Phil Starr

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

Couldn't resist it I've modelled your cab tuned to 55Hz and compared to my 30l cab It will give you just over 2dB more bass from 100hz down to 40hz (fundamental of bottom E). That extra box volume will give you noticeably more bass in other words, at the cost of a little power handling but power handling is still good, there's a dip to 300W at 90Hz and it handles 180w at bottom E which is pretty good, way better than the Eminence you started looking at. In practice you don't get a lot of fundamental from the pickups so unless you start using stupid power and an octaver you won't have problems at all in any normal use. There's still a bit of extra 'punch' at 120Hz but it's not a bad frequency response at all. Use one port of 110mm (plastic waste pipe) 15.5cm long or two 64mm (guttering downpipe) vents at 11.2 cm long. (or 3 at 19.2cm) You'll get a little wind noise at full power but you probably won't notice it in practice.

The best thing you can do is to download Winisd. It does all the calculations for you and will calculate the best sized box to give you the deepest, flattest response the speaker can cope with. Then you can change the box size and see on the graphs what that does to the frequency response, It'll calculate the port sizes too and everything else you can imagine about the low frequency performance too and you'll learn loads about speaker design in the process. You'll have to put the technical specs of your speaker in manually though, once you've done that the rest is easy. If that is too much for you one of us will calculate a suitable port size for you, probably using winisd.

Good Luck with this, I'm sure you'll get plenty of help from people here.

Because they are looking for simple answers. It's undoubtedly true that some of the difference in what we hear comes from the skill of the bassist. It is equally true that lot's of other factors are important, like the diameter of the speaker cone or the size of the cab. Sometimes those differences are significant, sometimes trivial. Few of us have the time or inclination to calculate all the factors in so as a species we grasp for simple answers and quick decisions. If they have a heavy old 4x10 they will swap it for a lightweight neo loaded 12 and if they don't like it conclude it's all down to being neo and then eliminate neo from their purchasing calculations from then on. I cringe when I see interviewers asking politicians "well minister is it ***********, yes or no." Their viewers may want simple answers but running the health service or education is rarely anything like as simple as speaker design. It's lazy reporting and ultimately people end up voting for politicians that offer simple answers like Trump, Putin or dare one say Hitler. Beware anyone who says it's all down to any one thing. Whether they say 'speaker cone size makes no difference to tone' or 'all 15's have a sound and all 10's a different one' they will be wrong. Sweeping generalisations are rarely correct. Neo magnets weight for weight are stronger, that much is true. It let's you do different things if you are building a drive unit but it can also let you do the same things if you choose.

well done

I'm doing this remembering repairing kit back in the very early 70's, well 1970 actually. My memory may be a bit iffy at that distance. Compression is something valve amps do naturally partly down to the valves themselves but also due to the saturation of the output transformer. Basically they just peter out as the output rises giving a nice soft sounding distortion as they over loaded. Guitarists used this to create all the sounds of early rock music. Combined with the feedback you get at ridiculously high levels it also gave them a lot of sustain to play with. Everyone forgets that most of these amps were pretty unreliable and a band running four valve amps on stage plus often valve PA amps was experiencing a lot of technical failures. Plus back problems from carrying the amps. Having 20 KT88's on stage was a nightmare to be honest. Transistor amps were coming in by then WEM (not much more reliable) and later HH for PA followed by early guitar and bass versions. They were certainly cheaper and quickly became more reliable but transistor amps really distort unpleasantly when overloaded so we looked for a way of getting that gentle overload that the old amps gave. Compression was what was needed so compression on instrument amps started as an effect to give 'valve sound' The first compressors I encountered used ordinary car bulbs to compress the sound. At high power they get hot and their resistance goes up, put the signal through a bulb pick it up with a photocell and bingo, compression. The next stage was a voltage controlled amplifier. Take the output and use it to control the volume or gain of the amp and you get compression. These were often adapted from tape recorder automatic volume circuits and used FET's as the controlling element. By about 1974 integrated circuits took over thousands of components in a single package. You could get undistorted compression at will but you wouldn't do that complexity with valves. So you wouldn't simulate valve sound with valves for obvious reasons. They still make optical compressors as an effect but with VCA's you can get completely controllable compression which is largely done digitally nowadays anyway. Valve based computer anyone? If anyone is interested https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-what-optical-compression

