Phil Starr

Hi Steve, have you been along to PMT in Portsmouth? If it's like the one in Bristol they stock a range of PA. There's nothing like auditioning the gear. I took along some decent quality vocal recordings to run through some of the speakers you are looking at. I probably drove most of the people in the shop mad but the guy who served me was really helpful and I think quite enjoyed a chance to try the stuff out himself. I tried out some JBL's EV's Alto, Yamaha and RCF's and I was concentrating on vocals though we did have full range recordings. The JBL's were bass heavy with a bit of tizz at the top, a natural smiley face eq if you like, perfectly adequate. EV's were much more honest but with a slightly larger than life presentation of the vocals, I knew both of these speakers quite well and have heard bands using them sounding great so it was a good basis for comparison. I tried two sets of EV 12's but they've updated their range since then one was the ELX though. I tried the Alto's as I was considering them as monitors, good value for money but they just didn't do it for me, there was a real lack of detail in the vocals, though they'd be a whole lot better than the Peaveys. The Yamahas disappointed me a bit, though I know a lot of people love them. I looked at the DBR12 and the DXR 12. They were OK without exciting me at all, the bass lacked definition and vocals were again but I found female vocals in particular weren't well articulated. I had a passive Yamaha system including a couple of Yamaha mixers and I am a big fan of their reliability and workhorse nature. The RCF's were just a class ahead of the rest I tried the 310's, 312's and the 735's (which I couldn't afford) For me it was the sweet midrange which distinguished them, you could pick up so much more of the work the female vocalists were putting into their voices, suddenly you could tell they were using studio condensers rather than stage mics. I'd have happily used the 310's for vocals only, bass was clean but obviously limited the 312's sounded much the same but with a touch more bass and the 735 would be my dream if funds were not an issue. That bigger horn driver and lower crossover just cleans the last little veil away from the vocals but at a price. I ended up buying used Wharfedale stuff though. I've got the EVP12's and Titan 12D's as monitors. The Titans are essentially the same speaker but in a plastic box. The EVP's are great sounding speakers but the older versions I have are very heavy with ceramic magnets and old classAB amps built in the Titans I bought new and are an easy one handed lift. They sound very similar on vocals and if I know that's all I'll need I take the lighter Titans. The plastic cabs can't really handle loud bass though so you'd have to go for the EVP's if you wanted to put bass or kick through the PA. (I picked up the EVP's with matching bass bins for £350 on fleabay) The Titans are on offer at the moment I notice http://www.gear4music.com/PA-DJ-and-Lighting/Wharfedale-Pro-Titan-12D-Active-PA-Speaker/Z5B Hope that helps.

[quote name='Conan' timestamp='1495015775' post='3300415'] Fine in principle - but not all of us play in bands (or venues) that have a PA sufficiently robust to put the bass through. I know I don't. [/quote] That's true of 80% of my gigs too sadly but there's no point in the bass drowning out the drums and if the PA can't handle bass it can't handle drums. All I'm saying is that 4x10's are enough, and most of us find it more convenient to have them as two 2x10's so the market for 4x10's is shrinking. Most people buying them will be after the retro tone or look of them so won't want a vertical stack. I too pictured the old WEM collumn when this was first posted. Sweet memories, who else is picturing the Pink Floyd Sleeve?

There's no reason why not but I guess demand would be limited. The reasoning behind multi speaker units like 4x10's and 8x10's has disappeared as tech has improved. Older single speakers struggled to handle the heat generated in pro gear and amplifiers were expensive. Putting lot's of cheap speakers in a cab improved efficiency and upped power handling which made sense when all you had for bass was your own stack. As materials have improved you can get relatively low cost PA speakers that can handle bass and a single 2x10 bass cab can be made with speakers that handle 500W+ and match most drummers. It just makes more sense to use two of these and put the bass through the PA if you need more volume.

Oh Alex that looks a little personal, playing the man not the ball I'm going to defend what I said. I've put it some of the post you are challenging and copied in the graphs to save people having to scroll back a page. I've highlighted in bold the bits I see as important. Apart from running my own business custom building speakers back in the 70's I was a science teacher. My thought was that with the ability to read the graphs people could make their own minds up on the evidence, and that was much better than simple assertions. I tried to keep it simple and not get bogged down in more detail than people would find interesting. I thought of mentioning the roughly 2dB discrepancy between the two plots for the Barefaced driver and the roughly 2dB hump around 800Hz in the off axis Ciare plot but my post was already too long so I tried to cover it with "pretty much the same on and off axis until you reach around 1,000Hz". I assumed you'd be back to point out the 2dB difference in level. I just wanted people to have the confidence to look and judge for themselves. Allowing for the 2dB difference your speaker is down 11dB off axis at 2000Hz and so is the Ciare. Above 4,000Hz the Ciare has much more absolute output than your driver (not an issue with a horn of course) I fully accept what you say about the power response at 3K so the difference depends upon your sample frequency. I went on to point out that comparison with a single driver wasn't a fair test. I've carefully avoided any comments over the years about Barefaced products, the only one I've played was a BB2 and I quite liked it. I was simply trying to help people interpret the graphs. Which we can pretty much all read, even me.

