Phil Starr

Just thought I'd do a quick update on this topic. I haven't had much of a chance to use the cab in anger until the last couple of weeks down to the usual band politics and lack of gigs followed by all the work involved in starting a new project. You've probably all been there. Anyway I have had the chance to try it out in anger at a full rehearsal. As a little extra spice the drummer has a 7 week old baby and hasn't been out for a while so was hitting things with a little extra enthusiasm, thank heaven for earplugs! So, I was back in the hall with the most appalling acoustics, all hard surfaces high ceilings, well you name it. To save anyone having to go back the speaker was designed to cope with this sort of space, and those pubs where you just can't get the bass sound right. The deepest bass was rolled off with a 2dB hump at around 120Hz to add a bit of thump so they didn't sound too bass light, a kind of old school underdamped response but with a modern high excursion driver using a single 12 built into a very simple 30l cabinet. To complete the picture I was using a Fender American Deluxe P Bass with a Markbass Tube everything set flat with VPF set at about 10.00 o'clock. We play pop/rock covers AC/DC, Queen through to Chelsea Dagger via Summer of 69 sort of thing (I've no shame) It sounded awesome, first of all really effortlessly loud with two guitars a keyboard and drummer really driving on it was really well up in the mix, not a hint of a clipping light on the input and with plenty to play with at the master volume. I have to say there didn't appear to be much in the way of high power compression either, it was over 30degreees outside, warmer in and we played for three hours without any noticeable tail off in performance by the speaker. This with a single 12 in a cab the size of an old fashioned milk crate. The sound? Well it was the sound of a P bass, punchy but sitting just right in the mix once the band got going. Not the sort of thing you'd set up playing alone at home where you'd probably want a bit more deep and some mid scoop but with a band just spot on. I can also report that in this really difficult room I had no problem in monitoring my own playing both with and without ear plugs. I know you can't trust someone praising their own design but this was meant to be built as a bit of fun, a demo at the bass bash, something I wanted to try. I fully expected to be building a 45l cab which to my mind modelled a lot better but thought I'd try a cab just on the silly side of 'too small'. it was only when we plugged it in at the end of the bass bash I realised it was worth sticking with. It started life as a curiosity piece really but honestly I'd recommend building one to anyone who wants something really portable, isn't too bothered about the top end (it has no tweeter/horn) and who is happy with a straightforward old school sound straight out of the box. It will cost you around £120 to build and once the parts are cut, well it took me around an hour to do the basic build in the video, maybe 2.5 hours in total including the pre prep and finishing.

+1 for the Peavey IPR1600 I have two for PA use, they are just plug in and forget, no real sound of their own and they just work.

Oh that's interesting, I have a J Retro on my Jazz. I get lovely sounds at home and through headphones in particular but in noisy environments have had problems with not being able to pick out the bass. Swapping to a P the problem disappears and on days when I record the gig there is always plenty of sound out there from the J, I'm just not getting it. I've even wondered about going back to passive. The J retro has bass boost only so unless the bass is turned right down you can have a lot of bass boost without realising it. 3dB of boost is going to double the demand for power from your amp for a fairly subtle change in tone. I used to get some nice tones from the j-Retro with my old Hartke but with some strange shapes on the graphic. If you have a range of basses it might be worth investigating.

It might be sensible to contact Barefaced, or you could try a pm to Alex to get him to contribute here. If the difference is only 1dB you'd only notice the difference when switching between cabs in an A/B test. Having said that the broadband sensitivity doesn't tell you much, most of what we perceive as loudness is about the midrange sensitivity so a speaker with a flatter response may sound quieter. There's also the reality that in practice smaller speakers usually need more power to get the same volume of sound, whatever the advertising implies. A speaker may be very efficient compared with other speakers of it's type but a 1x12 is never going to be as efficient as an 8x10. Then you had your original speaker for a while and you'll have been tweaking the eq to get the best out of it, it'll be a while before you get to the same place with the new one. I really wouldn't worry about where the gain and master volume are set. So long as you could keep up with the drummer and the sound isn't distorting then your amp is happy, maybe this speaker just needs driving a little harder and that's OK. Obviously if it's distorting and the amp is overloading then that's a different issue but if your speaker gives you less gain then the amp will have to give a little more.