Yeah that lead will put the two cabs in series which is important as it keeps your amp safe. you'll get some extra efficiency by using two speakers but cancelled a loss of power into 8ohms. Assuming the speakers are identical you get double the power handling using that lead and excursion of the cones is reduced so your bass may be less distorted and the speakers are safer. If you use that lead with two 8ohm speakers you'll end up with the amp seeing a 16 ohm load so less power. What you could do is use that combination as an 8ohm speaker and then add in an extra 8ohm speaker in parallel through your amp's second speaker outlet. That'd give you full power from the amp, buckets of power handling and high efficiency. No guarantees on what it would sound like but worth a try?

no

I'd do a little more research before going ahead. All I can say from experience is that all the fenders I've liked best have been Nitro finished and all have had a slightly livelier sound than those with the heavier poly finishes. That may be coincidence but I was sceptical about how a thin layer of paint might affect something as heavy as a bass body or even that the type of wood would affect the sound, but bass bodies do vibrate a lot when you hit the strings and you can feel it as well as hear it. If the body is vibrating then some of that must feed back into the strings via the bridge. I don't suppose the effect is huge but I might contact a friendly luthier or one of the small boutique guitar builders the post in the build diaries and see what they say.

just work systematically and you'll find it. You'll need to remove the grille anyway to look at anything else so do that and see if the rattle goes away. then have a good look at the outside of the speaker cone. Look for any tears but also have a look at the dustcap in the middle and where the cone joins the corrugated surround. Check that all the fixings on the speaker are tight and it is pulled firmly against the baffle (front board). If the rattle is still there you'll need to remove the speaker and look inside, First check the wires inside aren't touching the cone, this is a common fault and you can usually fix it to something with cable ties to stop this happening, then look for anything loose onside the cab, check the speaker magnet which will pick up any loose screws etc. Then work your way round all the woodwork and fittings to check for anything amiss. Tapping things gently will often tell you if something is loose. It's unlikely to be anything serious or difficult to repair. Good Luck

Ultimately you've got to decide how much you are prepared to lose over things like this. The drummer is being a tit but you won't change him if he and the singer decide to stick together. Talk to the singer (who won't be happy about having a suggestion vetoed) about coming up with a solution, like having only a limited number of vetoes as suggested. People always say the band is a democracy but if it becomes obvious the singer won't challenge the drummer you know who is in charge. You've than got to decide if you are happy to go on in their band or to look elsewhere. This happened to me a few years back and their band are still gigging and I've spent a while in the wilderness. I'm not sure with hindsight that I'd make the same decision again. The compromise we tried was to each suggest up to three songs, in a five piece that was 15 songs. We then put them into a survey and ranked them 1-15 totalled their scores and played the three most popular songs. Songs pretty much only get through if most of the band put them in the top five and no-one puts them bottom. Our 'band leader' didn't often get anything through and sulked so it didn't end well, but the rest of the band liked it as a system. We used Smart S urvey to do the ranking so it was anonymous https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/

Many thanks to Derreybass who tried out the cab I've pasted his review into the second post so people can read it without having to search pages of text. Here it is below too to save you checking back. "I borrowed Phil's quick build cab one Sunday afternoon as it turned out that he was practising at the venue I was to be playing in that evening with a worship band. Normally I play through a Barefaced Big Baby 2 and a Peavey Mini Mega 1000w amp. The hall in question is very lively accoustically and can very boomy and difficult at times to hear what is being played particularly on bass. Bearing in mind what Phil had in mind when he designed the cab I was quite intrigued as to how it would behave in the room in question. The Big Baby also has masses of low down response and massive volume when required. I started playing the first few numbers through my normal set up things were useable but a bit on the boomy side then I switched to Phil's cab for the final numbers it was quite noticeable how the sound was came through and was easier to hear as the small cab handled the mid range and higher bass without the muddiness. I think the design he set out to make worked very well and met the requirements he laid down. I did miss the real low down response of the Big Baby at times but it was easier to hear what was being played through Phil's cab in the very tricky conditions the hall presented. A couple of these small cabs would be very useable and a relatively cheap high quality set for any one. Highly recommended. Having seen him make it at the Bass Bash a quick answer as well. Well done Phil."

