Phil Starr

Your problem is that almost any speaker you buy will cost more than the amp is worth. In addition I wouldn't be surprised if the speaker concerned isn't a 4 ohm driverto get the full 15W. The cheapest I found was this http://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=MON103290&browsemode=category

Thanks everyone, I'm just starting to play with a pick after years playing with fingers only. It's news to me that you can balance the sound out with technique only so it'll make sense to build this in from the start.

I'm a bit surprised by your question, what are you doing with this cab? It quotes 101dB/W and the LMII will give 500W into 4ohms. That's 127dB output. you need around 120dB to roughly match a drummer. If you turn that up full then even the strongest drummer with the loudest kit would be drowned in bass. On top of that you absolutely will be damaging your hearing permanently at those sorts of levels. I'm suspecting you work with guitarists who don't have respect for the rest of the band. These are loud speakers and with a decent amp! Secondly to get a step up in volume you need to double the output power. Anything under 1000w and you will barely notice any difference, That's just the laws of physics. Even then it will only be a bit louder and your speakers won't handle that power anyway. Is it you of the audience who can't hear the bass? I'd be looking at my eq first in this case, assuming amp and speakers are working properly. If you are operating with a lot of bass boost then you may be overloading the speakers, hearing distortion and realising you can't turn up further. Alternatively you are using some mid scoop which is great at home or the rehearsal studio but fatal when playing live.

That's what passed as a PA amp back in 1970. FAL were one of many small manufacturers. It will run into 4 ohms. If I had to guess it's probably one of many amps that used 2N3055 output transistors and probably gives about 70w RMS. Beware a lot of these old amps had very poor protection circuits and the output transistors tend to fry when they get too hot or if you short circuit them. Make sure your Jack plugs are properly inserted before you switch on. It gives a decent sound because it is essentially flat response.

Sounds like a dry joint or a faulty connection, fairly common but sometimes difficult to track down. It could also be a phone or both, a common source of noise is that the faulty connection acts as a radio receiver picking up electrical noises. What you do next depends upon your level of knowledge and how much you like fiddling with stuff. You could start by unplugging guitar and leads and seeing if it happens with nothing connected. If it still happens you know it is the amp (make sure there are no phones switched on nearby) Try the amp in another room. If the noise goes it's your guitar leads or maybe the bass itself. Keep swapping stuff until you are certain. Assuming it's the amp set the volume to a reasonable level and try wiggling each control one at a time. obviously each volume or tone control will change the sound but you are listening for the noise getting much worse or going away. If it does the poor connection is inside the potentiometer or pot behind that control. You can then either try cleaning it with switch cleaner (Servisol is what I use) or take it in to be serviced/replaced. It's not a bad idea to clean all the pots, Dirt and wear accumulates so if one pot gives trouble the rest are often not far behind. The next thing to check are the jack sockets. a squirt of servisol and wiggling a plug in and out may fix them. Pay special attention to any fx loops. those have switches built in so the signal gets through when you don't use fx. They corrode over time and that switch connection can cause problems, especially if you never use them. Beyond that you need to delve inside the amp. Beware the voltages can be quite high and the power supply can store considerable power for hours after you unplug everything. DC shocks are more 'interesting' than mains shocks, not to be repeated. Don't open up an amp unless you know at least enough to keep yourself safe. If you aren't sure then you don't have enough knowledge. However if you've managed to narrow down the possibilities you'll often get a better deal from the repair people.

Most 6x10's deliver a fairly distorted sound and don't have a flat frequency response. A lot of relatively cheap drivers in a portable cab means that the speakers are technically underdamped and give an all enveloping warmth at around 120Hz as well as extraordinary efficiency. Modern fashion calls for a flatter, less coloured response. That's not inherent in the technology but that's what you'll find in a lot of commercial offerings, so it's kind of true but not for the reasons most people think. I use 12's, One does most of my gigs, up to a couple of hundred people and it can go as loud as pretty much any drummer. If I take two it can be overwhelmingly loud, I don't like overpowering bass but after a mild argument with one drummer who kept asking me to turn up I did, to cut a long story short at the end of the first set he complained about not being able to hear his own snare drum. So yes they are loud enough and will give you a huge sound but it's likely to be a bit different from what you are used to. Ignore the comments about neo speakers. Neo magnets are more powerful for the same weight as ceramic magnets but they are just magnets. You can use the extra efficiency of neo to make a lighter speaker or a louder one, or one with a longer throw for extra deep bass or even get a little of all three but there's no neo magic, they are still just magnets. In the end you need to listen and judge them on that. Barefaced are making old school sounding cabs with modern drivers using their 10" units, they may be worth having a look at.

