Phil Starr

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.

Yep the magnet material makes no significant difference as far as performance is concerned. All other things being equal the more powerful the magnet the smaller the cab needs to be and the louder the speaker will be. Powerful magnets cost, neo doubly so. Powerful ceramic magnets are very heavy though so its a trade off between the weight saving of the cab versus a heavier magnet or high cost neo. The trouble is there is another fashion for flatter more extended bass response running alongside the move to lightweight. To get this you trade efficiency so you need bigger more powerful amps for the same sound level. So, modern means neo and modern means more[size=3] amp [/size][size=4]power, but for two different reasons.[/size]

The aging of speakers is relatively complex and a range of components will change over time. Any polymers used in the construction will continue to cross bond, that is there will be new chemical bonds formed between the long chain molecules that make up the plastic and rubber parts of the speaker, mainly at the cone surround. This is why plastics become brittle with age. The old foam surrounds used to be particularly prone to this and broke down after only a few years. The edges of the cones or even the whole cone may be treated with a damping material and of course the glues which hold the speaker together are also polymers subject to this process. The wood pulp used in the cone will also age, cross-bonding between the fibres made essentially of lignin will increase but this will be overtaken by the physical breaking up of the fibres which will soften the cone over time. Actually speaker cones are not rigid pistons but are designed to flex at higher frequencies and in most bass speakers the surrounds are in any case formed from the same material as the cone itself. Most old speakers initially break down at the first roll in the surround. The fibres are mildly hygroscopic and absorb water from the atmosphere eventually swelling slightly. Then in high temperatures and dry conditions they will lose that water so go through a process of swelling and shrinking which further softens the material, the degree depends upon where you are in the world. The cone will also accumulate dust and will get heavier, lowering the resonance. You'd also expect some colonisation by fungi especially in damp conditions. Speaker coils also go through dramatic heat changes, reaching several hundred degrees during high power use this can end up distorting the coils and leading to failure of the speaker but will also heat the magnet. Depending upon the magnet material this can end up losing some power over time. Modern magnet materials and coil formers are designed to mitigate this and are pretty impressive though some 50's and 60's speakers may have lost a lot of power and drifted off spec. You wouldn't expect any mechanical component moving thousands of times a second to last forever without wear. There will be changes in sound but they aren't usually dramatic and there are many bass players out there using vintage gear quite happily.

Not sure about family commitments that weekend but if I'm free I could bring the Basschat 12" cabs along http://basschat.co.uk/topic/227904-1x12-cab-design-diary/ and do a talk about designing bass cabs.

[quote name='GrahamT' timestamp='1411291091' post='2558101'] As my job is near Taunton and I live in Hemyock, any of the above areas would work for me. I am always keen to try out new gear. Jimrs2k has built some Fearful cabs which are awesomely powerful. He lives at Ashcott, on the Bridgwater to Street road so he may be a useful local contact for you. [/quote] It would be ideal to compare the new cabs with other offerings, commercial or home builds and to try out a range of amps and basses with them. Could be fun.

[quote name='yorks5stringer' timestamp='1411148461' post='2557020'] If you'd venture into Dorset/Somerset there's always the Queens Head at Milborne Port, venue from the last Dorset Bash....? Sorry, don't want to hijack the SW Bash but it seems to have gone quiet...? [/quote] Yep that's a distinct possibility and there are a group of you who would be happy to meet there I guess.

Wait a bit and keep calm. I started playing when I was 55 and you have to ask the question how many people would have you? Secondly it always sounds awful because when you first play in a band you think it is going to sound like all the recordings you ever listened to the reality is without a proper mix and with all the problems of hearing each other it usually sounds much worse for the band than it would for the audience out front. Now playing with my fifth band I've adjusted to rehearsals and working with new bands. It takes time to sound good but after a few practices it should start to come together, if you are all experienced that happens quickly but if you have two people who are veryrusty/inexperienced you need to let it ride for a while and keep your expectations low at first. In a couple of months you'll know if you are all improving and then you can make a decision if it is for you or not, unless you have another band waiting for you already you have nothing to lose and loads to learn so stick with it for a while and see if it goes anywhere. As to not being able to learn your part because they move the goalposts, welcome to the world of musicians. At this level you are unlikely to have anyone with a sound grasp of musical theory or any language to describe what they hear in their heads. So many people talk about putting their own stamp on music but take that with a pinch of salt. As a bassist you can always get away with playing the root note in time with the drummer especially if you hit the first beat of every chord change. Once you have a half dozen practices you'll find very little changes and you can add to a basic bass line from then on. Don't expect too much at first other than to get better at each rehearsal, don't criticise band members who are probably low in self confidence anyway and enjoy yourself, it will get better.