Phil Starr

The Eminence deltas have a rather odd frequency response which is going to be a bit marmite, you'll either like them or not at all. The cab is mworth less because it isn't original. The cab looks about the right size for the deltas but of course may be tuned to the wrong frequency. Don't buy unless it is a bargain and you like the sound when you hear it.

I've some sympathy with your guitarist, especially with the getting wound up before a gig bit I was a sound engineer for years before picking up the bass later in life. As a sound engineer you have one focus and it's easy. Running the PA, playing bass and remembering to entertain, that's tough, especially as musicians won't take the sh*t from other band members they will from the sound engineer. Those Carlsboros won't take much bass at all, other monitors might, it may be a matter of practicality rather than principle. Some vocalists like to hear their voices isolated from the band others like to hear lots of the band, it isn't about right or wrong but a choice. If your vocals are out then nothing will make your band sound worse, so singers trump the band when it comes to monitors I'm afraid. Keep the darlings happy if you can. I'd also be a bit pissed if someone started fiddling with my mix without discussing it beforehand, if you want to try something new then talk about it and do your experimenting at rehearsal, not at a gig, the poor chap probably had enough on his mind just getting the mic leads threaded round the drummer! Ideally for a five piece band I'd have five separate monitor mixes, if you had space which few UK venues do then it would at least double the cost of the PA to do this. Most bands limit monitors to vocals with a bit of acoustic guitar and maybe the keys fed in too, it isn't ideal but it works. Other solutions work too but there needs to be compromises. If you are using 12" Carlsboros then you are short of cash I guess. He isn't really being a t*t, just protecting the gear from a helpful band member. Bill's right about hearing the detail in the bass, a few mids coming from a floor monitor really help. Nothing to stop you buying your own and getting all you need from that. My favourite rig is a Hartke Kickback doing just that and DI into the PA. Bass rolled off slightly into the Hartke and boosted by an equivalent in the PA. I can hear every mistake I and the rest of the band make

I use a Hartke kickback to gig with from time to time. Pubs round here can be quite small and having something tiny on stage helps. They'll just keep up with a drummer if they aren't going flat out and you roll the bass back a tiny bit. It's a little limiting but not impossible. If the drummers miked you'll be going through the PA anyway. Other similar amps may well do the job but I haven't tried them. Old Peaveys sound great, tend to be reliable and the ones with Black Widow speakers in are worth looking out for. Great speakers for very little money. They are heavy though.

[quote name='LukeFRC' timestamp='1413217846' post='2575968'] the three musketeers, bill and others will probably have this/not need it... but someone linked to it on TB and it may be interesting for some... [url="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_l73GVBBlIUNTc2YTc2YTktNTNmYi00YWNmLTlmY2ItZTU0MTRhMzdkYTAy/edit?pli=1"]https://docs.google....YTAy/edit?pli=1[/url] [/quote] Yep it's a great book and a good thing to have around if you want to delve a little deeper and understand some of what the computer is up to when it calculates box sizes for you. The other book I'd recommend is http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470094303.html though it is more technical in places.

Firstly thanks to Ashdown for coming on. Having spoken to them on the 'phone and having been an Ashdown owner before I'm a big fan of their customer care. This isn't about bashing someone, for me it is just about the MiBass 2.0 I returned two to Andertons recently, the first was dead on arrival, the second just wouldn't let me dial up a decent sound, I can only describe it as being oddly lightweight. Loud enough but really lacking a full bass sound. Even using the line input with my iPod I couldn't get a good neutral sound. I expected that to sound like a feed through my PA amp but instead it sounded like a loud transistor radio with no real bass. Maybe there has been a dud batch or this one was faulty in some way but everything seemed to be working, it just didn't sound very good and there was no point in persevering with an amp I'd never gig with. I tried it with three different speakers which I regularly gig with and know well, a 1x12 loaded with the Beyma SM212, a 2x10 and a 1x15 loaded with the Eminence Deltalite. All displayed the same odd sounding bass suckout when turned up moderately. Has this amp been optimised to work best with Ashdown speakers? I bought the amp because of recommendations here from people who used the old MiBass. It would seem that people were happier with tht than the new model.

[quote name='Twincam' timestamp='1412795121' post='2572208'] Im convinced with modern tech they can be made cheap. If in bulk!. However if im wrong on the weight and them being manufactured cheap i believe there is one very interesting thing that would get a lot of peoples attention is that the speakers are tuneable on the fly to a degree. Surely that would be worth a fair amount of attention. As for the power source a smart move would be to have power from a custom amp head, which would add little to a head. If i was going to come into amp and cab manufacture this is how i would go. [/quote] They can't be made cheaper as you have a massive copper coil, copper prices are rising steadily, one of the drivers to switch mode power supplies. However you streamline your manufacturing you can't affect world copper prices. Also not tunable as the only thing you can change is the magnet, Make it more powerful and you change the electrical characteristics of the speaker which mean redesigning the cabinet. In any case if you knew 100V was the optimum voltage for a particular speaker design why would you turn it to 80V to degrade the speaker? These things were made when magnets were made of materials that lost their power over time and copper was relatively cheaper. I'm sure there is a market for steam engines and typewriters and Ferguson tractors and I love all that sort of thing but the idea that this is a better technology rather than a curiosity doesn't really hold much water.