My greatest bugbear, apart from people who, when they do show up clearly haven't looked at what we are planning to rehearse. I understand people are busy and sometimes things come up which we can't control especially with young families but in the end if you can't rehearse you can't be in a band. If breaks between rehearsals get too great then you lose the advances you made last time and end up constantly rehearsing the same songs over and over. Most of us are just weekend warriors and family/relationships and work usually have to come first but then there are other priorities and being in a band is quite a commitment. For us music is a team sport and there has to be at least some sense of not letting the team/band down. I still play cricket from time to time and if I commit to playing on a Sat I know I am letting 21 other people down if I don't show, 21 people who have arranged their weekend and their families weekends around the game. If I fail to show or cancel at the last minute for a Tues rehearsal it's the same thing multiplied by the fact that four other people have spent the weekend finding time to practice/learn whatever we are going to rehearse. Generally it's the same people each time and what they are basically thinking is that their busy lives are more important than other people's busy lives. You can tell this is a recent experience Anyway, a couple of practical suggestions: In the end the only way I've ever known bands to work is to have a regular practice day. In the end there is always someone who cant do Mon, Tue, ….. or weekends. If you pick a day which suits the majority it is surprising how people rearrange if the alternative is leaving the band. Once you've settled on a day they'll book their pilates class another day and all will be fine, the band stop booking things in on a practice night because they know Tues is the day we all meet. Moveable days don't usually work as people forget and book something in, or their partners do. Bands work best IME when two people form an engine room driving the band. If you turn up and two people have been quietly working away together at new material it generally goes well. It's relatively easy to jam along if two people at least are solid, they'll end up sorting out chord sheets and the like and will generally pick up on most of the organisation and drive the band. If those core members get together maybe with a singer or guitarist as well it can be really productive. a random meeting of three musicians out of five less so. It takes organisation and a decent musical brain to isolate little bits of a set or song to work on, not three people who have all either not picked up their guitar or put the kit together in the intervening fortnight. Only 12 bar hell can emerge from that. If you are working with band members missing an acoustic workout sometimes goes well IME, sitting down where everyone can hear each other can really give you a different insight into songs and your role in them, and people get to talk when they aren't competing with a kit or a guitarist widdling away in the corner through a 4x12. Bitter, me????

Just as a general principle (though relevant to the Mackie Thump) you get what you pay for to a certain extent. More money buys a bigger magnet for the drive unit and in turn that means fewer compromises or more scope with the design. with a bigger magnet you can extend the magnetic field and have the bass controlled over longer excursion. If the magnet is limited you either have to shorten the magnetic field or spread it thinner and have less sound per watt. The Mackie does the second, it has 3db less output than the SRM450 it's 'big brother'. So a cheap PA driver is going to either be less efficient than a top range model or it will overload with a bass at relatively lower power. However for home use? Well unless you live in a stately home pretty much anything is going to be loud enough so volume probably isn't a big worry. The other consideration with a cheap FRFR/PA speaker is that it is likely to have a cheap plastic cabinet and these tend to resonate a bit if you play loud bass through them. I'm not recommending any particular model because I haven't tried a range of them but FWIW I play in a loud acoustic duo and after struggling with the acoustics in the pubs we tend to play in we decided to scrap the back line and just use floor monitors. These are Behringer B1320D's nothing special and bought because they were adequate for vocal monitors. They are working fine as bass monitors so far and we only use one for rehearsal. At home they sound pretty good with bass, guitar and two vocals, though we have to roll off the bass fairly hard because they have a built in bass bias. If it really is just for home use though I'd probably look for something more compact like a 10" PA speaker.

There's no standard for clipping lights so it would be hard to say how much clipping would be acceptable. Heed Bill's advice about tweeters/horns. If the amp is genuinely clipping all that extra power pretty much goes through the horns. Some clipping lights are on the input stages rather than monitoring the output. That makes it easy to set up a little distortion and then adjust your levels with the same level of 'grind' at all volume levels. If you have an input level control (sometimes called gain) and a master volume try turning the master volume right up and the input level down and see if the light goes out, or even turn the volume on your bass down and the master up. If that is the case your input stages were overloading and the amp actually wsn't giving you a little more power to play with. Worth a try anyway.

