Phil Starr

Just so you know. You need big ports because they need to shift a certain amount of air, equivalent to the air moved by all the cones put together. Moving that much air through a tiny hole will make wind noises. The ports are there to tune the cab to something close to the resonant frequency of the speakers. Just putting in random holes might tune the cab to a frequency which is pointlessly too high or too low. You might as well not bother which is why I suggested leaving them out. If you do want to tune the cab and get a bit of extra bass then use ports the size Alex has suggested. 4" drainpipe ( actually soil pipe) is easy to cut and you can fix it in place with silicone or other mastics, even if the hole you cut is a bit iffy.

I managed to take about half a cm off the tip of my thumb last year with a bench saw, playing a gig that evening was pretty painful. I have Imodium in my kit box just in case, geting the runs is the one thing that can really stop you.

Pretty much my first port of call after I find a chord sheet. I find myself having to learn songs fairly quickly for a band. So although I'd like to develop my ear more, and that would undoubtedly be better in the long term, I'd rather turn up with a cheat bass line at the next rehearsal to enable the band to get on with learning a song than coming in with only half a bassline I'd had to work for. The worry is that I'm not developing musically as quickly as I should by taking all the shortcuts. I love performing and having a reputation for turning up with the bass line is a really good way of getting the gigs. On the down side I have to live with the knowledge I'm faking it most of the time.

Don't buy. The advice has been all good. These are reliable well made speakers but the vocal sound is poor due to the horn drivers the BW's are good enough but this is a higher price than you should be looking at in any case. For less than £200 you should be able to pick up some Yamaha S112V's or the almost identical but older and jack plug fitted S112IV's which I've seen go for little over £100 on ebay. These have a really punchy vocal sound and run with easily obtainable Eminence drivers should you get any problems. If you don't mind the extra weight the S115V's are slightly nicer sounding. Mine must be 20 years old with no problems to date. EV, JBL QSC and RCF are all good but are likely to cost more. Wharfedale EVP series are worth a look if they turn up in this price range.

[quote name='bootsy666' timestamp='1429375182' post='2750945'] Someone told me once that a 200 watt valve amp was the equivalent of a 1000watt solid state. If that's true then the vba could handle a 2000 watt cab, that's one of the reasons for making the cab 2000watts. I currently have a quad of 6550A valves in it, but u also have a set of brand new sovtec KT88 Russian valves sat in my garage waiting to be used. I wanted to hear the 6550's with this cab before changing them tho. [/quote] It isn't true. As far as the speakers are concerned the valve watts are the same as any other watts, a measure of the electrical energy going into your speakers, nothing magical about them. The reason for valve amps sounding louder is well understood, simply put valves and transistors can both be driven into overload, the loudest bits of your bass are easily 20dB (100 times) the average you are playing at so if you are playing an average 10W then the loudest bits will be distorting. With valves the distortion sounds Ok and you can turn the amp up even more, with more nice distortion. Transistor/solid state amps sound poor and worse as you turn them up from this point and so in practice you don't. The upper power is still 200W or whatever but the average power is reduced because of the horrible distortion. I'm probably one of the 'experts'. I hadn't commented because the advice you've been getting is good. Now I'm on I cant resist any more Your design is bonkers from a practical and technical point of view but looks like fun. Your speaker will work though and give you a different sound. With all those cones it is going to be very loud and very bassy sounding. There wont be as much deep bass as high bass but with a restricted top end and a fairly sizeable peak around the 100-150Hz range you won't be disappointed with the perceived response. You really aren't going to have to worry about power handling though 200W through these guys is going to be too loud for the band and audience to bear in any enclosed space.you are likely to play. That's 25W per speaker which means they'll probably outlast you and certainly outlast your hearing! The only poor advice is from Celestion, I wonder if you spoke to the Saturday staff. The ports will make almost no difference to speaker cooling as the air in them just vibrates back and to at most frequencies, very little air flow will occur when they are being used so no worthwhile cooling will happen. The ports are there to tune the cab, since you've not done anything else technically correct why bother with an added complication which won't cool your speakers. I'd block the ports. If you are going to keep them then put them on the back and make them big, at least as big as Alex (I think) said. Lots of 4" pipes. Some 'experts' forget that a technically optimised speaker isn't necessarily going to sound the best. You are going to end up with a huge speaker that will sound like almost nothing else but be a talking point at every gig you take it to, people will come just to see the mad speaker, not a bad thing for any band. you could doubtless achieve a very similar sound at a fraction of the cost with a couple of 15's in a well designed cab using eq for the tone and a more powerful amp but this is a fun project which will give you a massive retro sounding cab, if you can afford it and are happy to move the thing then enjoy. Just because you can

To be fair there will be an interaction between a cab and the room acoustics. Cabs will work better in some rooms than others. I've an old Peavey 15 that sounds just magnificent in our tiny practice room but very ordinary anywhere else. My Harke kickback sounds great in my home and the 1x12's I'm gigging (which normally sound great) sound poor in the same room. You really need to try cabs in a variety of spaces to make a meaningful comparison. You may not be able to get 'that' sound elsewhere.