For me the answer is 'I don't know', but I'd like to. I'm inclined to agree with BFM, 80% of my gigs are in small venues and what the audience hear is my back line. At the same time we know how to control dispersion and if there are things I can do at little or no cost then why wouldn't I? At the same time in an ideal world I'd want one dispersion pattern for the audience another for the band and yet another for my monitoring, then I'd need a different pattern in a different venue where the acoustics of the room have changed. So the question for me is 'where does the sweet spot lay?' and what else would I sacrifice in a design to get better dispersion.

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1494856354' post='3299037'] I've rarely seen a better case argued for using your ears rather than all this reductio ad absurdum. If you like the sound, buy it. If you don't like the sound, buy something else. [/quote] [quote name='Conan' timestamp='1494858314' post='3299064'] For those of us without a PhD in acoustics, what do those graphs actually mean in the "real world"? [/quote] [quote name='Steve Browning' timestamp='1494862134' post='3299100'] Maybe I'm less sensitive (there's probably a graph for it!). While not a scientist, I have worked in a scientific environment and it is the nature of scientists to probe and question any claim. I'm not sure I see any casual put-downs but a mere statement of fact. [/quote] Knowledge is power. Without it you have no way of assessing the truth of anything and you can spend a lot of effort chasing phantoms. My music theory isn't what it should be and I don't doubt I'd be a better bassist if I knew more. Most of what I get out of BC is reading other people's debates about music and I'm trying to learn as much as I can. I love it when the muso's get into a spat about what mode a song is written in because I learn a lot. I hope there are people out there who don't have the science but who are learning from the bits and pieces of technical debate on BC. So yeah, if it sounds good to you and you want to get on playing bass good on you. If you've spent a fortune over the years on changing gear whilst chasing your perfect sound and think a little technical knowledge would help, well that's good too. And Steve (Browning) is right, scientists and engineers can get quite heated over details, but we have a way of resolving issues and that is to take measurements and collect data. In the end the off axis response of a 12" speaker either falls off in pretty much the same way for all 12's or it doesn't, and if it does you can measure it. I don't think it's snarky to do those measurements So what do Stevie's Graphs show? (I'm ignoring the waterfall chart) [quote]Here’s the frequency response of the Barefaced driver on axis (top) and at 30 degrees off axis (lower). Nice smooth response apart from the wide bump just above 2kHz, which deserves further investigation. The upper -6dB point is at 3.5kHz, which means that, without any crossover on the LF, the crossover point must at around 3.5kHz. Note the off-axis response. This is the same measurement of a Ciare 12.00 NDW. Unfortunately no longer made, it was a standard production model (i.e. not OEM). It has a 4-inch, 20mm long coil. It’s a bit bumpier than the Eminence, but its on-axis response extends to 4kHz, which is where its main upper resonance is. [/quote] Each graph has two traces. The top line is the frequency response of the speaker with the mic pointing straight at the middle of the speaker and the lower one is with the mic pointing in from one side, 30 degrees off the centre line. Both speakers show that the frequency response of the bass frequencies is pretty much the same on and off axis until you reach around 1,000Hz which is well into the mids. Above this the output off axis falls for both speakers in a similar but not identical way. The area between the two represents how much sound is lost off axis. If one of those drivers is better off axis then it would have a smaller difference between the two lines. You can judge for your self if that is true It would be great to see a few more measurements of other 12" drivers from commercial units. There's not a huge difference in off axis output and it clearly varies with frequency but the Ciare driver might be better or worse than average itself off axis. To make a fair test you'd have to compare the Barefaced driver with a range of drivers. Anyway I find it interesting

Well done! There will be dozens of us giving a little cheer when we read this. Good start to the day

Great work guys, I really wish I could have been there. Subjective loudness is such a tricky thing, I think we tend to pick out the loudest sounds and they dominate our perception of loudness, so anything with a flat response is going to sound quieter even if it measures the same. One persons loud is another persons 'shouty'. IME if you use the same piece of recorded music through speakers and something in the recording sets off even a small resonance in an A to B test then that cab will sound louder. Change the recording and the difference disappears. That's where your measurements add so much. At some time I'd love to bring across the Mk1 to compare and I've also got a 2 way design built with the Beyma and a P-Audio BM-D440 compression driver. As soon as I get time I want to have a try at something using the 4x3" line source Faital drivers.

