Phil Starr

Something we can all agree on :). My first experience was a local covers band Blue Arsed Fly. I pulled up outside the pub and you could heara decent covers band going flat out. As I came in the pub down a corridor I looked into the room and couldn't see the band. they were right next to me and the only sound was the singer and the tap of the kit from the eDrums, the quietest bit of the room. The band sounded great and plenty loud enough out front, one of the best sounds I'd heard from a pub band in quite a while. It was quite a weird experience at the time. If I can take the 10 sugars analogy a bit further though it is like giving up sugar in your coffee. Not very nice at first but you get used to the taste of coffee and grow to like it, then when someone forgets and sugars your drink it tastes absolutely foul. I know @Al Krow only used the soul-less word to stimulate debate but the silent stage isn't silent for the band or the audience and the gigs go just as well as before except you can't hear the audience members who push their way onto stage to ask your rockabilly band if they do any ABBA

That's really interesting. I know your singer from the clips you've sent me and if she ever moves down to the West country I'd steal her She is good! So she's using the in-ears as just a back up for when the on stage sound is difficult and/or for a bit 'more me'. Both mine do the same and I can't wean them off it. though Lucy has got a good sound when using my in-ears and did like that. In fact she's asked to go back to 'can we use your mixer' where she last used in-ears so i think the problem is at least partly that she's lost the control of her mix. We are currently using the guitarist's XR18 for mixing. It's his new toy and I didn't have the heart to say no lets use mine. Got to keep the troops happy Guitarist is the only one not using in-ears and on the mix he likes to make it complicated. I'm a KISS person. Also we all have iPhones and the personal monitoring apps are non-exitent or glitchy with the X18's I sympathise with the guitarists generally. The modellers are good and getting better but not quite identical with the amps they emulate. However for the audience different is often better. It's a bit much though to ask a weekend warrior who has spent thousands on getting 'their' sound to give up using their pride and joy. In my other band the guitarist mic's his cab. For you though I think your next step might be a new mixer

I guess that's probably the main thing. I've still got a backline amp and speaker plus a set of floor monitors for times when we use deps. Though the better deps use in-ears more often than not, or maybe I've had a lucky run. For the point of keeping the discussion alive though I'm going to play Devil's advocate a little. How does the singer know it sounds better front of house when you use back line? I assume she didn't go out into the audience area for any length of time and this is just a feeling that it's got to be better because it's 'just me'. Or maybe she's using some bleed from the PA to add to her monitoring and it genuinely sounded better for her at the expense of the out front sound. Does she use in-ears? If she doesn't the sound for her will be very different from having everything coming out of the PA. Guitar and vocals will be beamed forwards with almost nothing 45deg off axis but your deep bass will be radiating 360. If you have left the back line at home or turned it down because you don't need it to fill the room then it will radically change the sound she hears on stage and the dominant sound without adjustments will be your bass. I know your current mixer doesn't allow multiple aux mixes so you are limited here. In the end though you can't go fully mixed into the PA without a lot of work on your monitoring. There is another factor of course, thre are a lot of things we as humans like that aren't good for us, primitive urges that worked in evolutionary time but trip us up in the modern world. We like sweetness, umami flavours, salt and fat in our food. In taste tests we'll go for anything that is high in those. The obesity problem is caused in part because we can manufacture food that appears to primitive us to be nutritious but is over calorific.We also like adrenaline in our lives, so long as it isn't too much. Loud noises stimulate adrenaline production and in listening tests we always prefer the loudest sounds. Salesmen will persistently turn up the device they want to sell to you. Primitive us like loud sounds, it is exciting when the drummer is really hitting and the amps are all at 11. The adrenaline rush though is because the sound is actually injuring us, our body is identifying this as a fight or flight situation. It's the aural equivalent of 10 sugars in your tea. I hope you are still using your in-ears Bas, you don't have to share their sugary drinks

pm'd

Shame I didn't know you were looking, I was up in Cumbria a week ago. Could have brought my Monaco up or borrowed a Monza if Stevie has a demonstrator at the moment.

We tried one with db at the SW bass bash about two years ago. I'd persuaded @Rich to try a couple of my designs to help me out with developing the concept I was working on for db. We had one of the first Monacos produced there and I'm afraid it rather blew mine away. We've also run it and the Silverstone against the Barefaced cabs at the Bass Bash and they've always come out on top. The quality of the mid range and top end is exceptional, everything is so clean with no nasty peaks to set off resonances in a db and the bottom end is extended but controlled. You need to try one. Stevie is a friend but he has seriously underpriced these cabs given the quality of the components and design IMO

So, just doing the maths; the Aguilar is 500W into 4ohms and 250 into 8ohms so it is 125W into 16 ohms. That's peak so unless you run a lot of distortion or bass boost your speakers are all safe and in terms of power handling 125W into a 100W rated speaker is the same sort of level as 250W into a 200W speaker. No worries there. For the amp the impedance of all three speakers is 3.3ohms which is a little low. That will draw more current from the amp than it is designed for and if you run it flat out could cause some heating problems and eventual failure. Probably the amp has protection and if you run the whole system no louder than you do with the two 12's then you shouldn't have problems. The big issue is that an 18" speaker rated at 100W is probably from the early 1970's. Most modern 18's are rated at 600W continuous or higher. The change is because modern speakers use high temperature glues and heat resistant coil formers. Old speakers used paper formers and low temperature glues and literally burned out at high power and your speaker is almost certainly one of those, and it's 50 years old. Some 50 year olds can still run a good race but some would have a heart attack Have some fun and try it out at moderate levels on its own first and listen for any signs of stress. Then try it with one or two of your 12's. I wouldn't personally take it on stage unless I'd run it for quite a few hours and really loved the sound. The reality is that this speaker is at the end of its life and you can expect it to blow at any time. Like any pensioner it can have a short time enjoying an active life and a sudden end or can sink into inactivity and maybe stretch out a few extra years doing nothing.

Hi Alan, at the risk of sounding like an echo Bill is spot on again. I think that with a 120W 1x12 you are always going to be at the borderline of being loud enough, assuming you are playing some sort of pop/rock with a drummer in the band. It's worth thinking about this long term. If it's important to you to keep that exact tone then an extension cab is an option but qiuite expensive if you are buying new. It would pay you to have a bit of a think about what you are aiming to do before commiting too much money. What is your amp for apart from making the bass louder. Is it just an on-stage monitor for you and band members to hear? Your current amp will probably do that, no need to change things in too much of a hurry. Does it need to be loud enough for the audience to hear and if so how big is that audience likely to be? It's far better for the audience to hear your bass via the PA. Lot's of reasons why but mainly: a.) Something loud enough for the back of the room or outdoors is going to be literally deafening on-stage b) anything that loud is going to go through the vocal mics and a distorted version is going to go through the PA and muddy up your band's sound. It might be better and no more expensive to beef up your PA.

That's right, the chips actually have four amps on board. so the 300W @10% distortion figure for the TPA3255 is for two of them bridged and if you could get the heat away they can do 2x300W into 4ohms. If you go to the rating is BTL (bridge to load) You can't bridge a bridged amp and the individual amps won't handle the current to drive into 2ohms unless you run them in parallel. PBTL is parallel bridge to load. There's so many practical problems in heatsinking for this power level that even bolting the chip hard against the case wouldn't work. Notice that Texas Instruments give the maximum operating temperature as 85deg so the case would probably reach 65deg which would be far too hot to touch. They do however give all the thermal information to calculate the heatsink needed.

Yeah I think that is realistic, and remember this is only using one amp on the chip. I'm not recommending these because I haven't trried them but TI are a recognised company and those specs are continuous rms power. the only reason I've put all this up is to say that given the state of the technology and how cheap it is the claims of the Nobsound and similar Chinese amps aren't ridiculous. I've a history of shooting down the ridiculous over claiming of Behringer/Yamaha/RCF/every single PA speaker on the basis of being technically impossible so it's nice to be able to say that this looks very feasable. I've no idea of the build quality but at that price I'd take the risk.

You Should be Dancing! Now that one is high. Great floor filler though.

