Phil Starr

Maybe there is a little bit of people talking at cross purposes in the chat about L-Pads. If you're trying to design a flat response speaker then an L-Pad is not the way to go, there is only one position where it will be anything like flat and unlikely that most users will know how to find that point. You still can get all the advantages of having a decent horn driver in terms of extended frequency response and improved control of dispersion at high frequencies. Modelling of classic amps and cabs is only going to get better over time and this demands an FRFR approach to get the best out of it. Your bass speaker effectively becomes a very loud studio monitor. Crossover design at this level needs an iterative process of measurement and re-design to achieve the best results to remove artefacts in the crossover region. You won't achieve this with an L-Pad in the circuit, but for simply playing bass though a traditional bass stack an L-Pad can give you a great sound with some additional control of the particular colouring you might like. @Graham wants to transparently amplify a sound he knows and likes, so FRFR is the way to go and a decent PA speaker could offer him a sensible way of getting close to this.

There is so much to untangle here Firstly dont change your speakers. It will completely change the sound of the cab, reduceit's value while it will cost a fair bit to buy the new drive units. It would be far cheaper to change your cabs entirely. That's without the re-engineering of the cab you would need to match it to the new drivers. Secondly don't believe the advertising. There aren't many 10" speakers that can handle more than 200W at all frequencies and there are usually frequencies in the sub 100Hz range where power handling may be reduced to a few 10's of watts. This leads to the old rule of thumb about cabs handling twice the amp power. That dates back to the 60's and early 70's when speaker coils were wound on paper and stuck down with very ordinary adhesives. The coils heat up like an old fashioned light bulb and the paper literally caught fire. I saw a lot of smoke in 1970 coming out of cabs. In those days rating a cab by thermal limits made sense. Times change and modern speakers are wound on fireproof materials and it's pretty hard to physically set them alight any more giving speakers a thermal rating makes no sense but it is the standard and nobody wants to see their 200W speaker de-rated to 50W If you want to use an amp rated above the thermal rating of the speakers then you need to manage the frequencies below 100Hz. That means using a high pass filter (HPF) and shaping rather than just boosing your bass response. Every 3db of bass boost increases the power to your speaker by doubling the power. If you turn the boost up by 12db (usually the maximum) that's 16 times the power at the very lowest frequencies wher all the damage is done. You talk about it not being loud enough, is that for you or the audience. You may be blasting out the audience and almost forcing the guitarists to turn up but still not hearing yourself

You will be fine, I used the K12-2 for a couple of years and they are widely used by a host of other FRFR fans and are widely recommended fot that use. They are built to last and have a decent bass driver but are also really well protected so you'd be hard pushed to overload them to the point of damage so that won't be a worry. The other recommendation would be to look at RCF tops, the 912 would be a decent bet and is £100 cheaper than the K12-2 One word of caution, they are designed to give a flat response on a pole, On the ground the bass frequencies will be lifted by 6db and they will sound muddy if you dont roll the bass back a bit. Be prepared to have to fiddle a bit to get that right

I would personally be very reluctant to start butchering a commercial cab, if you come to sell it you'll lose a lot of value. How about a floor monitor, you wouldn't need any bass frequencies as you can hear them already so it could be quite small, even something like a Behringer B205 might do it at a pinch.

To answer your question, I dont think anyone makes such a system. The DIY solution of a top hat in the bottom of one cab and the top of the other is probably the only way if you don't mind modding your cabs. Someone will have a broken speaker stand to provide a length of pole you could use. Tilting one of the cabs with a stand will point the cab upwards so that could work without taking power tools to your precious speakers. You could put a small monitor amp on a stand at ear level, it's more common with drummers but there's no reason why bassists couldn't do this. The next step is in-ears Seriously worth considering if you value your hearing. Small speaker stands are available https://www.thomann.co.uk/km_21454.htm I've four of these that I use for lighting but they weigh very little, pack up small and take a lot less stage space than conventional stands. You'd then only have to mod one of your cabs and on the bottom where it otherwise wouldn't show.

