Phil Starr

First check nothing inside the cab is touching the cones, sometimes wires etc come loose and rattle against the cone. then check the speaker over carefully and look for something coming unglued, either the dust cap in the middle or the corrugated surround, also possible tears. repairs can be done with Copydex for sticking and Copydex and tissue for tear patching. If the speaker coil is rubbing it needs replacement

[quote name='warwickhunt' timestamp='1397115289' post='2420693'] IMHO if your 350w isn't enough to be heard over the band then 'everyone' is likely playing too loud, which in turn means that if you want to continue playing at those volumes then you may need to look at upgrading your PA so that it can handle the job of amplifying the band and your combo can go back to its job of being a monitor for the bass. Just an outsiders view of the 'likely' issues. [/quote] There's more than a grain of truth in this. I use a 2x10 with 300W and never struggle for volume, I've no idea what the Fender sounds like but it should be enough. The problem may be the guitarists, you only need to match the drummer who of course can't turn up. If you match the drums and can't hear then no-one can hear the drums either and you will sound poor whatever you do. Turn down the guitar amps and the band will sound like a band. The other problem may be where the bass amp is pointing. Bass goes everywhere but the mids and tops from you cab are what you need to pick yourself out from the mix, move the cab or yourself so it points at your ears.

I use the same mixer, I take from aux1 and use a jack splitter to feed to two sides of a stereo amp (Peavey IPR1600) if your budget is limited then there are some good classD lightweight amps from Thomann or even Behringer that would do the job for £200 or even less. Conversely I've just tried the Behringer B205 active personal monitors and for vocals they are just the ticket at £139ea you'll need one each though. I'm buying a second one.

Hi Tom, the trouble is you can't trust everything you hear on the internet, even me. The only thing you can really trust is your own ears. If you want to buy your ideal set up the only way is to try it with your own bass and amp, then try the others you are considering and only pay out when you are happy. Listen to advice but treat it with scepticism. It's best not to obsess too much over speaker size, it is important but is only one factor out of many. All things being equal bigger speakers will give you more bass and small speakers more mids and tops but all things are never equal. You can get mid biased, bass light 15's and bass heavy dull sounding 10's but that has led a few people to forget that these are exceptions that prove the rule. It's also true that we don't all agree over what constitutes 'real' bass. The 'real' bass punch of the average 4x10 is due to packing lots of cheap speakers into a too small box. This actually limits deep bass but gives a real mid bass hump of an extra 3dB or so. Packing lots of speakers together causes interference between them so the bassist can't hear the tops so well, which means the bass sounds heavier, it's often just a loss of upper mids. However I'd say many of the big bands I've seen on tour still use 8x10's because they don't have to lift them themselves and they like the sound. 4x10's aren't 'wrong' they are just another option with a few characteristic features and which are currently unfashionable. So I don't know what you mean by bass, do you mean an extended frequency range? capability to produce lots of bass without distorting or just a bias to bass over treble? I also don't know what anyone else means by terms like 'clean' or even 'neutral' So I'd agree with Thodrik don't make your mind up before you try, you liked the sound of the Aguilars so you have to try them somehow, then these are the ones to beat.

Yep, all good advice. I've been running a thread on this on another site if you are interested http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1591207

Just a thought, is that frequency plot with one or two drivers in the cab? My reservation with the Celestions is their relatively high fs.(fo in Peavey speak) if the cab is tuned to 50ish Hz it may need the ports re tuned.

[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1396274039' post='2411637'] I'd add that some singers, mostly beginners, don't like to hear themselves in the monitors. The more they're given, the less they'll 'project'. There's a learning curve here, but sometimes it helps, at first at least, to actually [i]reduce [/i]the foldback level, to encourage them to sing up. [/quote] the reverse is true of guitarists, turn the foldback right up and sometimes they'll even turn down

I also have the IPR1600, I bought a second so I must have been happy. One speaker per channel is best there's even a built in crossover to a sub built in so you could try that as an experiment although probably not an important option. Reliable and absurdly light. Even with the IPR 1600 you might end up driving the 1x15 too hard so listen out for any unusual noises and turn down. How powerful is your ABM? You really ought to be able to out-muscle any drummer with those two cabs. The PA amp will give you a much cleaner sound though. If the festival is open air you'll still need PA support.