Me too, though mainly just to add a bit of volume. What was the name of your band? I was going to look you up but I've lost the answer

Ah but you aren't the singer

So we are playing at a rehearsal with my new(ish) band and running through the set including the Pink song Who Knew. What is special about this rehearsal is that we are picking up after a tragedy for one of the band members. Her childhood friend of over 20 years had died a few days before from drug abuse. If you know the song it's about a friend who died of drug abuse. I'd thought about pulling the song from the rehearsal but that also draws attention to it. Anyway we run through it, it's simple enough and we play it well so no need to linger. I'm on the edge of tears by the end and daren't look at the rest of the band. At the end of the rehearsal I talk to the singer about it and she says "I didn't know that was what the song was about" "Oh is that what the 'when we meet again lyric is about?" She knows every word but has never thought about the meaning. Actually that is probably true about most singers I've played with, none of them are really bothered about lyrics. A couple of other examples Nutbush City Limits has the line "it's a WHITE community" singer has no idea it's about racism. To be fair that word is smeared in the radio edit. One of my favourite moments lyrically is in Feeling Good is when Nina Simone changed the original lyric from you know how feel to Freedom is mine, and I know how I feel changing the whole meaning of the song. Other singers just don't notice it, the whole civil rights movement dismissed. (OK maybe that's overstating things ) Now I get that I'm a bit of a nerd, but I really don't get that when the sung word is what you do you don't get to really listen to the words, they are surely about feelings/stories/pictures and so on. How can you take an audience with you if you have no idea what you are trying to say? Now I'm particularly interested in lyrics, I love a clever or telling phrase in a song often a big hit song resonates because of capturing a thought or feeling and I love the "power of cheap music and cheap perfume" . I'm amazed that the person delivering the killer line doesn't savour the power that this gives them. So id this just me? Have you come across this?

This is all true. The best thing you can do to get a real picture is to go to the chip manufacturers data sheets TPA3255

Hi all, well the drugs are working and I'm feeling a lot better. In my case it was caused by a PE and deep vein thrombosis and I got the chest infection thing at the same time. I survived and my lungs are healing but it wasn't nice. Back at the gym now and digging the garden and starting to sing again so all is good. Anyway yesterday I ordered a couple of Fane 8-225's so I can build the prototype and I'll try and dig out my draft plans and get them off to @Bassybert for drawing once I've made a few sketches. We are back on track

I don't think there is anything too suspicious about these amps, there are a whole rash of class D amplifier chips they are used in that are the basis of a lot of cheap hi-fi/television sound bars and the like. Generally thay are the basis of anything that is rated as 2.1 i.e. a stereo amp with a subwoofer output. Basically each chip has a four channel class D amplifier. Each amplifier can be bridged with another so you can get extra power. Typically one pair are used for the subwoofer and the other two as a stereo amp. Other chips have just two amps as used in this Nobsound. These amplifier chips are incredibly cheap as they are mass produced and the reliability of the final product depends to a certain extent upon the quality of the few external components they need and the power supply. I'd assume Eich will use better components. The power you will actaully get will depend upon the power supply and 19V is an odd choice for a 24Vchip. It's not unusual for a laptop power supply though so my guess is that is what you are getting. We've all probably got a collection of domestic bluetooth speakers using these amps, it's why this stuff is so cheap. During Lockdown I bought a whole collection of these on uncased boards to try out for building a combo. I still haven't got round to making anything but I know @Chienmortbb has got them going This is one of the amps based upon a TDA3116 chip which is hidden under the black heatsink. In this case the board is rated at 100W @4ohms with a 24V supply. It's £9.99 from ebay it could be what is in the4 Nobsound but there are other options.

As Bill says. On stage with a band the last thing you want is a lot of the fundamental frequencies (41-83Hz for a four string) coming from the bass stack. It'll make a horrible formless mush that will make it difficult for everyone to hear, it will pollute the vocal mics and potentially create feedback problems. You need a very different tone on stage to that lovely sound you carefully set up at home. Even in the PA you'll need to filter out some of the natural bass once you try balancing out bass and drums with the other instruments. Of course if you have a sub at home and want to try it for fun there's no harm but if you were thinking of a purchase then save your money and buy a Thumpinator. A sub on stage is as welcome as someone who has had too much re-fried beans

Thanks that's really useful. I had a great in-ear sound a yesterday's gig with ZS10 pro's. I got a really good seal and the answer may be sunscreen. We were outdoors all afternoon and I may have overdone the factor 50, but the triple flange tips slid right in easily and the isolation was great. The only problem was with the mids and uncomfortable cymbal noise which were highlighted now I've got the external noises down to a lower level. It also showed up how much bass was leaking in from the PA, I've filtered it fairly heavily in my monitor mix and had to add a fair bit back in. Next step is to get some customs.