It's an interesting thought, as cabs get smaller the need for folded ports increases. I've tended to avoid them so far but this is a relatively pain free way of getting a result. Thanks

Just to be clear, the cheap QTX driver is the same one used in a lot of cheap cabs, mainly those advertised as 'party cabs' or disco cabs but also used as cheap and cheerful PA systems in churches and schools. Maplin used to sell them as their cheap as chips speakers. They are remarkably good for the money but I just wouldn't advise anyone to go out and buy one, they really aren't up to any serious bass use at any high power level, They might sound great for home practice, I couldn't say but for £135 you could probably buy an active PA speaker with amp tweeter and crossover built in but with the same driver. He's probably designed the cab for the Beta anyway. That's what I'd do and the cab will probably be tuned to around 50Hz. A 50l 50hz cab with a Beta will be fine and he's probably used winISD anyway. Here you go https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/QTX-QX12A-12-ACTIVE-PA-SPEAKER-400W-DJ-DISCO-SOUND-SYSTEM-PA/202077424069?hash=item2f0cc0c9c5:g:O2YAAOSwls5Y63zR Bill will know better than me of who uses the Beta in their commercial cabs, they might be a similar price to these and they'd definitely be cheaper used. Nobody is ripping anyone off but there isn't a free lunch being offered either. There's a TC RS212 in the for sale section for £380, less than a pair of the Eminence driven cabs at £200ea, They'd probably be similar but I'd go for the brand name because I'm not bothered about stuff being new.

I'm amazed this thread is still running. This is a bass player trying to make a little money by building cabs. He's chosen the simplest of designs, a roughly 50l 1x12 and is offering effectively to put in the driver of your choice at different price points. You'll get exactly what you pay for. His advertising claims are no more silly than anyone else's, kind of true but not very enlightening. I'd suspect you'll get a very simple box which you could build yourself for £40 but someone else has put it together for you. That QTX driver is the sort of driver found in millions of cheap speakers with a hundred different brand names all coming out of a factory somewhere in China. It'll make a noise but won't have a lot of deep bass and will give up the ghost fairly early if you turn the power up due to over excursion. The Eminence Beta will sound like an Eminence Beta, it's a good mid range driver for bass and is used re-badged in a number of designs. An unbraced 3/4" ply cab that size isn't going to be high end but the panels are rigid enough not to be awful and you can always add braces yourself. I'm not as cynical as others, having done something similar back in the early 1970's. It's tough when you have no capital and you have to do everything yourself. You operate on the tightest of margins and keeping costs down by saving on handles and fittings and sticking to one design makes sense. I doubt he's making minimum wage once his time is factored in but we all start somewhere.

Well done for keeping going. It's always distracting when things like that go wrong but you can only control your own bit and getting on with that is the truly pro attitude, whatever gets said afterwards. Good to hear the Mk 1's got some approval too.

I've no quarrel with using the ports as handles. Ports do have their own resonances and putting them on the sides or backs means those resonances will be less audible, though whether that is a significant factor I doubt. It's quite a clever idea I suppose and it's rare to see anything novel, I haven't seen this before. The piezo tweeter is one of those cheap things that a lot of people switch out of their bass cabs, neither here nor there really, some people like them as giving a little more top. Basically this is someone trying to start a business building cabs and it's a pretty straightforward 12" cab fitted with an Eminence driver, the cheap one fitted with the Alpha isn't going to sound too great but the one with the Beta, well it's a nice driver at that price point and fitted to a lot of commercial cabs. You could buy a lot of used 112's for that but who knows you might have the next Barefaced

If it works then it is worth more than that, the only fly in the ointment might be if the transformers are bust, the output transformers are costly items to replace and that would detract considerably from their value. Mr Foxen who used to post here frequently but has gone quiet might be someone to contact as he did a lot of work on old valve amps. Everything else on these amps can be replaced fairly simply.

Bill is absolutely right, cabs on top of each other with the centres of the cones aligned is best. Anything else and you'll get places on stage where frequencies are cancelled due to the sound arriving from the two speakers at different times. However I'm not a purist about this. We rarely play in ideal conditions in the UK, lot's of small venues and misshaped buildings, and bands who are run on a shoestring budget with inadequate gear. Sometimes you have to improvise and then it is a question of balancing two evils. When I started doing PA a long time ago we often used to swap speakers in a stack so the bassist had one of the guitarists 4x12's in their stack and vice versa. On a wide stage that helped them hear each other. Some of the older rock bands still do this, probably out of habit but at least one band had that arrangement at Glastonbury this year. If the onstage gear is just for monitoring and what the audience hear is through a massive PA it wouldn't be a problem. In one difficult venue I had my amp facing the audience but added my practice amp (Hartke Kickback) as a monitor for the drummer. If you think about it some bands scrap backline altogether and use floor monitors, the bass might be coming out of all of them so you have set up all sorts of interference/cancellation problems. It works because you are much closer to your own monitor than the rest. That means it is louder than the rest so although there is interference from the other monitors in practice it isn't noticeable. So I'd say default position is vertically aligned cabs but if you are due on in 5 mins and someone really can't hear then be prepared to be creative, then go back and think how you can sort your monitoring after the gig. In our case we gave the drummer their own monitor at ear level and let them mix in what they wanted to hear, mainly vocals and bass.