Be nice to hear from Ashdown here, I've no idea if they follow Basschat, but we must represent a significant proportion of their home market and an even bigger proportion of opinion formers over here. My first amp was an Ashdown, they were great on after sales and as a UK company even thought the stuff is made overseas I'd like them to succeed. I've a bit of a soft spot for them but not enough to buy an amp that sounds bad. Barefaced, Baer, TKS, BFM all come on, and I hope benefit from Basschat. Come on Ashdown, we want you to get it right.

FWIW, I bought one for the same reason, initial impressions were OK, good clarity rather than the grungy sound of my old Mag600, but once I got playing with it I found the bass very light. I couldn't achieve a sound I'd be happy to gig with and I thought the tone controls really ill judged. I was about to try driving it with the post eq output from my Hartke and then thought 'why am I bothering' when what I wanted was a usable sound from a single lightweight box. It went back. Incidentally I bought it after recommendations from people who had the old model so it looks like they've goofed with this one. Andertons do say you pay for returns and were very helpful so I've no complaints over the £15. Actually thought their service was great as I've had a few things from them recently.

Ah those were the days. My addiction to speakers started with a field wound speaker in my old radiogram (You'll have to google that young people) My parents were out so I resoldered the coil from the 110V tap on the mains transformer to the 240V mains. It hummed quite a bit but boy was it loud, so loud I just had to carry it out of the house and down the bottom of the garden to see how far away it could be heard. Biggin Hill about 4 miles away apparently. Very satisfying, and I managed to get my dad's soldering iron and Avometer back undiscovered before anyone got home. Cracking afternoon that. The trouble is the coil was heavier than any magnet and made of very expensive copper. Cheaper to use neodymium and lighter to use ceramic. Even if you did a Clarkson and applied a million volts the pole piece would saturate and there'd be no increase in power. Are people still making them? Wow!

My view is that it probably isn't worth swapping speakers around, buy the Yamaha replacements or give up on them. I'm a fan of the Stagepas 300 as a generally well engineered niche product, now widely copied. We used some as stage monitors for years and I picked up one of the little mixer amps (someone else with blown speakers?) on ebay which I still use for rehearsals and carry as a get you out of trouble amp for all our gigs. Any different speaker is going to change the sound, though the one Stevie found looks a good un. The P Audio does have output at 4kHz but it is going to behave differently in the crossover region and sound different, it looks like it is a bit louder too so the sound is going to be bassier than you are used to. It may, or may not physically fit and adapting a plastic cab isn't straightforward. Finally the cab is ported and tuned to the speaker it carries, again the new speaker might work well or might not. Too many variables to gamble on to make saving £40 seem like a good bet. So the question is whether it is worth spending £150 on repairing them or whether you would be better buying something else, as you have a perfectly decent mixer amp. Andertons have a B-stock Stagepas for £250 [url="http://www.andertons.co.uk/active-pa-speakers/pid35598/cid627/b-stock-powered-300-spkr-passive-500-speaker.asp?"]http://www.andertons...00-speaker.asp?[/url] for instance. Or you could buy a couple of new speakers like these for instance [url="http://www.bluearan.com/index.php?id=WRFTITAN8P&browsemode=category."]http://www.bluearan....emode=category.[/url] Repairing the yamaha's if you like them a lot isn't a daft decision but it is worth thinking about what you want to get out of this since you will have to spend £150 anyway.

This seems to be very fair to me. Light bass slim, fast neck, great rock tone, wonderful sustain. It always created a stir when I got it out at gigs and playing it live was a bit like Jim Carey putting on the mask! I found the neck dive to be a bit of a problem, even after moving the strap fixings and with a wide non slip strap. The OP is right about the twist away from you being the bigger problem though. I found after an hour playing I was getting wrist pain from my fretting hand, I guess because I was subtly but constantly pulling the neck straight. Shifting the playing position high on your body helps or play it low as the OP suggests, where it is easier to play with a pick rather than finger style. After persevering for six months I sold mine, figuring I wasn't using it live 'cos I wasn't playing rock and I could always buy an Epi Pro if I wanted a T-bird for the odd gig. I traded it in for an American Deluxe Precision and had a fair bit of change so I was pretty happy. However my pop covers band folded and I'm now playing a lot more rock. I've tried the Epi's The Pro and the classic are much heavier Fender weights and have thicker necks, nice basses but if you've played a Gibbo you won't want to go there. I'm having hankerings to go back to the T-bird just to use for the second set, That sound and that lovely neck ......