This is a good demonstration of off axis response and distance problems http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvUfXxalD7Q

[quote name='geoffbyrne' timestamp='1396177635' post='2410602'] Would a bit of compression allow you to turn her up a bit? G. [/quote] No, compression brings up the feedback and makes things worse. If you think about it guitarists use feedback to improve their sustain.

Good luck with the mic technique, our singer bought a top of the range Shure KSM9 to solve the problems. Sounds wonderful but at a gig, after a couple of rums for courage, she was holding the mic at arms length and complaining that she couldn't hear herself through the monitors. When I suggested, probably fairly forcefully that she might like to hold it up to her mouth she informed me that she shouldn't need to with a £500 mic. It's not uncommon for the non-techie to resent the laws of physics, there's a lovely scene in Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance where two people fall out over the thought of using a piece of coke tin as a shim rather than buying a specially imported German shim. The best bet might be to get her to watch videos female singers who really use good mic technique. The 45degree thing is usually copying the pose off some pop video which looks cool but is just someone miming. Hope she never reads this. I love her dearly but she drove me nuts.

Hi, we had the same problem for years, our singer had a great voice but quiet and no mic technique. Your problem is gain before feedback, your mixer will probably let her be loud enough but you'l get howlround before you run out of gain. Adding a pre amp won't help that. First of all the SM58 isn't the best for avoiding feedback, it was great in 1962 but we can do better now. It is a cardioid and a super or hyper cardioid has a tighter pick up pattern and will reject feedback better. Audix OM5 would be better as would several by AKG, Electrovoice, Sennheiser, The other thing to look at is mic technique, pointing the mic straight at the back of her mouth and holding it right up to her lips would raise the level of her voice compared to the racket the rest of the band are making and reduce the gain needed to get her loud enough. Trouble is many singers find this intimidating if they lack confidence.

Enjoy

Who is it that can't hear the bass? I gig regularly with a 2x10, nothing particularly special either in terms of efficiency. I can be louder than the drummer and I don't need any more than that unless I'm playing outdoors. Your guitarists should probably try and find their volume controls, they don't have to play on 11. It's possible that everyone else can hear the bass perfectly and at the right volume, You may not because a 2x10 isn't very high and is probably pointing at your knees or thereabouts. you hear better with your ears By all means take the extra cab, you'll get the benefit of raising one of your cabs to ear level so you will hear yourself much more clearly than currently. Or you could tilt your cab. I'd probably go for the extra 2x10 with all the speakers in a vertical line but if you have all three cabs you could try both combinations.

Hi Rich, Bill is of course quite right. In many ways though this is something you could do in the privacy of your own home but not something to do in public If each of the oddments of speakers you are adding can handle the voltage swing and hence the power of the amp then the speakers should come to no harm. If the overall impedance is above the minimum allowed for your amp then the amp shouldn't be damaged. The question is however, why would you do this? Other than curiosity of course. Amps may power into very low impedances without immediately blowing the amp but they usually run hot and the power available reduces as they run hotter, many designs will be less reliable if you are running them at full power into low impedance and the internal resistance of the amp and more significantly the leads will reduce damping and may introduce audible distortion. You can engineer around all these problems as an amp or system designer but it's an expensive option for a bass stack. There's a reason most systems settle on 4ohms as a good compromise. Mixing speakers is more complex than just impedance and power handling. If one speaker is significantly less loud than another then you won't hear very much of it and there is little point it being there so adding a 16ohm speaker to a 4ohm one of similar sensitivity (per watt) won't add very much to the sound. It would be similarly pointless to add a 92dB/w speaker to a 102dB/W speaker for the same reason. Adding any extra speakers will have a negative effect on the off axis response and mixing speakers of different types will have slightly unpredictable effects on frequency response, often losing the character of both speakers. If you were engineering your perfect bass speaker then you wouldn't go about it by mixing impedances, you'd start with a driver that sounded the way you wanted, if you need more sound then you'd try to make it louder by using a bigger motor and better suspension or by adding more, identical speakers. If I can use an analogy mixing speakers like this is a bit like a formula one team deciding the way to win a race is by bolting a sports car onto their race car for a bit more power. Having said that if you have a room full of speakers trying them in every combination possible sounds like a good evening's entertainment to a nerd like me

Use a heat gun with a variable heat setting like the DeWalt and you won't scorch anything, it takes a little longet with the heat right down. If you use a new scraper then file the corners into a smooth round as it is these bits that score the wood. Plasterers use this trick on their trowels. If you are going to finish with a solid Candy Apple colour then it wont matter too much you can fill any dings, if you intend using a translucent colour then be more careful.