FWIW because I'm not a great tone freak, I just want the job done. I have a Mark Bass Tube500 and a HA3500. the MB Tube was bought at a knock down price in a sale when the HA3500 started making strange noises after an admittedly long life. I quite like the MB it's light and does what it says on the tin, it's plenty loud enough, nice clean bass sound and I quite like the VPF control. The VLE is fairly useless, just a way of adjusting muddiness I find. The tone controls aren't quite at the frequencies that I'd find most useful and I can't tweak the bass the way I'd like, but flat is OK and I've an active bass with parametric mids so that's OK too. It weighs nothing and seems pretty tough. I use the tube input mainly but I'd happily buy the MB III as the effect is very subtle. However, I've cleaned up the pots on the Hartke and it does have more heft . In every sense of course, it weighs almost twice the weight of my speakers. I think it probably has little high pass filtering as the cones flap alarmingly if you boost the bass, especially compared with the MB. I tend to roll off the 30Hz on the graphic so that's not an issue for me. The sound is just more satisfying straight out of the box and it's hard to make it sound bad, the tone shaping is great, I just find a graphic more intuitive. So I use the MB almost exclusively at gigs, it's been utterly reliable and does the job really well, but when I do take the Hartke out it's a real treat. If the weight didn't bother me I'd use it more.

[quote name='stevie' timestamp='1494439837' post='3296031'] Just because we don't comment doesn't mean we're not interested in what you are doing. Keep it up! [/quote] +1

I don't understand. You have two lovely and expensive cabs which you quite reasonably don't want to take to the rougher venues, but all the suggested replacements are of equally lovely and expensive cabs.

Numbness and tingling does sound like something is pressing on a nerve, possibly a bony spur or just caused by swelling, which results from holding an unnatural position for an extended time. You need to talk to a doctor, not the internet. Hope it gets sorted.

Like many bassists I usually end up doing PA, organising rehearsals and doing the bookings. Fortunately in my case most of the time people realise the work you put in and although you do work harder everyone else did muck in if asked. In my last band someone else did bookings but they offered to put aside some of the gig fees to pay for leads and extras for the PA. A bit embarrassing as a couple of them were pretty hard up at the time but I really appreciated the recognition of what I was putting in. You'll find the right people out there. Hope you can get the fun back into music again.

Good to hear that they sound so good. Thanks for the review.

I think there is some confusion between line source and line array, though the principle is more or less the same in how it controls dispersion. Essentially line source is what an old fashioned column speaker did, lot's of separate speakers making up a column forms a line array, which gives you lots of extra things you can do with angles, phase control and so on. Who'd have thought an advertising dept. would confuse those two? It's pretty hard to give any exact figures for how power is divided by a crossover as it depends exactly what you are playing but I've some old rule of thumb figures from Eminence that at 500Hz 40% of the power goes into the tweeter and at 3000Hz its about 20%. That's for full range music so it'd possibly be less for bass but any distortion would drive the power through the high pass section up dramatically. Thanks for the information from everyone who has tried one. It looks like a concept that can work well then as ever the implementation is probably what counts. Stevie, I quite like the broad flat projection this sort of system promises. I know you've been looking at how a bassist can get to hear his rig better in the sort of cramped stages we generally play on. I'm looking at this design as a way of controlling room resonances by cutting down on reflections, and incidentally improving the bands experience. We've both been arguing for years that the small horn drivers available aren't really relevant to most of what a bass does and a mid range driver would be more helpful, the problem is that there wasn't a lot of availability of suitable drivers. The advent of the Bose style line source plus mini sub PA means there are a a range of drivers like the Faital to choose from. After the positive responses I'm keen to give it a go. I'm hoping you'll help with the crossover

For the future the most important thing is to clean off all the old glue and the dirt that will have stuck to it. It's quite common for glues to be incompatible and sticking to a porous surface depends upon the glue penetrating that surface, the old glue may have sealed the surface effectively sealing out the old glue. Generally I use a scalpel or stanley blade for cleaning off old glue from small areas like this with a quick sand if I can get in there. I use white PVA unless I know it's a rubber based adhesive on there already ( you can usually tell because this remains stretchy even when old and forms strands when you try to get it off) and let it go off or a while before applying pressure as it won't dry easily under Tolex. Bicyle repair glue isn't actually glue it's a vulcanising solution. It adds sulphur atoms to the long chain molecules of the rubber which then form cross links. The previous poster must have been lucky in that a rubber/latex glue was used originally. Contact adhesive is usually latex based. Another trick is to use a hair dryer to warm the Tolex. This makes it much more flexible and easier to stick. When you're done go over the join with black permanent marker to conceal any gaps.