You beg the question of: what are you trying to achieve by sitting this cab on top of your Ampeg cab? If you are simply trying for more volume then a second ampeg 15 would be a better bet. It may also be that the Peavey cab on it's own would be louder than the Ampeg. Have you tried the Peavey with the Ampeg? The results of merging cabs is a bit unpredictable for good technical reasons. If you are trying to aim for a particular tone this isn't the way to get it. The probability is that there is no way you can run these two cabs together. You could try running them in parallel (both cabs simply plugged into your amp) this will mean both of the 12's and the 15 will each share the power equally.The problem then is the amp will be driving into 2.67ohms and not all amps will do this. The extra current demand may well overheat the amp leading it to shut down if it is well protected or to burn out if it isn't. If you re-wire the two 10's to make a 16ohm cab then this will reduce the output of your tweeter and your crossover to the horn will be all wrong as it is designed to work with the 4ohm speakers. in any case the two tens will be getting a lot less signal than the 15 which will mean they won't be as loud and your sound will be dominated by the 15 . Dozens of people have asked how to mix an 8 ohm cab with a 4 ohm cab and the answer remains the same. If you want to change your set up then the minimum you need to do is to buy another 8 ohm cab. Don't buy this one, it just doesn't match.

For anyone who doesn’t know them the Wharfedale Titans are little gems. 12” tops that only weigh 10kg, go as loud as anything and with a lovely clear vocal sound. They use the same horn driver across the range so this bargain basement speaker benefits. They make a great vocal PA but the lightweight cabs aren’t good with high bass levels. Not a problem with a sub. You’d expect to ‘hear’ the bass apparently coming from the tops. Your brain takes the information from your ears and creates the picture of a band playing. You can pick instruments out of the mix and with stereo even place them in space but it’s all illusion. The brain takes the signals from all four speakers and ‘tells’ you there is a bass guitar just to the left of the drums. It’s wonderful when you are listening to music but the brain constantly confuses you when you are trying to be objective about sound.

My wife is going to love you

From a theoretical point of view a vertical 4x10 makes much more sense than one where the drivers are side by side in pairs. There are good reasons for this, the speakers are raised to something approaching the height of your ears so you will hear yourself playing more clearly. The second is a bit more technical; speakers are more like a torch beam than a floodlight in terms of how they radiate the midrange and higher frequencies. Off axis the sound from the side of any speaker furthest from you arrives a split second later than the part of the cone nearest you. This leads to cancellation if the difference in the distance travelled is a fraction of the wavelength. In practice you lose most of the mids and have a very lumpy frequency response off axis. Putting speakers side by side halves the frequency at which the response falls off. This is all well known and so the builder of this cab has done something about it. A line of speakers like this has a broad flat radiation pattern which will be better for you and for the audience and other band members. The only thing I would comment on is that it would have been better to put the horn at the top of the cab and the tilted speaker won't make that much difference. Thje port looks a bit small for a 4x10. In the end you need to treat it like any other cab, take your own bass and amp along and have a listen to the cab. You will be getting a lot for your money and if it sounds great it sounds great. It won't be identical to the original cab but probably like a Trace Elliott but a bit brighter and cleaner. Paint the cab up with a couple of coats of Tuff Cab and find a grille and it'll be quite a cool looking cab

I hadn't seen that. Damn you, I feel a hi-fi design coming on. My current speakers; based on a 5" Focal driver and the Scan-Speak 2008 needs some attention to the crossover but that looks like a better mid/bass driver. If I hadn't seen this I wouldn't now have the itch 🤣

I'm loving the thread de-rail. Back in the 70's I built a couple of cabs with the 15" Monitor Golds for a friend, at the time my memory is that they sounded as good as anything I'd ever heard. They also did duty as disco speakers so they would go quite loud by the standards of the day. Just the bare drivers with the crossovers cost several months wages though. I also used some of the Fane Crescendos to build some two way speakers for a friend who was a sound engineer who worked on film sets. He wanted something to provide music for the dancers at Shepperton and Elstree studios, I pictured a good commission for something huge until he told me he needed a pair to fit in the boot of his Ford Cortina!. I built him some two way cabs with 12"Ccrescendos not unlike any common or garden modern PA speaker. Forgot all about them and went off to train as a teacher. I'd just started working at my first school and he came back with an order for 10 more pairs as apparently all the other freelance sound engineers wanted their own. One of those sliding doors had been crossed though and I'd given up my workshop, teaching was my life and speakers were just a hobby. I wonder what would have happened if he'd come back to me a couple of months earlier.

