely - is there any time to spend setting up the bass sound. Then, I might get to use the EQ in my Zoom B3/MS-60B. I tend to roll off a little bass and sometimes low mids. Cutting is better than boosting, as always. But you chaps already know that, I think.

[quote name='stevie' timestamp='1368128765' post='2073674'] I had a TC Electronics bass preamp a while back - basically a four-band parametric eq - which I sold when I decided that dinky lightweight amps were a good idea. After that excursion, I tried to get hold of another one but they are difficult to find - so I bought a Behringer four-band mono parametric which, to my ears, is just as transparent. I'm using it with a Rauch or QSC power amp depending on how much power I need. The unbalanced input is perfect for bass and I have real control over my sound, and more importantly, the room I'm in. It's a bit more messing about, but setting it up with a RTA (on a laptop) gets me the fattest, cleanest, punchiest sound I could wish for. It's not for the faint hearted, however, and you really do need to know what you're doing to avoid messing up. Which is probably why it's a step too far for most people. [/quote] I'd be very interested in knowing your process to do this. Especially the RTA software, mic used, where you place the mic, etc. I keep thinking iPhone RTA software & buying a mic to plug into the iPhone would be a portable RTA solution...

Bergantino CN212 + Streamliner would be pretty loud too. Reported to be about 4 x 10" loud on Talkbass.

Just sold Dave a Dingwall Super J. Very smooth transaction, good communications and quick payment. Deal with in great confidence!

In terms of low end, I think the Fearless F112 will be the deepest, with Simplexx and Big Baby 2 coming up a bit lighter in the deep end. Depends on what driver is used in the Simplexx (and you can use the 3012LF in there). But...as JTUK alludes to...tone mostly lives in the mids. Turn up bass boost too much, and the mids get masked. Too little bass, and it sounds like a guitar. The implementation of mids and highs is a significant difference between the three cabs listed (and many others). I have messaged some of the guys on Talkbass about their experiences with Fearless cabs, and one felt the crossover from the woofer to the mid-driver happened a lot lower than they would like, and it affected the presentation of the instrument in a way they didn't think sounded good. Others rave about them, but the reports mostly come from a few individuals, which is a problem in terms of possible bias. Ed Friedland loves his F112 though and just wrote about it in Bass Player, though. Glowing review. mrtcat seems happy with the Simplexx cabs he's built, but not sure how easily we could audition those. The SPL charts for the 12s shows the chart to look almost exactly like the manufacturer driver chart (at least for the Deltalites), so I assume Bill crosses over his woofer at a fairly high point to the tweeter (and he states in the plans a tweeter is not always required for bass). The cab is also correctly sized for the driver placed within it, I assume from the charts. Looks like a solid performer. Don't know how it sounds 'til I hear one fired up though. IMO/IME, the BB2 has very clear mids presented though the compression driver into their horn. Again, a bit different to how mids sound coming only off the woofer - the mids sound super clean. But Alex has done a nifty trick with the crossover in that cab as turning down the compression driver means mids and highs are coming off the woofer, giving a very rock cab sort of sound. Not my thing, but a good thing for many. Turns out I like this clean presentation of bass less than I thought, hence me sending Alex back that cab. And, ultimately, moving on my Acmes. (BB2 was incredibly loud and efficient though.) I just tried out an Audiokinesis Thunderchild 112 (version 2, 8 ohm). Luke and I have PM'd about it. Ultimately it had stupendous amounts of awesome bass and totally clean mids and highs. It is as close to a studio monitor as I have heard on stage and sonically similar to the BB2/acme side of things. It was also moderately inefficient with 500w power. My drummer and I both preferred the rougher voicing/peaks and troughs of the Bergantino CN112. And the greater efficiency. There is a lot of talk about how much low end is required out of a cab, and obviously there are a lot of factors which drive that personal choice. But, a lot of tone is from the mids, and so far I haven't found a good way to get around the hassle of trying out cabs myself to test that aspect. I think Luke's contribution is helpful as another data point in this whole messy business.

I agree, high volumes are best for testing out cabs. Extra bass appears which otherwise has to me EQ'd in at low to moderate volumes. Extra treble usually comes for me too at high volumes, not sure why.

Nice work. Thanks for sharing!

IIRC, I think the Vanderkley 112EXT and the Bergantino CN112 use the same woofer - the Faital 12PR300. The Berg version is OEM so I assume has some changes from stock. High SPL, reasonably even in the mids, -3dB in the Berg size cab is apparently around 60hz. A lot of push for its size. Would like to hear an SL112 to compare in the flesh.