Hi Charlie, how do the cabs sound in your opinion then? The design spec i have in my head is a full range cab but suited more to bass, shifting the crossover point away from the 1-4kHz level where our ears are most sensitive to the crossover distortions and not worrying too much about anything above about 12kHz whih will never get past the inductance of the pickup coils even if it was useful for bass. I'm happy to experiment with non flat cabs for bass use but the sensitivity of these 3" units is in the 88-91dB/W range with 20W handling typically. I want to partner them with bass drivers of 96-99dB/W quoted. Crossing over an octave below 1K would mean a midrange sensitivity down to the 3" units and power handling would become an issue, crossing over low. I'm looking specifically at the 3" units designed for line source designs which have become available and I suspect Duke is using something else to partner the 3012LF. I don't suppose you know what he uses? The advantage of using four drivers is that it also gives you some control of the off axis dispersion of midrange.

[quote name='bassman7755' timestamp='1493886966' post='3291483'] True, the B3 isnt going to do everything but EQing out anything under 50hz and using a decent amount of compression would be a good start. [/quote]Yep, that's the way to go. Using a high pass filter after the B3 (thumpinator) would be an extra which would probably let you play without any worries too, but try the Yammies out at low volumes first and see if you like the sound before spending out any more money. Let us know how it sounds too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6dv5miaSmQ Have fun

If someone returns the Emperor's New Clothes you could always say they'd torn them.

I think I get where you are coming from now. Recorded bass sounds really punch through the DXR's and you are hoping you might get that punchy bass through them yourself? The thing is, you realise, that the recorded bass has been eq'd in the mix. Is that right? The thing is that in most if not all cases studio recordings undergo a lot more than just eq'ing. The first thing most engineers do is filter out all the subsonics often at surprisingly high frequencies There will commonly be little bass below 50Hz. maybe higher. Then they will limit all the peaks from the bass and maybe add quite alarming amounts of compression. Add in an octaver which will add in a lot of harmonic content to thicken out the higher notes on the bass making an overall bassier sound. The 50Hz filter will remove the damaging tones though. Lastly once the whole mix is finished they will compress the whole mix which means the bass is compressed even more. Live bass has much more dynamic range, though there is an increasing tendency for live engineers to follow studio practices, so the FOH PA sound is often compressed and filtered giving the 'disco sound' to some bands. That's why a lot of folk on here, sometimes sensibly, insist on taking big rigs with them to gigs. Your B3 isn't going to do all that unless you program it to. Some patches are going to boost the bass and fail to filter subsonics making it impossible for your poor DXR's and some will sound great. You are going to have to keep the volumes down whilst you experiment and learn to keep all the really deep stuff out of the feed to the DXR's. the interaction between the electronics in the DXR's and the Zoom are going to be 'interesting'.

It's certainly not a crazy idea but simply one where you need to price your time. There are minor safety issues too. I've never looked at this model but I've repaired a number of combos over the years. The securing bolts may be tricky to find and the amps are often very snug in the space and difficult to slide out, Ive even found them stuck in place by the glue used to cover the cab with Tolex/carpet. Sometimes the speaker cable will need to be removed. Obviously make sure everything is unplugged before you star and don't stick any bit of you inside the amp even if it is unplugged. The power supply can store some charge for a long time. Once out you'll need to make or buy a sleeve, a simple enough job but it'll take you a couple of hours or cost you a few quid. Sometimes amps are only partially cased when they come out of a combo so electrically they are unsafe out of the cab. I've no idea if that is the situation with the Ashdown. If you sell the 'cab' as a combo with the amp missing you will effectively be selling a damaged cab. Will it have the necessary plate with sockets on it or will you have to buy one and solder it in? Next you need to deal with the amp casing, remove it and re-finish it or remake the cab using the grill and fittings. Alternatively you could scrap the cab and sell the speakers as bare drivers or let someone else do the work and sell it off cheap as a project. None of this should put you off, a bit of fiddling around and £50 for the speakers if you are lucky sounds about right.

You might want to look at this thread if you haven't already the third post is the relevant one http://basschat.co.uk/topic/305026-powered-cabs/

[quote name='geoffbyrne' timestamp='1493632336' post='3289505'] Don't really have much of a clue what you're talking about, Phil, but it's great to come across someone thinking outside the box. G. [/quote] Hi Geoff, as someone spotted I forgot to put the links in. I'm happy to write up something about the theory behind this design though if anyone would find it helpful.

Thanks for the link, forgot to paste it, there's also a review on You Tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItMtFGlKjoo