Phil Starr

Ha ha, you've all got me wincing at some of the woodworking suggestions, ouch! Plywood is such a flimsy material, those plies are very thin and weak individually, and only held together with a fairly weak resin. Break away any glued panel and you inevitably come away with some of the outer ply attached, anything stuck at the cut edge is extra weak as that flimsy outer skin is only fixed on one side of the joint. Biscuits and dowel are made of compressed wood designed to expand inside their joints to make a tight fit running them into the plies further weakens them. Pocket joints are incredibly weak into thin panels as the screw tips barely pentrate the panel [url="https://woodgears.ca/joint_strength/pockethole.html"]https://woodgears.ca...pockethole.html[/url] In any case most cabinet corners need the edges of cabs rounded off to fit, you really don't want metal screw ends sticking into the place you are going to run a router bit. Honestly I suspect plain butt joints (just sticking the panels together with no extras) will be as strong as using dowels/biscuits or pocket joints, the weak spot is the outer skin on the cut edge. What you have in your favour is that a box is an inherently strong structure. Stevie has rejected the reinforced butt joint for the perfectly good reason that it would make his bracing more difficult especially in a prototype. The bracing itself will itself stiffen the cab mechanically and increase the glue area. It's a good design, just a bit harder than the mk1 to make. Putting in a 3012LF would work but the crossover is optimised for the drivers Stevie has chosen. I'd put the Eminence in a smaller cab probably, this cab is optimised for the SM212. I wouldn't put in a really pricey driver like that without optimising the cab for it. Porting to the rear is fine, if you keep the volume of the cab and the dimensions of the port the same the cab will have the same resonant frequency and the same damping on the speaker. There will be some minor changes and you won't get exactly the measured results Stevie gets. The cab will be sensitive to being pushed right up hard against a rear wall, port resonances venting to the rear will be less noticeable and a number of cabinet resonances always change with even minor changes of the internal structure of the cab. None of these are likely to have a major effect upon the character of the cab

Haha I said you'd end up being Gottastopbuilding gear I'm really pleased about what you say about the 3/4 ply with batten design, it won't be perfect but I found it was pretty good too. I'll stick with the woodworking questions here, my posts tend to be too long. All speaker design is compromise and I'm really pleased what you've said about my '18mm with battens' (actually reinforced butt joints) design. I chose these for two reasons, mainly using screws to draw the battens/panel joints together means you don't need any real extra clamping making it an easy build. I wanted everyone to feel this was something they could do at home with no real woodworking experience or special tools. Secondly the battens double the glue area and double the strength of the cabs. I was aware however that 18mm panels are pretty rigid at these sizes and the battens do stiffen and damp the panels as well. A compromise which means you can get away with no extra bracing. That's not to say you couldn't improve things with bracing but you should get a good result without that level of complexity. Lot's of other joints are available to you, dovetail, finger joints, dowels, biscuit joints and plain butt joints as Stevie used. Dovetail and finger joints double the glue area but won't be as strong as a reinforced joint and need to be clamped whilst the glue dries, crucially you need to have specialist tools to do the job. Biscuits and dowels are marginal for me putting a dowel into the sawn end of a 18mm panel isn't a strong thing to do and if you have to fit corners that means rounding off the panel weakening the joint even more. They may hold the joints square whist the glue sets but I still feel you'd need to clamp everything. Plain butt joints are just too weak for me, though Stevie's bracing will considerably stiffen and strengthen the cab I still think there is a good chance that the corner joints may break given any force applied at an angle, like dropping the cab for example. That is especially true of a cab made of 12mm ply. Finally the reinforced butt joint is more forgiving of any mistakes in measurement or cutting, you are more likely to end up with an airtight cab.

Bill is right about the dispersion and the best practical solution. I'm going to suggest something to think about. Old 8x10's were technically a bit of a dead end, They solved a lot of the technical problems at the time. Power handling, reliability, plenty of efficiency all sorted but were highly coloured, too small a box for that many speakers and comb filtering problems. However because something has technical limitations it doesn't mean it is bad. It may be that the comb filtering with it's off axis rolling off of the top end is just the old school sound you are looking for. If your sound is just as you like it and you can pick yourself out of the mix then I wouldn't go in for speaker balancing. Get a long lead and go out into the audience area to see how you sound. If you are struggling to hear yourself on stage then Bill's advice is the best way to go.

