Phil Starr

I'm a big fan of these. I bought mine after comparing it side by side with the Mackie. Apart from some cosmetic differences they sounded and worked pretty much identically apart from the Behringer case being slightly better made than the Mackie. The sound frankly isn't great, think of a very loud transistor radio. It's a bit like a Precision or an SM58 though, it just sits in the right part of the mix to punch the vocals through. Way louder than it needs to be as well. Even using it as a floor monitor I got feedback before I got distortion. It's the perfect answer to anyone who wants 'more me' in the mix. My drummer kept borrowing it so I sold it to him and 'upgraded' to a TC VoiceSolo . It's got a better sound and a couple of useful vocal fx built in but the better sound is useless in a band situation, you don't need tops and bass just smooth mids. The hi fi sound just gives you extra feedback issues and the digital controls are less user friendly than a set of knobs to twiddle. To be fair it's better in a low noise environment like my acoustic duo but in a band environment I've been tempted to go back to the Behringer. Like Andy I often used the mixing in the Behringer and send that to the house PA especially at open mics and similar uncontrolled situations. Oh, one fault with the Behringer, it's really easy to switch/knock the little button on the back and send a line level signal to the PA instead of the mic level one you intended.

My wife always says 'don't put out your dirty underwear until you have clean'. In your position a couple of years ago I made the band have the ''talk' It didn't clear the air and any promised changes soon evaporated. I didn't back down and it all ended messily. They went on gigging and I've been sat at home most of the time until recently. I went to see them the other day and they were OK if pedestrian. Ironically another band plying similarly needed a bassist a couple of weeks before the final split and out of loyalty to the band I was unhappy with I turned them down. I should have taken my wife's advice. I missed gigging more than I expected. Relax about your current band, as long as you honour current gigs you won't be letting anyone down. Look for something else, when you find it hand in your notice. Let's face it you aren't spending a lot of time learning new songs, so it really is just the gigs. You can enjoy them once you know you are on your way to something better.

I was feeling guilty about that, phew. I don't use fx but a lot of the separate fx are noisy and it's hard to set up the gain structure to limit it. I spent hours in the past trying to sort out my guitard's board. Yeah you get a fair amount of hiss on a lot of the patches but all I use is the amp sims and a bit of compression so it isn't an issue for me. That's interesting though I'd assumed the patches would be the same in most cases. Can you update them on the B3?

Good to see you making sawdust. Hope you enjoy the process and there's nothing like the joy of making a very loud noise with something you've built yourself, I still get a big kick from the first time I crank up each new design.

You are bumping into the reasons for big old cabs. No-one really wants to carry an amp that weighs more than a speaker or to pay more for the amp than a Fender Custom Shop. So 100W is where people lose interest. In the good old days we just couldn't afford anything bigger. Now the efficiency of a speaker depends upon how powerfully the magnet drives the coil, how much you can jam into the gap where the magnetic field is strongest and how light the cone is. Well roughly speaking. It's realtively simple to make a 100dB sensitivity speaker by making a light cone and having a short voice coil. That works really well for guitar but rubbish for bass where the voice coil needs to be long for better excursion. Early guitar speakers couldn't handle much power anyway because the glue used in the coils melted and the coil formers would also distort and sometimes catch fire! The solution was usually just to use lots of speakers. You could use bigger magnets and longer coils for bass but with most of the coil outside the magnet gap they were inefficient until you reached magnet sizes that weighed as much as a minor moon of Jupiter. Doubling your cone area will give you an extra 3db of sensitivity but with a valve amp no extra power, that only applies to solid state amps. Modern drivers using neodymium allow you to make very powerful magnets that don't weigh too much, and that is the real breakthrough, it becomes technically feasible to build a long throw speaker with acceptable efficiency. Light weight is a secondary consideration really. Even so you aren't going to find sensibly priced speakers with much better than 96db sensitivity for a 12" bass driver. If you want to use a 100W amp you are really bound to either using multiple drivers or lots of PA support. You ought to be able to get to 120dB to be sensible. 100W gives you 20dB more than 1W so you need to look for something better than 100dB/W. So your single 96dB/w 12 is going to give 116dB with your 100W amp. Two 12's will give 119dB, not far short of what you 'need' Two 2x10's and you'll be there unless you go for something exotic.