Hey Bill we'll have to agree to disagree on the appropriate way to use English. Actually that Eminence link is really quite a good place to start delving into Q if people are interested.

So to go back to the original question neo v's standard speakers the material the magnet is made of isn't the factor you should be looking at but the power of the magnet. Neodymium magnets are much stronger size for size than ceramic magnets. Simply that means that you can make a very small (and therefore light) magnet out of Neo or you can make it bigger and get a more powerful magnet. You can do this with ceramic magnets too but a really powerful ceramic magnet can end up weighing more than the cab and then you need to beef up the speaker chassis which also becomes heavier and bulkier until you end up with something which is pretty much impractical for portable sound. Basically you come to a point where Neo makes more sense. So Neo magnets are just stronger size for size than ceramic magnets. You could just use that to make a lighter speaker but most of the time it's better to make the magnet a really powerful one. That extra power can be used to give you a bit more excursion like the Barefaced drivers, or it can give you better controlled (damped) low Q speakers or you could use it to make the speakers a little louder (more efficient). Usually designers do a little of all three. So technically it isn't the material that is important, you could make a Neo driver that would do exactly the same as a ceramic driver but if someone gives an engineer a better engine, well what do you expect them to do?

I'm not sure you read my post very well. You'll notice my first sentence says quite clearly that damping has other meanings.Yes I was very obviously referring to Q in all it's guises (mainly Qtc as it happens) but this wasn't written for anyone who already has that knowledge and I deliberately steered away from any technical terms or any algebra which probably isn't appropriate in this forum. My aim was to simplify things enough so that anyone can get a grasp on what is going on inside any cab they buy or decide to modify. I suspect you knew exactly what Ashdown meant by tighter. I know Kevin is an intelligent guy who likes to experiment and he asked a reasonable question whose answer would interest quite a few people. That's why I jumped in with an attempt at a simple explanation I hope people can follow. (For those who are confused by this Qes is the damping due to the magnet and coil, Qms is the mechanical damping of the speaker and Qts is the overall damping of the drive unit which combines the two. Qtc is the damping of the speaker plus the damping of the speaker cab, if you get that far it's time to look elsewhere but for simplicity there are lots of 'dampings' or Q's that control the movement of the cone but the biggies are the magnet and the cab design)

That's my theory too. Damping is a difficult term because it is both an engineering concept with a very precise meaning and a perfectly good English word with more than one meaning. Keeping it simple as far as bassists are concerned damping is about how much the cone flaps around when you apply a signal. If it moves too much you get woolly sounding bass and a peak in the bass output with the speaker giving up with really low frequencies. If it moves too little because it is over-damped then the cone is held too tightly and won't move enough resulting in a slow roll off in output as the frequencies get lower. There's a Goldilocks point where you get a flat response and the deepest bass that speaker is capable of. The damping comes from two important sources, the air in the cabinet and the strength of the magnetic fields on the bit of coil inside the magnet. Strong magnets make for lots of damping and need smaller cabs. Finding the Goldilocks point is what all the maths (or the speaker design software) does for you. Swapping the speakers into the 'wrong' sized cabs will change the damping and the bass sound. I think what Ashdown are saying about the Sica's being tighter is that the damping will be greater, so more deep bass, less distorted but without the artificial warmth of the weaker Ceramic drivers. Of course damping might tell you the temperature of the porridge but some people like it hot and others colder so you can't please every Goldilocks with the same design solution