[quote name='Naetharu' timestamp='1487926133' post='3244119'] Humm that was my worry with the Hartke amps. I did get to try a 3500 when I popped into GAK in Brighton last year, and I loved the sound. However, I've heard a lot of anecdotes about their being unreliable. [/quote] To be fair mine was used when I bought it and I've had it ten years, it only failed once in that time and they are eminently repairable. I think the recent ones have had the problems with the power supply cap mountings addressed probably 15 years ago. Now I use the LM Tube out of laziness as much as anything. I do like a graphic though.

[quote name='visog' timestamp='1487883895' post='3243945'] Right chaps I know this whole HPF and LPF gets pretty gnarly quickly and goes into sub-sonic filtering for speaker efficiency but what do we think to this? [url="http://www.tech21nyc.com/products/effects/qstrip.html"]http://www.tech21nyc...cts/qstrip.html[/url] Sounds good to me... gets a 'Rick 'o' tone' out of a P-bass... [/quote] There's no indication of what frequency the HPF works at, since it seems to be designed for guitar it may be set at 80Hz or higher which might be too high. Actually I wonder if the popularity of pre amps like this might be partially down to some HP filtering and cleaning up the sound. If you like the sound go for it.

The truth is that the amp repair business is not far removed from getting your car fixed. Anyone can wield a spanner and call themselves a mechanic and may do a perfectly good job of changing a tyre. Charges range from not much more than minimum wage to £130 an hour (and upwards probably). Unfortunately the way cars are manufactured makes them harder and harder to fix and if the electronics in your car don't display the correct fault codes there are very few who know what to do next. (bitter experience here) Amps are going the same way, there are a lot of non serviceable parts now, so a new circuit board is increasingly the 'repair', often these are unavailable and cost close to the price of a new amp so even a simple fault can be uneconomic to repair. With so much gear being produced in China even something simple like a non standard jack socket can hold up a repair due to unavailability over here. On top of this component counts are going through the roof as more features are added to even quite modest gear. This goes right through the consumer electronics industry. Who nowadays takes in a broken DVD player or five year old TV in for repair? So put yourself into the repairers shoes. He has to make a living, a few hundred quid a week to pay the bills. You walk in with your dead amp and say, 'can you take a look, it's something simple it was working yesterday' He plugs it in and nothing, no clues. He knows from experience that it's going to take a couple of hours to open up and investigate and he has a 50/50 chance of finding a repairable fault. Then it is going to take him an hour on the phone tracking down a part. If he takes it on he's faced with telling you parts and labour are £200 and you'll go and buy a used one on ebay or replace it with a new amp for just over £300. If you are lucky it'll just be a broken wire and he can resolder it but there's no way of telling without opening it up. When you make what seems like a reasonable request to 'have a look, tell me what's wrong and how much it will cost' you are actually asking 'please give me an hour's free labour' with a 50/50 chance you won't go ahead anyway. I'm afraid an upfront fee with no guarantees is pretty inevitable.

[quote name='Chienmortbb' timestamp='1487847003' post='3243444'] Do you have a picture of the plastic part. I have used the ,K&M version before but now have financial constraints. Ido have a good workshop though and could probably kno I ups metal part to replace the plastic part. [/quote] Hi, I think the plastic part he mentions is the sleeve that allows the legs to slide up the stand for storage. It has a retainer for a nut that the screw clamp uses but that screw bears upon the cast metal base. I haven't broken one yet, my one failure was the handgrip on the extending upright which cross threaded, unfortunately on one that I'd taken a saw to to make a small stand so I didn't feel it was worth returning. Spares for K&M cost as much or more than the Studiospares stands. If I ever get across to Stevie's I'll bring a stand with me. These stands aren't perfect and I can see that if you had roadies throwing them around they wouldn't take it. If you handle your own gear they are unlikely to break very quickly, spares are available and you can afford to carry spares in a band.