Hi Balcro, great job mate. restricting the port area looked good to me too but I haven't had time to run the modelling. I agree with Bill about the Eminence box sizes and marketing. A lot of their extensive range of speakers look like cut and shut jobs to me. A kit of off the shelf parts which are bolted together to make a new model. The T/S parameters of some of them are often a bit odd anyway and won't fit easily into any sensible cabinet. Many of them have Qts quite high and aren't really very suitable for ported cabs of a practical size, which would make them less saleable. Put them in a smaller cabinet and they'll work, at the expense of rolling off at a relatively high frequency and an upper bass hump in the frequency response.

result!

As I think everyone is telling you the DI should have worked. Check it out with your mixer at the next practice. If it takes a battery try it with one. It could be your leads, the DI may be broken, The PSU may be dead, the gain on the mixer might have been right down or the mute switch on/ routing set to the wrong channel etc depending upon the complexity of your mixer. You really have to try out your backup without the pressure on, it's hard to concentrate in a gig disaster situation. At a pinch most mixers have enough gain to take the lead from a guitar/bass directly if the jack input doesn't work use a jack-XLR lead and plug into the mic inputs. I carry a little mixer amp as a spare, at a pinch it'll double as an instrument amp, run the monitors or even the vocals through the PA so it covers the breakdown of all the amps and the mixer, if the speakers go I'd be able to turn the monitors round and we'd be able to finish the gig after a fashion. So far it's never been needed.

I can't tell an Eb form an E at the best of times All of the above really. the room acoustics and echos/reflections are phase issues. My favourite set up is with the bass bins providing all the deep stuff to the audience (enough comes back to me anyway as they are effectively omnidirectional at these frequencies) and a little Hartke kickback providing my monitoring, with the bass rolled right off on stage. the trouble is the rest of the band, particularly the drummer, prefer a lot of bass on stage for the excitement value. I've given in and gone back to a traditional stack but end up with a real sonic mush in some venues, low ceilings seem to be the biggest culprits. Looks like we've all been there.

It may just be a pre amp, the power amp with the separate mains switch and blank panel might be a later add on. If you like the sound does that matter?

Well the two eights are just about the same area as a 12" driver. It's possible with a single 12 to create 120dB @ 1m which is roughly as loud as a drummer so it is also possible that these two eights will produce the same level. The manufacturers claims are all about maintaining the 'sound' of bigger cabs. Again technically this is not a problem my 5" hi fi drivers have no problem reproducing the 32' pipe organ sounds on some of my records, far lower than anything a bass will do. The problem is in doing loud and deep with small speakers. It's just about possible with a single 12 or 2x8 so you'd need to check it out, they have one in Mansons in Exeter if you can get down there. Listening to the sound on the website they sound pretty good but I would say characterised by an open top end rather than deep bass, which is much as you would expect from 8" speakers. the only way to resolve this is by listening.

Water based will penetrate too, actually I think it's a mixture of water and alcohol but I don't suppose that is important.. I'm guessing at the finish you are after but it sounds as if you want something like a 'limed' effect but black not white. Lime is applied as a paste and because it is made of particles not dissolved pigment it won't penetrate but sit on the surface and in the grain. Then if you sand back it exposes the wood but leaves the white in the grain. Nowadays people use liming wax or even eggshell paint to achieve the effect. http://voices.yahoo.com/how-create-aged-effect-liming-wood-2549318.html You might be able to do this with black paint.

I'd be pretty careful about this, Spirit based wood dyes penetrate a long way into timber and Ash is quite porous, you won't be able to sand it out. Practice on some scraps of ash first. If you don't have any Yandles have big boxes full of off-cuts which they might post to you http://www.yandles.co.uk/ .

To be fair it is also a nonsense as a design. Given that the distances between the speakers radiating surfaces is in the 10-70cm range and the angles less than 30[size=4] degrees, where off axis response is only going to be a few dB down it will pretty much have all the comb filtering problems of a 4x12 over the midrange. Only very high frequencies (high for a bass anyway) are likely to be directed towards the bassists ears. [/size]