There are a whole collection of factors to take into consideration when considering what goes on at these low frequencies. Individually none of them is difficult to understand but as with any situation with many variables you have a nearly infinate series of possible outcomes. One of the most significant is the way ported cabs behave. At their tuning frequency the port air acts as a load on the speaker reducing it's movement with the sound coming from the port mainly. Below the tuning frequency (typically around 50Hz) the cone excursion rises dramatically as the cab is effectively an open box with little resistance to the cone movement. Ported cabs are very liable to 'fart' because of this. You shouldn't really get this problem from the low mids though. By the time you get above 100Hz excursion shouldn't be a problem for most speakers. Using a sharp filter below 40hz should stop most of these problems hence the Thumpinator. Another factor is room resonances, which boost apparent bass and also make everything sound a little woolly. Cutting bass can avoid this and clean up your sound. A 24dB/octave filter may do this better than a more gradual tone control whilst affecting other frequencies less. We really don't hear deep bass very well at all and 'bassiness' is a very subjective thing, just cutting treble and boosting the volume so the subjective sound level is the same sounds bassier for example. Very little truly deep bass is present from the pickups and most of what we hear as bass is a rich harmonic content rather than deep fundamental tones.

Just an aside, Each 3db of bass boost will demand twice the power and makes the speaker travel twice as far. OK if the volume is low if the volume is up then your amp will run out of power and your speaker may break with 15 dB of boost. Best to keep the tone controls between 3 and 8 o'clock as a general rule.

Probably just a protection circuit as you surmise, The thump you sometimes get when you switch on an amp can get fairly serious if the amp is a few hundred watts. If it hammers the coil against the back of the magnet it can write off a speaker so far better to wait until voltages have stabilised before connecting up the power supply. The little click is probably the sound of a relay operating.

I don't think I'd go for them if anything else is available. They once made decent drivers for hi Fi but look to have moved on to distribute a wide range of budget gear of all sorts. Unless you can get full T/S specs you can't do much anyway. Thomann probably ship to the Azores

There's some fairly simple physics here. If you stand to the side of a speaker it will take longer for the sound to arrive at your ears from the most distant speaker, a few thousandths of a second. In this time the speaker may have traveled forwards and now be travelling back. This means the sound from one speaker is out of phase with the nearer speaker and the sounds will cancel and you will hear very little. All this depends upon the frequency and the exact dimensions. In practice this means that any frequency where the furthest parts of the moving cones are more than one wavelength are radiated in an increasingly tight beam of sound, all your mids and highs. Placing your cabs next to each other will mean only people in line will hear your sound properly. Put another way stacking speakers vertically means the sound is radiated in a broad flat beam across the audience, on their side and the beam is narrow and pointing at the ceiling and floor.

Deep bass is your enemy here. Anything above 80Hz or so is unlikely to exceed the excursion limits of most speakers and this is what is going to damage most of them. This means rolling off the bass is going to be your best bet of keeping away from the point where the speaker gets damaged. A Thumpinator or similar bass filter (high pass filter) as mentioned will be a great addition and/or roll off the bass with your eq. Really avoid things like octavers or anything which gives you extra bass. The next thing is to watch your volume, if the drums are unmiked and you are slotting in just below them in volume then it is moderately unlikely you will be using too much power. Most cabs will more or less match a drummer with 200W or less driving them. Avoid 4ohm speakers, doubling the impedance will roughly halve the power your amp produces. In the end there are no guarantees though, these are just ways of reducing risk, if you put 900W through a 250W speaker you are going to damage it.

Hi Garry, yes I was going to just send some drawings but Stevie has offered to run some tests on the cab asap so I'm holding back until I know there are no further mods to be made. I'm hoping that will be as soon as I get back from Japan. I'll pm you now.

Hi Chienmortbb I'm keen to meet up with anyone who can tryout the cabs and indeed others i have already built or planned. I'm off to Japan for a fortnight but will get my head round it as soon as I get back. I'm hoping to get some technical measurements made as soon as I get back from Japan. Like so many people who don't do this for a living life keeps getting in the way.