Oh dear, I was in a grumpy mood when I last responded to this I Just felt the OP's frustration. A couple of people have picked up on some things I said. I think I was the first person to mention contempt for the audience which others have repeated. For me standing up in front of an audience is still something special, my 'contract' with them is to do the best I'm capable of, never to say 'oh well that was good enough, the audience won't notice'. I'd be the first to say there are people way better than I am, whose half committed efforts would surpass my bass playing by quite a distance but I still think it is disrespectful not to do your best. Ambient made the points about the quality of the musicians and the difficulty of the music and there have been plenty of comments about not needing rehearsal for gigging the same songs you did last week. All true of course but most of those bands will have rehearsed at some time in the past. There's a balance between rehearsal, personal practice, regular gigging and the skills of the musicians. There's no point in rehearsing if people haven't learned their own parts at home, you can't stitch things together if they are full of holes. There's no point in rehearsing stuff you are already on top of and did last night. Better musicians may need less rehearsal, though I suspect they are better because of lots of practice. Simple songs need little work other than perhaps the starts and finishes. Sometimes for weekend warriors you have to reach a practical compromise between music and the rest of your life. But, I don't suppose any of us couldn't improve what we do with a little bit of intelligent time together in a rehearsal room. Sure the Rolling Stones would have been rehearsing in session men, staging and lighting and so on but shouldn't we all if we can? It's OK for me, I enjoy any time together with freinds making music and I enjoy the social side but I don't buy the claim that 'me and my mates are so good nothing could be improved by rehearsal' either. The rest is just about compromising between what you need to do and the practicalities of how to achieve it. As for the OP I think with a new band member I'd want to have a run through, just to check starts, ends and any odd bits of arrangements rather than do that in front of an audience, if at all possible.

Those three are all good brands, also consider Yamaha, JBL, QSC K12's. Of all these, and I've auditioned them all, my current favourites are the RCF's. Get along to PMT or somewhere with a range and take along some decent recorded material and try them out. Concentrate on those that do the best vocal sound, any lack there will affect your bands sound most of all, you are doing PA not disco! Don't obsess over 1000W, mainly that is advertising hype, the amps in question can usually only achieve peaks of that level, which does help at cleaning up the peaks but that is all. Few 12" drivers are going to be able to handle more than 300W continuously and the difference between 500W and 1000W is barely noticeable. Most PA speakers will specify their maximum sound levels and anything over 128dB is going to be enough for most bands. Mackie used to be the go to PA speaker, they've fallen out of fashion since they stopped using RCF drivers and moved production to China. There are rumours of reliability problems but I've no direct experience of that. I'd go for the RCF's or K12's, Yamaha stuff is pretty bomb proof and a lot of people like them a lot. I just didn't think they did vocals as well as the RCF's. Hope that helps, you'll get plenty more opinions.

Hi Phil, funny how you feel closer to somebody with that name. Really you 'ought' to be able to hear perfectly well with a 2x10. I gig with one and in a room with up to 200 people everyone can hear the bass perfectly well. Being neo should mean your speakers are more likely to be louder rather than quieter. It simply makes stronger magnets, though so many factors come in that there is plenty of overlap in performance with ceramic magnet speakers. I'd say the perfect way to use these is back against a wall and leaning so that they point at your ears. A £15 stand will arrange that though it means your amp will slide off. Raising it onto a chair will lose you some of the bass reinforcement having it on the floor gives so you could end up boosting the bass and running into distortion. Back against the wall means the bass is boosted even more so you can turn down the bass and use more of your speakers power. If the amp/speaker combination isn't loud enough I wonder about your eq. Room acoustics are so important, are you using the same eq you use for personal practice at home? Cutting bass and boosting mids will help you cut through anything and allow you to turn up without distortion. Sorry if that is teaching you to suck eggs. I didn't take your half-deaf statement literally and 70% hearing loss was meant to be a joke, but if you play in a band you will have some hearing loss. It isn't what most people think, you don't lose sensitivity largely you lose frequencies as you selectively damage tiny areas of your inner ear each time you are subject to a loud noise event, those areas don't grow back. Eventually enough frequencies are lost that it is harder to separate sounds in noisy environments even if you hear a pin drop in quiet times. you can check your hearing here if you have a decent set of headphones https://www.actiononhearingloss.org.uk/your-hearing/look-after-your-hearing/check-your-hearing/take-the-check.aspx Your 2x10 can reach peaks above 120dB, that will be as loud or louder than the drums, anything over 100db will damage your hearing in a fairly short time the HSE say 15mins http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/priced/hsg260.pdf That is about the level you are probably currently rehearsing at so any increase in volume will cause hearing loss. Honestly I think you should investigate using in ears or decent earplugs (not the solid foam ones), getting a little more out of your 2x10 or even getting everyone to turn down. If not you will get permanent hearing loss.

