Phil Starr

Stevie strikes again Now I'm going to have to run the models and investigate a bit more. I'd looked at Qts and Fs done a quick calculation of f3 the -3dB point and left it at that, dismissing a speaker that starts to roll off albeit gently at 150Hz ish. To a certain extent it depends upon whether you think 3dB is significant or not. I think it is, as I find in listening tests that the balance between high and low frequencies is something we really notice. It's also true that the 3012HO has a gentle roll off due to a moderately low Q. Comparing it with another speaker would yield a different result. I'd also be interested to know what size box you modeled Stevie. I'm only getting a plot this shape for the Celestion in a fairly large box.

Congratulations Steve!

Now you are into the realms of taste really. Both speakers have a moderate upper mid peak which will enhance those frequencies a characteristic shared by most 10" drivers. Whether you like that sound or not and whether you need something to enhance the higher frequencies or are happy to have the speaker reduce the pick and string noise is something we all see differently. the trouble with building yourself is that by the time you try it it's too late to take it back.

Oh if you want something that does go lower than the Celestions then the Beyma SM110's look promising at a similar price. Be prepared to wait for delivery though [url="http://www.bluearan.com/index.php?id=BMASM110N&browsemode=category"]http://www.bluearan....semode=category[/url] There's a thread on here from someone (fleabag) who tried these speakers and had a positive result [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/235679-can-i-improve-my-cab-at-all/page__hl__beyma%20sm110__st__30"]http://basschat.co.u...20sm110__st__30[/url]

[quote name='Jenny_Innie' timestamp='1413993810' post='2584574'] Sorry, I'm new here. I don't get this. I have an Ashdown MiBass 550 .... which puts out 550 watts at 4 Ohms - but probably only about 300 and something at 8 Ohms. So ........ surely, there will be a higher volume at any given level on the dial if it is a 4 Ohm rather than 8 Ohm? I'm interested y'see as I'm kinda slight and would like a lightweight cab ..... and any help with output would be good. [/quote] Hi Jenny as everyone has said doubling the power gives you an extra 3db which is like turning your amp up one notch, not like doubling the volume. If you want detail go here, its a little technical but I hope straightforward http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/columns/gear_maintenance/making_it_loud.html The point is that some cabs can make more use of power than others. This is measures in dB's per watt. The worst cabs for this might make only 90dB for 1W the best maybe 102dB for the same power, this is more than the 3dB you get by doubling the power. In fact you'd need 16x the power through the first speaker to make it sound like the second! The trouble is most of these super loud speakers are big and heavy. It is possible to get loud and light but these cabs tend to be expensive because you need a good quality driver with an expensive magnet system to achieve both these aims.

If you go on the thread above you'll find some data from TKS engineering about the distribution in power between the fundamental and all the harmonics a bass puts out. Those Celestions will have very little output below 100Hz once they are in a cab, which will raise the resonant frequency even higher than 79Hz. Basically you will have almost no fundamental in the bottom octave of a 4 string. However it is the harmonics which give us most of what we hear anyway. Putting these speakers in a small cab will give a big bass boost in the 100-200 Hz range which will probably make them sound bassy or boomy depending upon your standpoint. These speakers are going to have a very 'old school' sound, lacking in deep bass and a bit indistinct in the bass area but possibly warm and punchy. Deep bass is often quite an embarrassment in a lot of rooms with poor acoustics creating a lot of boom as they excite room resonances so it isn't all bad. Because of the high fs and the fairly limited excursion of these speakers you'll need to limit the deep bass going to them, I wouldn't use any bass boost and think in terms of deliberately filtering out the low bass with something like a Thumpinator. As ever the advice is the same, if you are doing this to get a cheap cab then buying used is a better bet. If you just want the satisfaction of using something you've made yourself and to start learning about how speakers work and are prepared to take a risk on how they sound then welcome to the club.

OK this is entirely from a technical point of view. I haven't used these speakers. A 15" speaker has roughly 60% more surface area than a 12" so at the bass end will be louder assuming all else to be equal. Ignore the power output of the amp. These amps will drive both speakers way beyond what they can handle at low frequencies but the built in software protects the speakers so they are pretty bomb proof, if you do overload them they just gently turn themselves down for a fraction of a second and you probably won't ever notice this happening as the effect is subtle. The whole thing is engineered to squeeze everything out of the speakers by giving more power than is needed and controlling it carefully so the limits are of the speakers not the amps. When you are playing outside the bass is radiated 360 degrees, (actually in a sphere). Indoors walls, ceilings, floors all reflect that sound back to the audience and increase the bass, usually by about 6dB, the equivalent of using 4x the amplification. In addition you usually find people spread out more so you need maybe 10x the power and much bigger speakers to maintain the same sound. I don't think you can afford to carry a no compromise PA capable of giving the same sound at an outdoor gig. The 12's aren't going to be enough outside, the 15's a bit better but nowhere near enough. If you are the bassist then I don't think you would expect to get a lot of bass out of a 2x12 without PA support outdoors, though it would be perfectly adequate in most venues. It's pretty much the same for your PA, in fact it is exactly the same. I'd go for the 15's but I don't have to carry them. The decision is down to convenience though, 95% of your gigs you'll hear no difference. For the outside gigs you'll get the extra 60% of deep bass to help towards the 400% extra you'll need to make up for what you lose due to room reflections. If you take a bigger bass stack and turn the PA up full you won't be far off your indoor sound and it will be better than the PA tops on their own

[quote name='owen' timestamp='1413802394' post='2581978'] [url="http://www.hypex.nl/product/2012-11-23-13-44-01/2012-11-23-13-46-04/psc2-700.html"]http://www.hypex.nl/...4/psc2-700.html[/url] [/quote] Trouble is they are quoting 460 Euros, you could buy an RCF PA speaker with the speakers and cab for that. Shame as it would be a great thing to use something that flexible.

Corrosion can effectively 'glue' the parts together. Once they start moving a bit of judicious wiggling gets you the rest of the way. If you can remove the whole bridge from the guitar then you can apply heat. That sometimes breaks the seal. Alternatively mechanical shock can work. The trouble is with small parts you don't have to hit them hard before you break them. If they are allen keys you could try gently tapping the allen key with a pin hammer to break the seal. Gently does it though. Good luck!!

Oh, you might find this helpful, if long winded http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1591207

I've got the 205D as a personal vocal monitor and it does the job really well, but if you want the drummer to hear your vocals he will struggle to be honest. The TC Helicon is the same but better, and with useful effects built in. I'd agree about a 15 being too big as a regular monitor, as a start up band you tend to find cramped stages and there is also the problem transporting larger monitors, even a 10+horn would do the job. We've just bought the Wharfedale Titan 12's as vocal monitors, Great sound, scarily loud and could double as vocal PA although bass stresses the lightweight plastic cabs so you wouldn't want bass or kick drum going through them if you used them as PA. They were on offer with Andertons at £139 when I bought mine. You should find the EVP's cheaper than the price you quoted. The RCF's are fantastic and you can't do better at that price point, I recently auditioned them against EV/Yamaha/JBL at PMT in Bristol and they were a class apart.

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?