I'll be there, I'll certainly bring along all the various BassChat designed cabs and I'm happy to run a shootout of some sort if that is wanted.

Oh I asked for help on using reverb and delay when I was setting up my mixes and got this advice from @VTypeV4 It's now my standard set up for live vocals with the sends and returns adjusted to suit, basically quite a lot applied to my own bvs where I'm just filling out the sound and a bit less to the lead vocals. I find the delay particularly helpful for the bv's. "My personal starting points are usually a short-ish plate or hall reverb of around 1.2s - give or take - and then in addition to this a short delay with 180ms (or thereabouts) time with around 30% feedback. These are approximate settings and won't work on everything all the time (plus different fx units have their own sound too) so you'll no doubt find some vocals will lean towards sounding better with less of one / more of the other and vice-versa - adjust to suit the sends / returns to suit. Good luck. 😃" Here's the original thread

The general principle with live sound is to make sure the sound going to your mixer output is as good as you can get it and then send that sound out at every gig, then the only thing you would have to do at each gig is to set the overall level and use the graphic eq on the output to compensate for the room acoustics. Your approach is textbook so not only can you set all the levels eq and fx at rehearsals you should aim to do this. There are a couple of assumptions here. The first is that everything is miked up and that any backline is for on-stage monitoring only and the audience are hearing only the FOH though the PA. If, say, a guitarist is setting their own levels with their AC30 cranked to 'give the right tone' then you have that to compensate for. Backline bass is even more problematic as bass is very susceptible to room and stage acoustics. The second assumption is that you are mixing from on stage and don't have a sound engineer sitting permanently at the desk. You can't tweak FOH from on stage so set and forget is going to beat fiddling every time. If you have a jockey riding the board then they can potentially tweak for all sorts of reasons possibly from song to song if they really know your set. Monitors are slightly more tricky, space considerations come into play and you may not be able to measure out their placement exactly as you want and a boomy space may lead you to want to adjust the eq but in principle I'd aim for consistency set to set. Of course you can hear the monitors and poor monitoring won't affect the audience so you can fiddle with more effect, even so I will set and forget for most gigs. The sooner you get to using in-ears the sooner you lose this problem. One word of caution, I never use compression on any of the mics, that will guarantee you less gain before feedback at most venues. If you are using pre-sets on mic channels you might want to turn any compression off. You'll also want to be aware of any boosts to frequency you have applied to the vocal mics in particular as stage acoustics will vary venue to venue. If one mic in particular feeds back check it isn't at the frequency you boosted in the rehearsal room. so basically yes to both questions and when you get that perfect sound at a gig make sure you save it

Hi David, I'm sorry to hear about your dad. I hadn't crossed paths with him but he sounds like a generous spirit as are so many on BassChat. I would strongle advise you to go onto theBassChat marketplace. There's a whole community of folks there buying and selling treasured gear where you will get good advice and a fair price for almost everything bass and music related. You'll need to take up an annual subscription to sell there but you'll know everything you sell there will be going to a good home and will be treasured or at leased used to make music. You can also search for items and see what they have sold for in the past which will give you a really good idea of what they are actually fetching. There is even a 'what's it worth' sub forum where you can ask other members to price up what you have to sell https://www.basschat.co.uk/forum/121-wotzit-werth/ It might also be worth putting something about your father passing away on the General Discussion thread as people who know him might miss your post in the introductions https://www.basschat.co.uk/forum/13-general-discussion/ Its not uncommon for 'In Memorium' posts to be put up there and other friends of your father might see that and offer help. Good luck with everything and I hope one day you will find time to learn to play something on that Rickenbacker.