I've got the Tube500 just as people say really. The tube doesn't sound much different but I use it on 100% Tube all the time because it sounds better. If it's any help a the last SW bass bash someone was trying all the lightweight heads he could scoop up. all the usual suspects were there and he ended up preferring my MB tube, and it did sound lovely through his big Barefaced cab. It's just what I wanted really, a good sound with everything set flat and it just makes my bass louder and so far 100% reliable.

A single 2x10 will probably be loud enough for 90% of your gigs, so if you buy a 4x10 you'll be carrying a lot of hardware for no reason 90% of the time. For bigger gigs you might want a second cab but all your eq will remain the same, just plug it in and you'll have the same sound but louder. Stacked vertically two of the cabs will place the top speaker at roughly ear level so you will hear it more clearly than a 4x10. Having a vertical line of speakers will spread the mids in a flat wide fan of sound so all your audience will hear the same sort of sound. A traditional 4x10 tends to beam the sound like a guitarist's cab so people off access get less of your sound. I'd repeat though that you ought to go and try some cabs if at all possible, including lifting them of course. Itsmedunc has made some good points, if you are in the north west near the land of 4000 potholes then take up that offer, if you are down anywhere near Somerset I'll lend you an extension cab. There'll probably be a helpful basschatter somewhere near you.

I think that the PA is an issue best dealt with separately. It's much better to go through the PA for all sorts of technical reasons and good PA has come down so much in price it is probably cheaper to have modest backline and good PA than the other way round. However, (can you tell I was a science teacher) I still maintain backline good enough to be able to run without PA support for flexibility. First of all don't worry about the extra 300W. It'll only give you 1dB of extra volume, that's the smallest change in volume a human can detect. Our hearing isn't linear, it's very sensitive to quiet sounds for obvious evolutionary reasons and protected against very loud sounds so we have the maximum range available to us. The downside of that is you need to double power to get a meaningful increase in volume of 3dB. In practice a 200W amp is enough to do almost any gig if you have typical speakers. You could buy a Transit to transport that flatpack home from IKEA but they pretty much always fit in the back of your car. In this case either amp will be more powerful than you strictly need. Choose your speakers on the basis of which ones sound best, then get enough of them to be loud enough is the best advice. Mixing speakers is fine but problematic. The character/timbre of the speakers doesn't come from the bass for the main part but the mids and if you look at speaker frequency plots they usually have plenty of bumps and dips. When you mix them you'll have no idea if those peaks align and emphasise each other or align with a dip and cancel. The combination will sound very different from the speakers on their own, that's if they are equally loud. If they have different efficiencies then one speaker may dominate and the other be little heard rendering it into an expensive stand to sit the other one on. If you own loads of speakers then trying them out with each other is fun and you may hit lucky but it isn't a sensible thing to plan on doing from the start. Two 12's, two 15's, two 2x10's will all be plenty and in reality you'll end up taking one to a lot of gigs on it's own. Don't choose on size though choose on sound.

I get real pleasure at seeing that, and in knowing it is used and loved. Thanks just a quick one Lidl's have a special offer on table saws. 10" 2000W saw for £99. That's a bargain. I've used one of these aluminium topped little table saws for years before upgrading to something more professional. If you are cutting a lot of panels or just slicing up offcuts for bracing a cab then they are way better than a circular saw. Set up carefully they can be very accurate but they are fiddly (I built windows and doors including all the tenons with my old one) and less repeatable than a pro bench saw. Lidl's are also doing corner clamps for £5.99 useful if you are about to build.

Hi Dave, welcome to BC, I'm pleased to see common sense is prevailing, you really don't need a 4x10, 1x15 combination. That sort of set up is very much old tech from the days when amps were costly and speakers of limited ability. The only reason to choose that sort of set up now is if you love the old school sounds or for the look a huge rig brings. All you really need to be able to do is match the drummer for volume. After all if the drums aren't going through the PA then you being much louder than that isn't going to give you a good sound anyway. If you are playing to 50-100 people then you will be more than loud enough. A modern 2x10 or even 1x12 will just about get you there in terms of matching the drums. I too use 1x12's, a single speaker for small venues and two for bigger or trickier venues like a marquee. My amps are both of the 300W into 8ohms 500 into 4ohms varieties. If you are struggling to hear yourself then it may be because of it's positioning. Being on the ground will reinforce the bass but it means the speaker isn't pointing at your ears so you miss a lot of the mid and high frequencies, if you can lean it back at an angle you will hear more. It may be your eq, at home most of us prefer a bass heavy mid scooped sound. Playing live you probably need to roll off the bass and boost the mids so you cut through to the audience, it sounds better that way with a live band too. You don't say which combo you use or whether you like the way it sounds. Someone has already said it but if it is an 8ohm system then adding a matching 2x10 if that is possible will mean your amp will develop it's full power and the extra speakers will double the efficiency giving you an extra 6dB of sound, putting your combo on top of the extension speaker will raise the speakers nearer your ears. You'll be amazed at how much more authoritative that sounds. The sound you have now but bigger. The ohms bit is simple enough, always use speakers of the same impedance, generally go for two 8ohm speakers, 16's won't draw full power from a solid state amp and two 4's are too low a load for most amps. Two 8's in parallel will nearly double the power the amp will give and that will be shared equally between speakers with the same ohms. As Lozz pointed out that's 450W per speaker with the amp you are wanting to use.. Matching amps and speakers isn't an exact science, their wattage ratings are done very differently, but using a 450W amp into a 300W speaker increases the possibility of damaging your speaker by pushing it too hard.