I guess a digital desk is your next purchase? I lucked out and made my purchase just before the price hikes. £330 for mine and the Behringer XR18 was only £10 more at the time. If mine ever goes down I'm looking at the A&H CQ20 as a possible replacement at £780, it's a bit more flexible than mine but that is a huge price hike. The XR18 is now £550. However being able to mix and eq their own monitor mix is probably what you need to do to persuade your band to fully embrace in-ears.

Good luck with the gig tonight Anything is worth trying, it's a bit like cookery. get to know your ingredients and come up with a recipe that tastes good for you. In general though if you have a flexible mixer I think it's better to have a target 'sound' that suits your band and then feed that to your PA and then equalise the monitors for the optimum on-stage sound. I'd always prioritise the mix for the audience so a clean feed of the sound you want to FOH comes first. You've got great PA speakers too so you don't need to compromise that. What mixer are you using Al? Obviously if it has no eq on the monitor channels then you are stuck and a compromise is necessary.

this is the other driver for me to use in ears, Floor monitors are so depenedant upon the acoustics in the pokey little 'stage areas' we often play in. As is our bass sound whe using back line. IEM's give you pretty consistendt monitoring.

Very much so. The problem stems from a few things but mainly the bass from the PA. However good your in ears are they are probably only going to reduce the ambient sound by 20db give or take 5db, maybe a little better if you have customs. the trouble is that it is often less than this for bass frequencies. The PA meanwhile is omnidirectional in the sub bass frequencies of 40-160Hz so if you are 2m behind the PA you hear s much bass as if you were standing 2m directly in front of the PA. If your PA is banging out 110db of bass and your IEMs are trying to feed you 90db of your monitor signal then with 20db of attenuation you already have 90db of bass from your PA leaking past the IEMs and you need no bass at all. (very rough figures here but you get the point. On top of this most venues have you hard up in the corner of the room and in spaces prone to low frequency resonances. So, I now HPF the bass at 80 Hz and then also shelve it down a minimum of 6db below 200Hz for my in ear channel. I also boost the mids a little and roll off the highs at 3kHz. If anything in most venues that still leaves me with a bass heavy sound so I'm considering raising the HPF even higher. I'm not claiming any expertise here though so hopefully others will come in with suggestions. The same thing is true if you are using floor monitors so maybe we should run a separeate thread.

For me the misconception is that in-ears are about replacing back line. It's actually primarily about managing the noise levels on stage down to levels where you can hear clearly without damaging your hearing. Mine is really damaged because this wasn't an option when I started out and I worked away at in-ears to preserve as much of my hearing as I have left. The secondary benefit was a better mix with more me, that wasn't an issue with bass but it's let me do more backing vocals. Removing just some of the sound from the on-stage mix then helps the rest of the band especially the singers. The final benefit was realising I can leave floor monitors and backline behind. As you say space becomes an issue so anything less on stage helps at many venues. I still own a bass amp and speakers and they go along to any gig where someone isn't using in-ears. You can have both but it becomes a choice.

If you've ever been into a recording studio you probably have tried it, sort of. The drummer may have been in a booth of course but when recording almost all engineers are going to want a clean recording of each instrument/voice as a starting point so it tends to be headphones all round. If the engineer is good and takes time over your monitoring then that's the sound you'll get on stage. In-ears are just headphones, but little. If you want to try it without hassling the rest of the band you can simply try some cheap in ears like the KZ ZS10's plugged into a recorder like the Zoom H1 Using the recorder just as a convenient mic and headphone amp. If you choose the tips for the headphones carefully they should block out most of the band sound (like ear plugs) and then you can feed in the normal band sound but at lower levels. You'll instantly find everything is a lot clearer just because you have reduced the volume.