Your English is fantastic, the only evidence of it being a second language, never mind a third is that you are slightly more polite than we are with each other Please don't worry about sharing ideas either, it is good to share and I certainly don't have all the answers. Any suggestions you make are welcome. Thanks for clearing up how you generated your data. It is something I had wanted to do and it would be good to try a range of basses. It would be nice to see what the difference between a P and J bass actually was for instance. It is always good to have an input from people who are actually manufacturing speakers. I wish you every success. For those who haven't noticed TKS are already on their own thread and you can see some of their speakers here [url="https://www.facebook.com/pages/tks-Engineering/154937774584383"]https://www.facebook...154937774584383[/url] .

Tks talks about a cheap 10" speaker, though it isn't clear if all the tests took place with the same speaker. The implications for our design and any other designer are that we can take a few more liberties, which we kind of knew. I like to explore the extremes though so we can predict behaviour. I hope that what people are getting from this is that though the maths gives you the predictions there is lots of room for setting the compromises in different places. For those who don't know 6V6 built an earlier design based on the SM212 which is very similar to our design so his comments on his speaker are absolutely based on experience and relevant to our design

I'd take the measurements as indicative only. All basses have a different timbre, or mix of harmonics. The pickup positioning is going to be critical. The further up the string the more fundamental and the less harmonics you'll pick up. Put it on the 12th fret and you'll get maximum pickup of the fundamental and the second harmonic will be absent as the node will be above the pup. The Pickup itself will have its own frequency response and where you pick the string will also affect the way it vibrates. However even if this is one bass, through one amp and speaker it ties in with what you'd pretty much expect. I hope we do get some more information, my Swedish is non-existent so I'll have to wait. Could you do your own measurements Stevie?

Really sorry guys, it would have been good to get a few opinions. I've been gigging a lot recently so this is the first weekend free for a long time and I'm going to spend it with someone I love

[quote name='tks.se' timestamp='1412160565' post='2566219'] When playing a low B, most of the tone consists of harmonics to the fundamental. Here's the result of playing a low B and running the signal through a spectrum analyser: If we "translate" those dB (logarithmic) values to watts (voltage swing would be better, but using watts makes it a bit more intuitive for most) and use say 200W as a total, you get the following "wattage distribution": Different basses, fingers, plucking style etc give different responses/harmonic distribution, and this also changes over time (the harmonic distribution of a ringing note differs from that of the attack). The main thing to focus on is that a low B is never a 31 Hz only tone, most of the "energy" is distributed in the harmonics. Because of that a 50 Hz tuning doesn't mean a death sentence for a SM212 (nice speaker by the way!) even when playing a low B at full power. Great initiative with the design diary! [/quote] Thanks That's great information, do you have a link? I suppose I'm designing for worst case, because someone somewhere is going to think they have a 350W speaker that can reproduce anything they throw at it, add 12dB of bass boost from a traditional tone control and the wattage distribution would look very different and my suspicion is that someone, somewhere will do this. I suppose the possibility of designing this hazard out was worth a look, in the end the compromises weren't worth the gains and I'd advise anyone with a fiver who wants to drive at extreme sound levels uses at least two speakers and preferably a filter like a Thumpinator.

Final one this morning. For some reason the winISD plot won't go up. If I halve the port area of the 40Hz tuning I can use a shorter port, it now fits inside the speaker!! The plot you can't see now shows the air velocity inside the port. The faster the air moves the noisier the port gets and you'll hear chuffing noises at somewhere between 15 and 17m/s. Now we have the port down to reasonable dimensions but with the same air moving through it the 40Hz tuning will start to make noises. So we have to compromise; tune to 40Hz and accept a noisy port at high volumes or 50Hz and have to de-rate the power handling for 5stringers or users of octavers. The solution for us is to go for 50Hz tuning. I'm the one who hung out for the lower tuning but the other guys are right really. Why the hell would you think a single 12 is the way to go if you want a stack to handle full power fundamental from a 5string?

file:///C:\DOCUME~1\dad\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image002.jpg[size=4][attachment=172886:clip_image002.jpg][/size] [size=4]OK if I've got this right this should show the frequency response of the two cabs. Pink is 50 Hz and Yellow 40Hz. You'll see that 40 is flatter and tails off more gradually and a 50Hz tuning gives a bit of extra bass between 200 and 50Hz. whether you see this as extra warmth or distortion is a bit of a matter of taste, and at only 1dB I doubt you'd notice it unless you are listening for a difference. The point is that mucking about with tuning affects the low frequency response, and it might be greater for other speakers and other cabs. Without the simulation you won't know.[/size]