The volume controls are in the patches. So for example my favourite tones are A2 and A3 from the pre loaded sounds, Select these then select the amp. That's a Hartke HA 3500 on one of those. You can then select the controls on those and adjust them as if you had the amp there. The only problem is that you can only adjust one at a time but for a simple change in volume it's quick and easy. I'm set up so all I do nowadays is plug and play. If I wanted to use something like this live I'd go for the B3 just to cut down on scrolling through the patches

Ha ha he'd have got a lot of maj7's and 3rds from me, since he'd made it clear he didn't mind . Or maybe a 'can't you manage a chord change?' comment. Are you sure he wasn't just doing the equivalent of the 'drummer joke'?

Zoom B1ON cheap as chips, built in tuner and drum machine, cab and amp emulation so sounds great and you can connect anything with a headphone output. All sorts of other features too. Runs for about a week on AA rechargeables which means you can practice anywhere without being tethered to a power supply.

Well done, bonding with the drummer is key but so long as you are competent the usual factor is personality. You've just met a bunch of people who like you. Some days are wonderful

There is such a device, in theory. It's called a transformer and there is one in every valve amp to match the impedance of the speaker to the amp. An audio transformer that handles 500W would be very heavy and would cost more than a second speaker especially as it's not a sensible solution and you'd have to get it custom wound. The other issue is that most of the 'extra oomf' you get from a second speaker is down to the extra cone area and raising the speaker closer to your ears. Just pushing one little cone harder won't give you a lot extra even if it is a long excursion driver and can handle that power

I'd think you wouldn't want to go anywhere too close together in time or more than three or four times a year. FWIW my last band didn't really ring the changes. We'd go down well the first couple of times and then it was a yawn from the audience and eventually no re-bookings. It doesn't do to rest on your laurels and one of the reasons I fell out of love with them.

Looks like I've joined this party too late! Who are the band, I might have seen you? Hold the Line and Jump, I was worried it was my band but then I remembered I'm the bass player

Looks like I'm committed then. I'm wondering how quickly I can do it. Maybe we should have a sweepstake

Moved to 2018, oops is it time to unpin this?

Yeah, it's kind of the tool for the job. A bit like a hammer if you just want to bang in a nail. It's not elegant or sophisticated but it does the job well.

I'm pretty sure they will in one form or another. If |I can possibly get there I will. I haven't told anybody yet but I have toyed with the idea of building a cab whilst there, if anyone would be interested.

Yes I'm continuing with the Beymas as the basis for experimentation. I'm going down a different track to Stevie and John at the moment in my thinking, accepting that design is a compromise and looking for simple solutions that gig well even if they aren't perfect technically. In this case we've seen people arguing for years that anything above 6-8kHz isn't necessary for bass and that small cone drivers are more useful than horns. Now we are seeing the use of FRFR cabs for bass and the argument that control of dispersion of the middle and upper frequencies is a crucial component of a good sounding bass cab. I want to find out to what compromises are acceptable or even noticeable. There's a number of other issues I want to investigate too but I've got my own FRFR cabs and I want to compare them with using a 12+6 and a 12+3 (actually a 4x3 line source) The Beymas are a good platform for that as I they have good low frequency performance, are as flat as any other speakers in the midrange and don't have a lot of awkward personality issues meaning crossover design is simpler. They also have fairly typical sensitivity for a bass driver so if I do come up with a worthwhile DIY design it can be upgraded with a lot of other commercially available alternatives for the self builder.