My gigging amp was a Hartke 3500 still sounds better than anything else I use but it is getting a bit cranky and is on the heavy side. I bought an MI bass and sent it straight back. Just couldn't get a sound I was happy with. I've settled on a Little Mark Tube which sounds absolutely fine. The Tube input isn't a dramatic change from the standard Little Mark but I've gradually settled on an all tube pre amp sound so I guess it must suit me. Having added even further to the Mark Bass love I'd say try the amps through your speakers before you buy if at all possible. It's your sound.

Hmmm, your hearing is poor and you are turning everything up to hear what you need? I'm concerned about how this will end up for you. I understand the appeal of loud sound but if you are genuinely 'half deaf' you don't want to move to being 70%, you'd have to give up playing at that point. Your young drummer needs to learn to play more sensibly at rehearsals and to save it for the gig, he probably lacks control but lighter sticks will help as will damping the skins. The other thing is that your ears are probably trying to protect themselves from further damage, there are tiny muscles inside the middle ear which contract at high sound levels, this reduces the energy transmitted to the inner ear but is frequency dependant so you also lose the ability to discriminate and sounds end up a bit muffled. One way round this which is counter intuitive is to get some musicians ear plugs, the ones with the holes down the middle, that turns everything down and I find emphasizes the bass. You'll find you can pick things out better with the right sort of plugs in and it will protect your hearing. It's a lot cheaper than just increasing the number of speakers.

I think you really have a simple choice, arrange the courier yourself and keep control of the process including any insurance or stick to collection only and accept that there will be fewer bidders and possibly that you will get a lower price. I've arranged couriers from my end as a buyer and it is a hassle for the buyer too as the couriers expect to deal only with their customer which makes pick up awkward. You'd think couriers would understand that there are people at both ends of their delivery chain As to this purchaser you now know he is a dealer and apparently a pushy demanding one. My experience with eBay is that they work well when there is a problem especially if you have a good reputation with them, and most people are incompetent rather than dishonest but if you have reservations then politely message him and say either that you do not wish to get involved with a courier or that you are not happy to sell to a dealer. Then block him if he bids.

IME it often takes longer to find a fault than to fix it. Charging you for 45mins labour to diagnose a fault which at the very least is probably going to involve removing the case opening up the amp a quick visual inspection, connecting everything up on the bench maybe some quick tests with a meter and then reassembling the amp for return isn't unreasonable. £72 an hour is more than almost any local repairman would charge though. So it's the car analogy again, what do you think the labour charges should be for your car, would you expect the main dealer to charge more than a local garage? It'd pay you to shop around but in this case I don't think you are being ripped off, if that was your worry. Bad luck, hope you get it fixed soon.