Thanks for putting together a fun test. I picked it up too late to make a fool of myself. As said the only point is that you can't really tell, which many of us knew already. If nobody could tell and we all guessed at random then 1/6 should have guessed right, a lot more than 2 people, I think what this shows is that at least with these speakers listener bias is more important than speaker size. FWIW I guessed the 10's right but thought A was the 15. My professional opinion would have been that I had a 1 in 6 chance of getting it right. Good fun though.

I'd defend Basschat in terms of net etiquette. Nearly everyone is polite and helpful, tolerant of newbies and constructive. If anyone does overstep the mark there is usually a storm of 'calm down' posts and support for the wronged party. Bassists seem a pretty decent bunch. I've even enjoyed the political debates in Off Topic, the odd iffy comment but a lot of very well informed peopleand certainly one step up from the average pub conversation. The most heated debates seem to be over technical issues but no worse than you get in academic debates anywhere. There does seem to be a fall off in forums generally. Lemonrock has lost its forum after days at a time when no-one really posted and Ultimate Guitar is a very quiet place nowadays. I guess with people using their phones more ephemeral chatting is taking place but Basschat still seems strong to me and if you have a genuine problem there is usually help to be found here.

Doesn't it depend upon what you are rehearsing? If we are learning new songs, especially at the initial play through, we will rehearse at lower volumes and in a circle so we can hear each other better and communicate easily. If we've had a break in gigging and are just refreshing the set we'd use the full stage gear including monitors but not the full PA. Again probably in a circle, but not always. From time to time, usually if we want to change the PA set up, we'll have a 'technical rehearsal' with the full PA.

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' timestamp='1426975282' post='2724416'] He did just as he should have, as with the cab on the floor aiming straight out the audience is within the cone shaped midrange and high frequency dispersion pattern, while he is not. Tilting it back both he and the audience will be within said cone. [/quote] Spot on. The problem is that outside the cone he wasn't hearing what the audience heard.

I've been checking mics a lot. A few years back I had the Samson Q7, Behringer XM and an SM58 together. As everyone said the sounds are fairly similar and if anything the Shure is the very slightly weaker sounding, the other two being very slightly more open sounding, but you wouldn't notice this if your PA is less than fairly high end. In which case you ought to be using better mics anyway. The Shure has the worst feedback rejection of the three (just) but the best handling noise (again only just) They really do sound very similar. The SM58 is a cardioid and the other two are super cardioids so the SM58 is better if you don't have good mic technique or can't keep still like me. I've had to resolder a couple of Behringers as the internal wiring is poor, a simple fix if you can solder but would cost you as much as the mic if you had to pay someone to do it, no problems with the Q7. I've A/B checked the SM58 against the AKG D5 which is a whole lot better and equally as well built at about £60 it's a great mic, I bought a second. Well worth £30 extra. Again it's super cardioid so better feedback rejection but more demanding of good technique and a strong proximity effect. you might need to move your monitors if feedback is a problem. With a cardioid you need the mon's in line supers you put them off line at 135degrees. Yesterday I checked out the D5 against the Shure and the Sennheiser E835 (£60) and the E935 (£140) and the EV ND967. The d5 has a more open sound than either of the Sennheisers, I didn't think the E835 had much to offer over the Shure really other than being nearly half the price. The E935 doesn't sound as good with my voice as the D5 but has good detail in the mids and a nice rounded sound noticeably an upgrade from the Shure but more expensive. It's going to replace the D5 for me though, because it does sound nice and it is much less demanding of good technique. I move around when I am singing and playing bass which is a problem with a tight pickup pattern like the D5. The EV is a step up again in sound, if i sang lead rather than a few backing vocals I'd go for that but I don't have a great voice and no-one needs to hear me that clearly, in any case it is too expensive for your needs. If you want something cheap and cheerful go for the Q7, if you know someone who solders the Behringer. If you want to sound better and don't jump around like a Jack in a box then buy the D5 and relegate the Shure to being a spare, it really does have a great sound for that money

I think 'cheaper' and 'more fun' won't be the same thing. It's almost always cheaper to buy a second hand cab than to build one. If you want a small box to put a speaker in one of the smaller wooden 10" PA cabs might be good. The Pro Sound made by Maplin come in fairly well made boxes if you can find a damaged one it will cost peanuts and it'll have all the connectors. The Basslite is fairly pricey so you might want to look at something else though it goes well in a smaller box.