Without wanting to start a major derail of this thread there are a lot of assertions here that are at least debatable. One thing however stick out as just being wrong, that rectangular vents give more "woof" and ducts are more hi-fi. Whilst the shape of the ports will change the port resonances and changing that shape will also alter the point at which turbulence sets in the idea that different shaped ports of the same length and cross sectional area will have vastly different sounds isn't something with any evidence or mathematical proof that I've seen. I'm interested in what you mean by Line Array. The first of what we currently consider line array systems appeared in PA systems in the 1990's. A series of identical cabs with the mid and high frequency drivers vertically aligned to control dispersion. The idea of 'line source' has been around a lot longer, single cabs with vertically aligned drivers. The original paper on that was published in the 1950's but the phenomenon was known a long time before that and I remember churches with line source speakers fitted probably back before WW2 plus designs published in old books before Olsen's paper. I can't think of anyone using Line Array for bass, though the Genzler Bass Array cabs look interesting.

Yes it's an old Sheffield unit and there were various versions rated 150W and 250W, there's also a recone kit advertised which is 8 ohm. There's a moderately lively second hand market for Peavey drivers so you could probably pick up a cheap replacement if something went wrong. Frankly you've not got a lot to lose, you could probably get away with using your Elf for quite a while with no problems. If you are going to use it at home it'll make a lot of noise. If you are going out and gigging with a loud rock band then it's probably not going to last too long and you'll want a better speaker fairly quickly anyway. Matching amps and speakers isn't an exact science anyway. Play your 150w amp with clean tones and you're probably only averaging less than 10w anyway so it isn't going to overheat the speaker. Play with distortion and a lot of bass boost and you can probably blow quite a few speakers rated well above the amplifier power by over excursion at the lowest frequencies

Yep there are arguments for and against putting the port on the back. The main argument for is that ports produce noises at mid frequencies due to all sorts of resonances, putting them round the back means the noises can't really be heard. Against is the thought that you can't ram the cab hard against a wall and potentially block the port, but even a few cm away it won't be a problem. With compact cabs it's always a bit of a problem fitting everything on the baffle without weakening the panel. The other solution might be a slot port, you'd have to form it in timber so there is extra woodwork but it's a nice tidy way of creating a port, another more complex method is that used by some manufacturers of building triangular corner ports like Mesa

Seriously no problem. If there's any basis at all in this sort of thing then it's nothing to do with damping. It's more to do with power and the technology of the time. 120w is a big valve amp both in terms of cost and weight to carry around. Nobody was going to carry around an 800W valve amp! Back in the day there was often little PA support for the bassist so big venues had to be filled by the bassists amp. The answer to that was lots of efficient speakers built into a cab and the 8x10 was the best solution of the day. They were packed in a sealed cab which gave them a big boost in the bass and the cheap drivers also had a natural peak in the mids that helped punch through without sounding harsh. The Ampeg fridge was born and there were lots of 'me too' copies. Most of the cabs were sealed just because everyone had to offer a competitive product. just as everyone is offering a lightweight 12" now. So what you need is an efficient speaker. That Barefaced claims 102db sensitivity, though it doesn't specify whether that is at 1W or at 2.83volts. (2.83V is 1W into 8ohms but 2W into 4ohms and it's a 4 ohm speaker) Anyway 100W into a 102dB speaker is going to give you 122dB which is going to match a drummer pretty well and because it's a valve amp you can run it closer to the rated output without the distortion becoming objectionable so you'll probably be able to get an extra 3-6db if you need it. You could eq in an Ampeg sound if you wanted or just worry about eq'ing the sound you like best.