This is a sore point for me. There is clearly a balance between personal practice,rehearsal and gigging. If you are the new guy you'd expect to put in a lot of work on your own. If you are an established band gigging a set you've done a hundred times then there is no need to rehearse stuff you already know.If you've a new band member you aren't an established band any more, performing with no rehearsal is a bit of a lottery. Youmight get away with it but it's just not a professional attitude to risk it. If you are all readers it might be OK I guess but symphony orchestras rehearse, lots. IMO to perform without rehearsal shows contempt for the audience, or at least a lack of care about what you do. Bands who busk it or who talk about playing it their own way without rehearsal and thought are rarely as good as they think they are. I saw an interview with Keith Richards where he said the Stones rehearsed for three months before their last tour, how often must they have played those songs? I'm probably bitter, I fell out with my last band because of this. We made the same mistakes in the same places every gig but there was a reluctance to sort the problems and half the band thought they were so good it wasn't an issue. It's frustrating when you've been playing a set for years when someone leaves and you have to rehearse the new person in but if you care it has to be done. If you don't care why are you playing music?

There really should be no problem with this, the only proviso being that some people are capable of breaking anything. (usually by doing something unexpected/slightly crazy) Your amp should have been tested at some stage in it's development for continuous running at it's full output with a test signal. (Unfortunately at some point after that advertisers may/will have got hold of the technical spec and may have picked out an instantaneous peak they choose to push but that's a separate issue) In addition just about all modern amps have extensive electrical protection against over-powering built in and will switch themselves off/limit the power if you do something stupid. On top of that you play music which has loud bits and quiet bits and gaps with no notes, if you play at 800W peak it will only be for a few thousandths of a second for each note. Your average power during a song is likely to be 20dB lower than that at about 8W unless you are using compression. Despite all the advertising claims about the 'high efficiency' of lightweight speakers that is only in comparison to previous generations of speakers of the same size. The efficiency of speakers at low frequencies is proportional to the square of the surface radiating area. It makes perfect sense to use them with all the extra power available but you would expect to have to turn up a bit compared with using an old school 8x10 it's good design but it doesn't break any laws of physics.

It probably doesn't matter because you'll never know, and there is no reason not to check your leads and speaker wiring. Just a thought though, what repairs were made to the cab, which I assume is now working? 'Almost certainly failed short circuit' implies that either he didn't actually check the speakers or wasn't the person who repaired them.

Snap

I don't see the problem either, a sealed cab will have a flatter response and may sound nicer, but that is to some extent subjective. putting these two speakers into a ported box that size won't get all the bass they could generate but it will still exceed them in a sealed box. You do get a 2dB hump at 100Hz so they will sound boomy (or punchy, choose your adjective based on your taste) but you will also get an extra 3db of bass down to 40Hz with a ported box. You maybe shouldn't have started here as Bill says, but it's not a disaster. Especially if you picked them up cheaply. If you are happy to bodge the baffle or make two then try both and choose the one you prefer the sound of.

[quote name='uncle psychosis' timestamp='1487016677' post='3236307'] At the risk of offending, I'm not sure that the demise of the pub band (as I see them, anyway) is necessarily a bad thing. Most of the "pub covers" bands that I see are, frankly, pretty dreadful. Too loud, no sense of dynamics, singing songs that are inappropriate for the singer's range, lurching from one style to another as little more than karaoke with instruments. Yes there are exceptions but I'm not sure there are enough exceptions to sustain it. All of the best cover bands that I've seen in recent years are those that put their own identity into the music - a duo of acoustic guitar and singer with cajon that had the dance floor at a mate's wedding filled all night playing everything from Abba to Bruno Mars to The Clash and another covers bands doing all the usual stuff but using their own arrangements in a soul style. So yeah, rock karaoke might be dying but great live music is still out there, you just need to try a little harder to find it. For those of us who have never been into "mainstream" music (try finding a band down the dog and duck who'll play Sonic Youth or Sun Ra) this is nothing new. You just have to look harder to find your fix. :-) [/quote] I don't disagree about what you say about a lot of bands approach to their repertoire but there is a knock on effect I believe. If their act is predictable and ultimately dull then it creates a shrinking audience for the venue and ultimately for the next band in. People decide that pub bands aren't for them and eventually the venue will close to music if they cant make a profit on the deal. An exceptional band may be bucking the trend on a particular night or for a one off gig, but we operate within a 'scene' which is beginning to atrophy.