[size=4][attachment=172884:clip_image002.jpg][/size] [size=4]OK update on the design process, which is back to where this thread was originally meant to be, I feel sorry for anyone who comes to this in the future to try to find information [/size] [size=4]The biggest problem we are having is to select the port dimensions. Tuning the cab is easy as winISD will calculate all this for you once you have decided what outcome you want. the problem is deciding the outcome. It is always a compromise and all the cabs you might buy have had the compromises decided for you, however high end they are.[/size] If the plot above comes out then it should show the cone excursion at 300W. The pink curve shows the cab tuned to 50Hz resonance and the yellow to 40Hz. the red horizontal line shows Xmax, the point at which the speaker coil leaves the magnet and the speaker starts to distort. You'll see that they both start to distort at 100Hz and the 40Hz tuning distorts more. Because Beyma use the worse case calculation for Xmax it is unlikely you would notice any distortion at all with the pink 50Hz tuning and in practice, probably none at the 40Hz tuning. So far, so good. The problems come below the port tuning. Look at the 30Hz line and you'll see the excursion shoots up to 11mm and 18mm. Critically at 13.5mm for this speaker the coil hits the back of the magnet, and this will destroy the speaker. Low B is 31Hz. This means the speaker won't handle 300W of low B fundamental if we tune it to 50Hz. So we tune it to 40Hz right? Well no, not necessarily, because this causes other problems. One you might be able to see on the image. The port length is bigger that the cabinet for a 40Hz tuning. More about this in my next post.

The prototype is 53x42x36cm (exterior dimensions) I don't think that will vary by more than a cm in any dimension in the final version. My rack mounted Hartke sits nicely on the largest face. Because it is a self build you can vary the shape to get the exact dimensions you want so long as the internal volume stays the same. I'm going to offer everything down to a cutting list to people who just want to make a perfect copy but the reason we are giving all the design details away is so you can tweak the design if you want.

There are two variables here, the cab and the venue. The acoustics in some venues are appalling. Low frequencies are hard enough to hear clearly at the best of times but if you are shoved into a highly reverberant space with a not very lively speaker which is pointed at your legs not your ears then you won't hear anything, even though it may be fine for the audience.

Sorry, can't do the 12th, family commitments.

There are two technical issues with using PA cabs, actually the same issues are shared with all bass cabs. Neither of them should be an issue with a properly designed PA cab. Bass needs lots of air to be shifted if it is to be loud, this means lots of cone area and/or the cone(s) need to move a long way. Cheap speakers with cheap magnets can't do this generally. PA cabs should be able to put out exactly the right amount of bass to match the output of the rest of the band so should be able to cope with bass at that sound level with no problems, otherwise what's the point? However cheap PA's compromise this and are often only used as vocal PA avoiding this issue. The other technical is distortion, if you play with lots of distortion/overdrive then it generates lots of extra high frequency energy and you will burn out the horn drivers. Not a problem if you play clean. If you bought a new PA speaker and it had DSP built in then none of this is a worry the DSP makes your speaker idiot proof and turns it down if you do something stupid. The other non- technical issue is that of taste, bass cabs are rarely uncoloured because the colour is the 'sound' of the cab. PA cans should be uncoloured so will sound different. If you like DI'd sound then you'll like using PA cabs. Another issue is cab resonance, bass cabs generally are fairly massively built to resist low frequency resonances. PA cabs are generally made to be light enough to be thrown on top of poles and are engineered to suppress resonances across the frequency spectrum. I'd avoid one of the polypropylene PA cabs as a bass monitor but most reasonable quality PA cabs will handle bass as well as most bass cabs. In some ways the bass unit in a PA cab can be more specialised for bass than a bass speaker, as the horn does all the top end. Try your cabs at home, turn the power up gradually to slightly louder than you would normally play and run up and down the lowest octave on your bass listening for any strange noises from your cabs, stop if it happens. If it doesn't you are good to go. Don't do this at a gig because the signs your speakers are being damaged will be masked by the rest of the band.

I'm struggling to do the same thing, not helped by a poor pitch control so i need to concentrate on the singing and controlling my breathing. Three tips: Practice the singing along with a recording without the bass, you have muscle memory there too as I found out when I practised in a different key to the band. If it's in memory you can spare a bit of attention to the bass too. Really mark the bit of the bass line the first word of the lyric sits over and make sure your bass and the vocal are locked in at that point, practice both with a drum machine if you can. Simplify the bass line and follow the vocal line with the rhythm, may not be ideal but far better than the bass losing timing altogether. I'll be watching for tips here myself.

Might be better to look into re-coning it, which means it is still the original speaker.