Not with a name like Browning

I'm no expert in musical instruments (I'd take Andyjr's advice over mine) but I do a lot of working with wood including restoring antique furniture. This sort of clouding doesn't look to me like anything T-Cut would benefit and I agree from the photos it looks like something is in the finish. To me it doesn't look like a lacquered finish from the photos, but I'm far from sure. It's very similar to my dining room table which is 15 layers of Danish oil which is a mixture of oils and alkyd resins. If it is it's not an impermeable finish and does tend to soak up thins over time like oil from our skin and even sweat. It may well be that over time people have added finishes, like a layer of wax or maybe oil over the original finish. That sort of bloom can also be caused if someone has used a silicone based polish at some stage. I'm guessing here without the bass in front of me but people do all sorts of strange things to wood. Personally I'd live with it and maybe just sort out the dinks and scratches. If you do want to try something yourself I'd start off by cleaning off as much of the patina as a solvent could take off. Work on bits that won't be obvious with the usual solvents and a cotton bud to start. Alcohol is probably the mildest or even just soapy water if you keep it as dry as possible. White spirit or even petrol are a bit stronger but go carefully on a small patch, there are also commercial varnish cleaners (not strippers) available. go carefully, good luck

I must admit as a scientist I was originally sceptical about some of the claims made during basschat debates about tone, and it is true that in many areas there is a general lack of data from properly controlled experiments. In particular I found it hard to believe that the amount of energy transmitted from a string would move a relatively massive bass body enough to feed back to the string and modify the original signal. I own four basses, a Fender P American Deluxe, a Highway One J, a Burny T'bird and my starter bass a Cort Action Bass. The only other bass I've owned was a Gibson T'bird. The J,P and Cort all have J style necks, all with maple/rosewood necks and all the basses are 34" scale. The Burny is a pretty faithful copy of the Gibson, certainly in physical shape and pickup placement. They are all currently strung with Dean Markley Blue Steels The Cort has had a series of pup replacements, it plays great but sounds completely dead, both acoustically and through the pups. All of the others sing acoustically, sustain better than the Cort and the acoustic sound is reflected in the sound I get through an amp or through headphones. The two T'birds sound fairly similar acoustically, both have remarkable sustain too but the Gibson had a lovely rough edge to it which the Burny lacks, I have that down to the pickups in all probability. Now you are right that strings, pup's and their placement all make a difference but pups aren't going to make much of a difference to the acoustic sound. The bodies of the two Fenders vibrate enough for me to be able to feel them through my stomach never mind my fingers and lets face it, if basses didn't vibrate clip on tuners wouldn't work. So I'd say it is certainly plausible that the nature of the body would affect the sound and that some energy is transmitted to the strings. I'm not hazarding a guess as to how important each factor is but I certainly no longer believe a bass body or neck is an inert part of the system.

I must admit to being tempted by the One 10 for just this sort of use. Of course I'd rather design and build my own being me but I just can't find a suitable 10" driver to deliver the sound I'm after. Did you read the simple 12" build thread I put up recently? The one where I stuffed the original Basschat Mk1 into a 30l cab. If you get time to do a quick build I'd be interested in what someone who has lived with the Mk1 for a while thought of the smaller and more coloured cab. It's nowhere near the small size of the One 10 but if you wanted to experiment...…….

Nancyraygun are you still in the room? Anyway, here's the thing all other things being equal the efficiency of loudspeakers is proportional to their surface area, doubling the cone area gives the equivalent of doubling the amplifier power. There is nothing magic about modern speakers just a gradual improvement in materials and engineering which enable you to squeeze a little more sound out of a modern drive unit. The state of play at the moment IMO is that you can just about squeeze enough sound out of a single 12" cone to match a drummer, so long as you aren't demanding anything unusual in terms of boosting the bass. The Barefaced designs along with loads of others takes advantage of this and the ultralight cab helps a lot with portability too. If you are still reading this thread then I'd recommend you think in terms of buying a couple of 8 ohm, 1x12 cabs. a single one will do for rehearsals and small gigs and adding a second cab will double the efficiency and increase the power from your amp giving you a real boost in sound. It means a single journey for smaller gigs and a return trip for big gigs, though I do sometimes manage two light'ish 1x12's, amp and bass as one lift if the route from the car is straightforward. I think you should be fussed by tone though, compared to speakers amps add very little tone of their own and changing your speakers will change your tone more than changing your amp. I'd go out and try as many speakers as possible, preferably with your own amp.

You could mount the port in the rear of the cab, that way you could fit the bigger port in. .

Yes that's right I assumed 40l, speaker ports and any bracing