Phil Starr

Hi Rich, without the Thiele Small parameters you won't be able to calculate a port length with any reliability and if the cab wasn't ported originally the speakers may not be suitable for a ported cab. Your best bet would be to simply cover the hole with a piece of plywood, so long as it is properly airtight the cab is restored to it's original design as far as the speakers are concerned. If you did want to port the cab I'd probably risk tuning it to 50Hz as the resonant frequency of the speakers will probably be around that area, no guarantee though. Ashdown are probably the best though when it comes to after sales and they might cough up the Thiele Small figures if you email them. Equally they might not want to share that information as it would be potentially commercially sensitive.

The secret of guitar amps is going to be more in the speakers than the amp itself. Guitar speakers for electric guitar are pretty much used because they are very coloured and designed to be so with a soft/thin paper cone which operates under break up creating a huge frequency hump in the 1-3,000Hz region. They are designed for high efficiency often reaching over 100db/W for a single driver and about 6db more than a comparable bass driver. They also have a higher resonant frequency as bass goes an octave lower. However both guitar and bass can sound great through the same speakers, which is what a good PA does. If you want to use the same back line for both you effectively need to think in terms of a PA on stage just for your back line. If your back line has no 'colour' you can add it in with eq and amp sims. If the sound is coloured to start with it is very hard to take it out. The easy way to do this is to go FRFR. If you are happy with your amp sims as you seem to be then you probably don't want to add too much extra colour from your cab, something with flat/neutral sound will be better. The Barefaced Big Baby is fairly neutral which is why that was successful for @Lozz196 even cleaner sounding is the LFSys Monaco and lots of people are doing this with active PA speakers with RCF and QSC being the go to cabs and a few Yamahas being used as well. You can then add in the tones you like for bass and guitar with multi-fx. I've seen people loading guitar patches onto their Zooms giving them a mix of guitar and bass patches to use in the same units.

Here you go

Following some of the discussions in this Forum a few of us are looking to run a PA shootout at the South West Bass Bash. It's in The Memorial Hall, Cheddon Fitzpaine, Rowford, TAUNTON, TA2 8JY just outside Taunton in Somerset, a few minutes from J25 of the M5. It's a bass bash so there will be lot's of lovely basses and bass gear but everyone is welcome and there might be people here who want to have a listen to some PA. I'll be running an hour's session just after lunch. It's a great day out and the lunch is wonderful, so far the furthest anyone has come is from Aberdeen! Since the debate here has been about how much power is needed, where to put subs, can you get away with little speakers if you have a sub, is there a system that will do it all the shootout will be comparing a pair of 15" tops, 10" tops with a sub and a 'stick' system. If I can get a second sub in my car I'll also try and demonstrate the power alleys you get when you put the subs under your tops. So the basic shootout will be: RCF 745's v's RCF ART310's +sub v's RCF Evox 8 v's Wharfedale Titans Details Here

When you can play one song all the way through. For me that was Gimme Some Lovin by Spencer Davis but there are plenty of really simple songs with straightforward rhythms and just a few notes. I was lucky that a few friends wanted a bass player for their hobby band and roped me in. I practiced my one song like mad and was as nervous as a kitten but the first time we got through the song it was an out of body experience. The sound of the bass thundering out behind me and realising it was genuinely me making it was just so exciting I was hooked. If you aren't so lucky then start haunting the open mic nights and talk to the host. You can just do one song and join in with someone else and most hosts are happy to guide beginners through their first few songs.

Badmaieff and Davis pub 1966, I've got a copy in front of me, my first speaker book I built a few near copies of the Altec A7 from this and I have a collection of old books from the pre Thiele and Small era. Happy days

Go on give the family a trip to the countryside

The tweeter does so much more, but depending upon how it is implemented. That depends to a certain extent on the crossover used. The Crossover shares the sound out, highs to the tweeter lows to the woofer. It might be wortwhile checking that the crossover is disconnected in your cab, if not it might be stopping the highs reaching your woofers and killing your sound. There is a reason why tweeters have a poor reputation; many older cabs had tweeters added as an afterthought. Frequently they were poor quality and simply added on to an existing design with a simple capacitor to protect the tweeter as a 'crossover' instead of a properly designed system. Worse still many of the add ons were super cheap piezo tweeters which did away with crossovers altogether and in any case didn't have a very flat response. Simply adding high frequencies simply doesn't work well creating lot's of unwanted noises and sharpness whilst messing up the crucial mid range. Bass guitar doesn't really need high frequencies there is nothing there above roughly 6,000Hz depending upon which pickups you use and in any case these frequencies are lost once you are playing within a band, the crucial frequencies are from roughly 80-4,000 Hz, give or take. Speakers with big cones start to beam (narrow the dispersal of sound) when their dimensions get close to the wavelenghts of the sound they are producing, 10" speakers start to beam at around 500Hz and beaming is significant and unpredictable above 2kHz and big heavy cones don't produce high frequencies well anyway. A well designed horn system will fix a lot of problems the small driver will produce cleaner high frequencies and the horn will guide the sound in a predictable fashion so people to the side of the speaker will hear more or less the same sound as people in front of the speaker, That includes the bassist who rarely has the speaker pointing at anything other than their legs.

I must admit that £5 off the Sennheiser and Shure radio gear hardly counts as a discount But, there's a lot of Behringer digital mixers with much bigger discounts of around £100 or more which makes me wonder if behringer are about to upgrade their offerings. Over the years a lot of the Andertons bargains have been end of lines, and I've bought a few bits of bargain kit off them.