Ha ha, because I rarely get past the 'prototype' stage mine still haven't had the woodscrews replaced with proper T-nuts.

Mine are built with 12mm Baltic birch ply and weigh about 14kg. All I have is a reasonable strap handle and I usually carry one in each hand. I'm a not particularly big 66 year old so a long way from being a superman. The only problem is that they bang against your legs a bit

thanks, They put me on to Electronic Music Services who could get me a new module just over £100 so probably not worth a repair. https://www.electronicmusicservices.co.uk/find-us/

Anyone know how to get hold of Behringer Spares? I've a F1320D floor monitor and the amp is blown. Looks like a conventional Class AB amp with a switch mode supply, no signs of charring but the overload light is flashing slowly which suggests the power supply is OK. Simplest thing might be to replace the amp module but I can't find a European never mind UK supplier. Are these amps used in any other Behringer models? If so I might be able to track down one with a working amp and blown speakers. the amp module is Behringer Q04-AA900-02000

Those figures are interesting, and completely consistent with measurements taken at Glastonbury a few years back. Oh blessed day when bands learn to turn down and let the tech do the work, and protect their hearing.

I hate you, that's 22 minutes I need back. and now I have to watch some of the others too

That's a really good point. I choose the 40dB range not because anyone is ever likely to need it but because it means you have gear which can cope with most things and for a bassist 20dB over the 'average' gives you a healthy amount of headroom to play with. Your figures of 100dB FOH and peaks of 110dB (so a dynamic range of 20dB) look far more real world to me. It's also interesting (to me) because I think audiences are getting noisier. If they are generating 90dB of crowd noise then 20-30dB of dynamic range is probably all you are left to play with. It'll also be interesting for bassists to consider the implication of a band rarely reaching 110db. That won't all be bass of course, but if it was your Barefaced 2x10 would only need 16 watts to produce that sound level at 1m.* I sometimes wonder at the crazy levels of power people aspire to when most of the time their amps are operating at just about 10W Even then they probably ought to turn down and let the PA do the heavy lifting. I think what you have here is important for anyone trying to get to grips with decibels and questions of how loud do I need to be. The science gives you extra insight but it can't give an absolute answer. The type of music you play, things like compression eq and so many other things will come in to play. I'm not surprised that the country acts are both louder (on peaks) and quieter (on average) than metal bands but I suspect a lot of people over hear might be a little surprised that a country band would be more demanding of the PA than a metal band. For the OP who plays in a function band and who wears ear protection we can reasonably assume this is a fairly professional unit where the PA is producing what the audience hears and stage levels are sensible I think that a 100W valve amp would be more than adequate. If you want the audience to hear the same sound you do then you need to chat with your sound engineer about how to relay it on to the audience, or simulate it with tech. 50W would probably be enough depending upon what the rest of your band are doing whether you compress your sound and how you eq and even how far you stand from your amp but I'd start looking at 100W amps. *for those of you still looking at the maths: the Two10 gives 98dB for 1W. To make 110dB needs an extra 12 db. 3dB needs double the power and 12db need the power doubled four times which is 16 times the power=16W

Well Bill you might if you plan to play solo bass with all the treble rolled off, I suspect Joe intends to play with other musicians, noisy guitarists and such like. If he pushes the bass to those levels you can expect everyone else in the band to turn up to match him. That'll probably mean the band collectively are going to reach levels maybe 6dB above the sorts of levels we are describing. I'm talking about a capability of 40dB dynamic range with peaks of 120dB for each instrument. I don't think you are seriously suggesting safely going up to 160dB peaks. I've chosen to make a whole series of assumptions in my sound levels, without making it into a 101 acoustics paper I have tried to indicate which bits are factual and what my reasoning is based upon where I've made broad assumptions. I don't think they are anything more than one person's opinion offered as a guideline but they are based in real world experience. I'd absolutely say that a speaker capable of 120dB across a broad spectrum is going to match a drummer 90% of the time and one which will only do 117dB is likely to struggle at times in some bands. I'm trying to keep it simple too, there are so many variables. The only point I was really making is that there is no point in just purchasing more and more sound output just because you can, and that there are hazards in extremely high sound levels. There comes a point where you are loud enough.