There's probably two areas you can operate in depending upon your skill. As I think everyone is indicating £250 is the going rate for pub bands and 40 gigs a year is pretty good but achievable for a decent band. Pretty much all the gigs are Friday and Sat nights. A lot of pubs are small and there is a demand for solo acts and duos, these can also work the bigger pubs on weekdays and Sundays. The other 'scene' for covers is weddings and functions, again the £1000 mark is probably a fair median depending upon the quality of the band. The demands upon the professionalism of the band are much higher, but I guess this is the same anywhere and there are of course semi-professional bands who use the pub gigs as shop windows to get the more lucrative functions. Bands have to expect to carry their own PA and increasingly lighting to provide a ready made show. 2x45mins won't really be enough, 9-12 with a 20 min break is more the norm nowadays. Pubs are struggling to make profits and there are a lot of pretty good bands here so don't expect too much but it isn't impossible to build a reputation and gig regularly. If you are looking at the area north of London then have a look at www.lemonrock.com which is a great site for pub bands, we get about half our gigs from LR and in areas where it is strong it is well worth looking at.

[quote name='JoeEvans' timestamp='1426458197' post='2718283'] ... if it's a big budget gig you need to put on a good show so you might be rehearsing extra thoroughly; ... [/quote] [quote name='discreet' timestamp='1426458349' post='2718286'] What if it's NOT a big budget gig? Would you put on a mediocre show and do half-assed rehearsals..? [/quote] Both good points, you shouldn't stand up on a stage and give any audience 60%, however we all know that if you are booked for a wedding/corporate there are extra demands, reliability being one of them. Charging is so difficult to get right, if you included all your costs in gear, travel, practice time etc and then charged minimum wage then band fees would price live music out of the reach of nearly all but the biggest music pubs. In the end though I want the pub scene to thrive and the pub to make a modest profit, so prices are pitched at what the market can bear. In the area I live we do charge slightly differently for the busier town centre pubs compared with the smaller country pubs. No doubt if we were in a wealthier area playing bigger busier pubs we'd charge a bit more for that too, but very simple economics drive band fees for this sort of gig For anything corporate or private we charge something more realistic, effectively double our normal fee. If it is a ticketed event there's no reason for the band to be working for less than the bar staff or caterers.

There's a lot of not too well informed advice here, well meaning enough. TimR has it about right especially with respect to earth. The important thing is to ensure all your equipment and the truck are at the same earth potential and that the gear you are using is all properly wired. An RCD will help but isn't foolproof. The size of the generator has been mentioned. Add up the total wattage of your gear including any lights or other electrical equipment. Add another 50% and that should tell you the size of genny you need. I doubt the total of your gear is much over 1000W and even a quite small generator will be 2k so you shouldn't have a problem. the only problem I've had is that the voltage will fall before you over load the generator and this could cause some problems, hence the need to add 50%. Generators are noisy, as are trucks, you might need more power to be heard than you expect. Without any reflecting walls and floors the bass in particular is lost, take your biggest rig for bass. You really need to be supported if the truck stops suddenly and your gear needs to be strapped down too. No point in being held steady if you are hit by a flying 20lb bass amp! There are regulations about all this and you should ask the organisers about insurance, public liability may not cover you if you are part of the event. In Somerset we have annual competitions for floats in all the local towns. PA systems are built into the trucks and tend to be rated in kilowatts. Anyone standing on the truck usually has a harness fixed to metal work and the floats are all inspected for safety, Marshalls ensure the trucks never exceed walking pace. You can see some of the cages and harnesses on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaBHwy0DAIE&feature=youtu.be

Good luck and don't feel bad. For most of them being in a band and some recreational playing was enough, you've probably ended that for them and you can't blame them for being fed up. You aren't responsible for their happiness though. I've been in exactly that situation with my previous two bands, pushing them into gigging which they quite enjoyed but weren't bothered about it being too often. I too took on the PA and all the other organisation as I tried to push the bands forwards. Gigging is a real commitment though, It takes out most of the weekend as far as the family is concerned and lot's of preparation and compromises on the set and many people struggle with performing in public. There's only so far you can push people and you gave it a good go. You'd be surprised at how popular a gigging bassist with a full PA and organising skills can be. I'm now with a band that gig twice as often as before and our diary is growing and I've had inquiries/offers from other bands. I'm grateful to my previous band members though, they lit the candle and put up with my awful bass playing whist I grew my skills. Most of us are still friends. Your guitarist might be a keeper too. Good luck

I use the B205 and it does the job. A friend uses the TC helicon and I have to say I wish i'd gone for that, lots of voice processing, i think a better sound and mounts onto the stand better. I think the Mackie is pretty similar to the Behringer, I've tried it in the shops but not gigged with it. If you want a used Behringer and can meet up in Exeter I suppose i could upgrade to the TC. PM me if you are interested. Either way the great thing about all these is you can give yourself as much monitor as you want without throwing the monitor mix out for the rest of the band, I've never heard myself so clearly