I had the Behringer B205 personal monitors, their version of the Thomann one. Actually a clone of the Mackie. They are really good in a noisy band environment and you can have a personal mix if you get a feed from the PA. I A/B'd them with the Mackie, nothing in it, if anything the Behringer was more tidily put together but that may have been just luck on the two I had in front of me. Studiospares do their own version of the 'Box' version if you want to purchase from the UK. The Behringer was used as a monitor by my drummer so I sold it to him and upgraded to the TC one. It sounds much better and has a lot of useful extra features. Not least it actually just clamps onto the mic stand, fixing the Behringer/Mackie to the stand is impractical really as you end up with something that topples really easily. The TC works well as a monitor in my fairly loud semi acoustic duo too. In a band situation I'd go back to the Behringer style monitor in a heartbeat, The extra fidelity of the TC means feedback at lower levels than the Behringer which is very mid biased meaning it cuts through with the bit's you need to hear to pitch when singing. If you want a 'proper' floor monitor I'm using the Behringer 1320 The band love them and they sound unbelievable for the price, much more accurate than the Laneys, though see above for the feedback consequences of wider flatter frequency response. If you don't need the controls on the front of the speaker then the PA route of the ART310's or similar is a great solution. If the cost of that is too great then a couple of Wharfedale Titan 12's is the bargain of the moment, they sound really good on vocals and reliability seems excellent. I think DJKit had them on offer but search around

Funnily enough I'd intended trying out my 6 in a separate box first, I see no reason why you shouldn't build the horn and crossover into a separate box other than that you would have to carry it on gig days. The crossover design published wouldn't be right for a pair of 12's though as they would present a 4ohm load. Chienmortbb and I tried the mk 1 and 2 together at the last South West Bass Bash briefly, not an ideal environment as groups of bassists are as noisy as drummers but to me it sounded really promising.

After so much time I had to check to see what I'd said

If it's not too late. The enemy of wooden structures is water, both fungal and insect attack are more likely if the wood has a high moisture content. There are centuries old buildings with exposed wooden frames still standing but they are designed to keep the frames dry. It's worth thinking of how you can limit the water soaking into the wood and how it is going to escape. Shape the top to shed water or better still create a cap with a proper drip strip which will shed water as far from the written surface as practical. Then consider how you can mount the plaque clear of the soil surface and prevent wicking up the wood. You probably won't be allowed to use concrete but setting the wood into concrete stores the water at the base which guarantees rot unless you design a way for water to escape. If you make the cap and base sacrificial and aim to replace these fairly simple parts when needed you could probably double the lifetime of the memorial.

Tuning the cab to that frequency means the cabinet starts to resonate and produce air movement (sound) through the port. This creates pressure on the back of the cone and damps down it's movement so effectively the port takes over making the sound from the speaker. How the cone moves is controlled by the design of the speaker, the volume of the cab and the tuning. The trick is to balance up the speaker, cab size and tuning so the sound stays the same all the way down and all WinISD and the other programs do is to do the balancing act calculations for you. So, as the speaker starts to lose output the port takes over and adds in a bit more sound, ideally just enough to keep the sound level the same but lets you go deeper.

That's really useful information from Bill. I'd think most of the mids came from the other drivers in this cab, it may be that your 15 was itself swapped in the dim and distant past, you often find non original drivers in old cabs.

I hope he isn't a basschatter If it sounded bad to you then it isn't really something to worry about, if in your opinion the outcome wasn't right then you don't need to replicate his approach. It could be he simply wanted to replicate his on stage tone but be able to fiddle around with the on stage amp without altering the PA output, sensible if you don't have someone mixing out front. However this looks like a very expensive way of achieving something you could do in other ways.

If you are only doing it up to sell then it probably isn't profitable to do much but no harm in getting a quote for a re-cone. Old drivers turn up on ebay from time to time so if you are in no rush then keep looking and an old EV may come up. Or try and sell your old working drivers to someone who has holed their other speakers but has a working 15. There's always a market for old drivers for people who love their vintage gear. If the driver is working you can repair. layer up tissue paper and latex adhesive (Copydex) over the tear as if it is a fibreglass repair on an old rusty car. you might get away with an old Peavey Black Widow as a cheap replacement, it'll be roughly right in a cab of that size, not ideal but I don't suppose the old EV was either. Used they go for £30-40 on ebay