I've always loved the look of this @Pea Turgh I'm a lazy so and so when it comes to finish and the corners and handle set it off really nicely reminding me I really should take it more seriously. You've even made the round grille look like it belongs rather than the afterthought it is on my cabs

Sound enginers have sometimes had a bad rap on Basschat but there are some great ones out there too and a good monitor engineer just gives you confidence to play your very best. Here's to Dave and all the others like him 🍾

Yes, I use the same few bits of music to test speakers but a lot of it is classical music which is very demanding of any speaker but not familiar to everyone. I use Western Highway by Maura O'Connell as a test of the midrange, a lovely clean recording of two acoustic guitars and two female vocals that is really revealing of any crosover artefacts. @stevie uses Smooth Operator: Sade which has some nice percussion up-front as his go to. I'm guessing though that a majority of us are playing some form of rock so something well known and well recorded might be better and I'll need CD quality. I've also got some Hi Fi Choice test recordings somewhere.

OK I wanted to do the PA shootout anyway so I'm proposing to do that in the main hall after lunch. I'm going to bring my 15" tops to compare with my 10" tops used with a sub, @Woodinblack is bringing his Evox system, all these are RCF Active systems and roughly in the same price range so its a reasonable comparison of big tops, little tops plus sub and a stick system If I can fit everything in the car I'll bring my old Wharfedale PA so you can see what a cheap old system will do and I can demonstrate the power alleys you get when you have the subs placed under the tops. I'll also attempt another cab build in the side room at some time in the morning demonstating the 'Easy Build' technique and showing off the new BC 8" cab design. I'm happy to take suggestions about what we might add to the PA shootout to help anyone thinking of buying PA gear in the next couple of years. Any suggestions though are welcome.

The problem is pretty well known but I've never seen a band address the problem before and to be fair not very many venues. Full marks to you for thnking of the solution and finding the right product. 6db extra headroom before feedback will make a difference.

Have you ruled out a self build? I designed the basschat 6" cab for precisely this use, it's tiny but has a proper speaker that will handle bass. The bottom end has been sacrificed deliberately but it has a flat response from just below 80Hz all the way up to the highest frequencies from a bass and in a small room it sounds beautufully clear and has plentyof bass if you don't want that rumble that permeates the house. You can use it with your TC If not then another option is to use a studio monitor, I use an RCF Ayra Pro 5, if you want tone shaping then something like a Sansamp or a Zoom B1 four will drive it or your Phil Jones Bighead

That's interesting, I've not come across that before, how do you go about it?

That's it really, Andertons have a sale on with some interesting reductions. A few RCF speakers (RCF 735 for £839) £200 of a couple of A&H Qu mixers, Loads of Behringer stuff cheap including X18 for £399, XR16 for £322, X32 Producer for £999 loads more too. https://www.andertons.co.uk/browse/offers/all-live-pa-offers/?page=2 Does this make me an influencer?

Ooh, bring it to the bass bash

https://www.thomann.co.uk/tc_helicon_voice_tone_d1.htm https://www.thomann.co.uk/tc_helicon_duplicator.htm https://www.thomann.co.uk/tc_helicon_critical_mass.htm this one is not really delay but another way of thickening out the sound I'm looking at these for my own use in my duo where I do the dooby-doo's and it would sound better if there were several bv's. Think Chelsea Dagger. The advantage of pedals is that you can switch them in and out with your feet obv's and your singer can/should buy her own. On another track you might like to look at something like the Mic Mechanic https://www.thomann.co.uk/tc_helicon_mic_mechanic_2.htm . You are right though, a mixer would give more bang for the buck. Given the number of pedals you have...... you'll adapt

Limiting is just controlling the peaks and bringing them down. Compression is looking at more of the sound and squashing it down reducing the difference between the loud and quiet bits. They both work the same way but compression affects pretty much all of the vocal sound depending upon how you set it up. Normally with compression you turn the volume up to compensate for the compression. https://www.sonible.com/blog/compression-vs-limiting/ I ought to say that the poblem with compression in a live setting is that because of the increase in gain you can get feedback problems, not a problem if your singer is loud and doesn't need a lot of ggain but a problem if there are howlround issues. Limiters tend to decrease feedback issues Detuned delay: delay is an echo effect but with often one repeat rather than reverb where the effect decays over time. If you set up a single repeat it sounds like a second voice supporting the first and if you can de-tune it you get a more realistic effect as no two voices are identical, delay without de-tuning sounds a little robotic if overdone. There's a thread on reverb and delay in the PA forum. TC and others make pedals for vocals which can create this effect for you.

I would have thought prety much most interfaces will do this I have a Moukey MSc1 and it sounds great alternatively a lot of small format mixers have USB interfaces built in. I'm using my Alesis mixer at the moment for this evening's practice The ana logue circuitry leaves a bit to be desired but it's good enough for personal practice and recording ideas. Hiopefully you can fix your old one though. Good Luck

I'd say for least financial loss buy something fairly decent and avoid anything that says 'practice amp' The reasoning is this: if you buy something old but good you'll be able to re-sell at more of less the price you pay. On top of that most 'practice amps have terrible speakers and tone. Your novice is going to be discouraged by poor tone and enthusiastic about making lots of lovely bassiness. They'll be even more encouraged if their first amp is good enough to jam along with mates. My first amp was a Hartke Kickback 10, bought for £100, used for four years and sold for £100 and I even gigged with it a few times and used it for dozens of rehearsals. A small gigging combo might be easier to re-sell and be a better bet and it will certainly be nicer to play

So are you proposing to build a cab? im assuming since space generally is an issue and given the capability of the Kappalite that you’d go for a 1x15. Essentially a version of the gen 1 Barefaced Compact. If you aren’t going to build then one of those would probably work well for you.