It's slightly complicated with two cabs because the impedance changes so you may, or may not draw more power from the amp. That's probably less of a problem with valve amps of course as the output transformer means they should be able to match to most common impedances. For the same power doubling the cone area will give you an extra 3dB. That's how itsmedunc got such a good result from his Ashdown 4x8's I'm guessing here but an 8" speaker is pretty efficient if it gives 92dB/W. Two would give you 95dB about the same as a reasonable 12" speaker. Four drivers would double again so 98dB/W and two cabs 101dB/W a 50W amp into this would give an extra 17dB That will give you 118dB the same as you might get from a Two10 and a 100W valve amp. Two Two10's with a 100W amp would give you 121dB, with a little overdrive/distortion that would be as loud as a 124dB solid state system in practice. Louder than almost all drums and more than enough to permanently damage your hearing. At this stage I need to say something. Each 3db increase in level halves the time you should be exposed to noise. Anything above 85dB will damage your hearing permanently if you are exposed to it for too long. The 100dB levels we average on stage with a Rock band will start to damage your hearing in about 15mins without ear plugs. I have mild tinnitus. https://www.noisehelp.com/noise-dose.html

That's spot on. To avoid having to dig the log tables out as a ready reckoner all you need to know is that 10x the watts is 10dB extra and 2x the watts is 3dB. You can then make a quick rough calculation by adding the extra dB's you get for the extra watts. Sticking with the Barefaced 2x10 which gives 98dB for 1W and looking at something like a 400W amp. That's two lots of 10x power and then two lots of doubling (400 is 10x10x2x2) in dB's that's 10+10+3+3 or an extra 26dB, 124 in total with the Barefaced cab. You can only just hear a 1dB change in level so calculating it to within a dB is usually good enough. A 300W amp is going to give between 1 and 2dB less 122-123db which is close enough for most purposes. The other bit of the story is why it's important. A metre away from a drumkit the average sound level is around 103dB. An audience makes an ambient noise level of 85dB or thereabouts so your quietest bass note needs to be at that level and your dynamic range (the difference between the quietest and loudest notes) will be about 40dB. You'll operate in a range of 80-120dB in most circumstances and if your system will do this without distorting you are going to be able to cope with most situations. When looking at bass systems I always look to beat 120dB as a target. With a valve amp you can crank it up 3dB and it will distort, in the example above the distortion kicks in at 118dB, but because its a valve amp you will only notice it as a bit of grit on the very loudest notes and a lower power amp amp will still deliver.

I'd say the sweet spot for valve amps is around the 100W mark. Any more than that and they get pretty heavy, and expensive. you can get away with a little less power with a valve amp because you can drive them up to their limits and the resulting overload is quite pleasing rather than unpleasantly distorted. Remember valve watts and solid state watts are still watts though, there's no magic going on just nicer distortion. Even that Barefaced isn't mega efficient compared with the old speakers that used to be used with valve amps 98dB/W will give 118dB with a 100w amp. My 1x12 gives 121db with a 300W amp and is just capable of matching a drumkit. That leaves you 3dB down though I think you should be able to push an extra 3dB higher on average because it's a valve amp. I suppose what I'm saying is it's very do-able but you won't have a lot to spare on a very loud stage. If you had a couple of 2x10's then you'd be sweet. Hope that helps

I really like the look of those beta's in the 50l cab and I love the mid peak in their response, it's a nice wide prominence showing a nice controlled cone break up rather than the much sharper peak that the Eminence Delta shows. It's not going to be a neutral sounding cab but it's pretty much the response I dial in on the graphic when I want the bass to cut through live.

Double the volume would be good but you'd need to recalculate the ports, they tune that particular volume of air irrespective of the number or size of the speaker. If you decide to go ahead I can calculate that for you or you can do it yourself with winISD a great piece of free software. I haven't looked at that Celestion, it doesn't have the excursion of the Beyma but that would matter a lot less in a 2x12. I know Stevie likes the look of that driver and I'd trust his judgement. I quite like the look of the Eminence Beta in the 50l cab but for me it works less well in the 30l cab.

That's right, we put in four ports because we had some concerns over port noises shifting that much air through only a couple of small ports. The mk2 cab has a single large port. We stuck to the small ports in this cab because you can cut the holes more easily by using a standard hole saw. I tried a slot port too but decided it was tricky to build because it needed clamping whilst the glue dried