bad luck, The truth is your amp shouldn't have blown your speaker and even if your speaker did short, which is extremely unlikely, the amp should have been able to protect itself.Without being there we will probably never know what actually happened. Underpowering is a bit of a myth. Without getting too technical an amp can produce a little more power than it's ratings under very limited conditions but that isn't going to blow your speaker. Your Burman is perfectly safe to use. It's not simple to be absolute about matching amp and speaker power. Amps are measured in terms of their electrical output with a test signal and speakers by how much power they can continuously take without over heating but music isn't a test signal, it has loud and quiet bits. The biggest variable is the person using it. If you turn your amp down a notch you are probably halving the power. Your 500W amp can be a 1W amp if you turn it right down. You've been using it without problem for years and with it mended nothing has changed. You can go on using it in exactly the same way without worries. There is one other possibility, It could simply be coincidence, your amp may have been about to blow anyway and the friend was just unlucky enough to be the guy playing when it happened. Broken amps can pump a lot of power into a speaker under certain conditions. It might well be bad luck and him paying half the repair bill a fair income. I'd take that for peace of mind rather than walk around feeling hard done by, especially since you will never knoe the truth.

Anything to do with the treble in a speaker system is a tweeter, the deep end is a woofer and the middle if you have one is a squawker though only older readers will have heard that one I guess. As you say it is advertising, the compression driver on the horn has a 1" voice coil, I don't suppose it has changed much maybe not at all which means if it was good before it still is and if not.. Anyway it's how it sounds that matters, I'd really strongly recommend you go and try it. 12's and 10's don't really have a sound which won't overlap a lot. It was easier in the olden days when everyone made a 4x10 and a 1x15 and pretty much tried to make them sound fairly similar. The reason for using 12's is because it is where the sweet spot is nowadays. Amps commonly output 300W into 8 ohms and 500W into 4. Put that much power into a 12" speaker and you'll typically generate just over 120dB which neatly matches a drummer. Most 12's will handle this power fairly well too. Take a second 12 and you'll have enough headroom to just about do everything you need given that at these sound levels you absolutely have to get the sound level on stage lowered and into the PA. I don't think you need to worry about it not being enough, choose on the basis of how it sounds. Obviously there are cheap 12's that won't quite work that well but once you are in the mid price bracket you'll hit the sweet spot.

I don't know that particular amp and I may be teaching grandmother to suck eggs but two things I've found in the past. if the thing has never been apart before then glue used for the covering sometimes sticks the chassis in place if it a tight fit and a judicious wiggle frees it, Or a tap with a hammer if you use something to stop it marking the bit you whack, I use a rubber sanding block for that. Before I did that I'd remove the nearby corners and handles, the bolts/screws sometimes go right through the cab and screw into the chassis.

[quote name='fftc' timestamp='1486570058' post='3232886'] It was the mobile phone what did it! I'm not saying I'm a Luddite, but that is just too modern for me. Lots more to think about. I want an aux in for headphone practice, so I'm not worried about the sound through a cab. I know the Ampeg won't even play the aux through the speaker out. Not sure about the others. But perhaps from what folk are saying I should widen my search to amps without an aux and either use what I currently have, or get another similar thing that is separate from the amp. I was hoping to get something that will be a bit better for my silent practice,[i] and [/i]do the loud thing. I'm not in any real rush (apart from GAS) so I'll keep mulling over the options. Thanks for all the input folks. [/quote] let's face it GAS is fun, get the silent practice sorted then the real search and associated GAS can start. You can be practical, practiced and still dream

[quote name='LukeFRC' timestamp='1486507747' post='3232428'] So just the one big port? [/quote] I think it's a good decision Stevie found it was relatively easy to create chuffing in the ports with his test signal and multiple small ports. Since his main aim was to get the best out of this cab it made sense to address that. The aim for the first design was around making it easy to build and the ready availability of black downpipe and hole cutters that size drove a decision on multiple ports for my design. Our aim in sharing this stuff is to give people a design they can follow exactly if they want, with a guaranteed performance, but also to give enough explanation and data for anyone to modify the designs easily enough if they choose.