Phil Starr

[quote name='BigBassBob' timestamp='1379366301' post='2211934'] My logic behind the placement on my board is that it's affecting my bass' signal in a way that would allow further effects in the chain to respond better. I keep a compressor on the end of the chain to tame any volume spikes from my envelope filter but, as said before, I figure that with my light use of octave and filter I would rather get the full sound of those effects for those brief periods where THAT sound is required. [/quote] This makes sense. If you remove the subsonics first then the octaver only works on the signal that passes through, the bits you want.

If you are interested it is easy to see how this works. Have a look at the graph at the top of page 2 [url="http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Kappalite_3015_cab.pdf"]http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Kappalite_3015_cab.pdf[/url] This is the famous Kappalite but it could be any speaker as this is just down to the properties of all speakers in ported cabs. The Kappa is better than most. The graph shows excursion at different frequencies with 450W going through the speaker. The speaker can do about 6mm before distorting and 11mm before it is damaged. You can see that it goes past 6mm at 40Hz (bottom E) and past 11mm at about 30Hz (bottom . If you bash the guitar it can go lower than this. The limits for most other speakers are worse. The Thumpinator stops most speakers going into this zone where they just don't work properly. There is really no point in feeding in a signal the speaker can't turn into a sound you can hear and if you push them hard enough to reach their max then all the sound they make will be distorted, not just the deep note that pushed them there. If you read the text you'll see that Eminence recommend a filter like the Thumpinator for all their speakers and cabs designs

Proper templates for the router, you put me to shame. I'm looking forward to seeing how you get on with how it sounds, I feel a bit responsible. It's a great little speaker and I love mine but recommending anything to someone else is always a risk. What amp will you use with it?

Does the sound happen all the time or only when you are playing. I suspect the sound is just electrical noise. Your pups and gitar lead act as an aerial and pickup all sorts of noises they shouldn't. Lots of this is high frequency stuff and will only be noticeable when the horn is on.

Hi Steve, I started playing at 55, I've been gigging for 5 years and am in two bands. You've got loads of time. good luck.

Best not to play loud through a naked speaker. Without the cab the excursion increases and you'll develop a fault that [b]will[/b] be teminal.

I had good experiences with Kent Armstrongs, Go for something overwound/high impedance as these are likely to have a deeper darker sound. The Quarter Pounders are Seymour Duncan's version but most makers do a heavy version of their pups.

Yup, no problems, the Yamaha speakers in a Stagepas 300 are 4ohms and I suspect yours are the same. This means the power is slightly less into 8 but should be plenty. If you use fx then you have the option of using the mixer to blend them and even use different tone settings on the mixer for clean and fx

It's probably going to be enough, the cab is small, the panels thick and it is looking pretty well made. Put the speaker in and when you test it with the volume up feel the panels all over with your finger tips. If you feel particular parts vibrating excessively then you can add some extra bracing to those parts. Welcome back and I hope the medical thing is sorted now.

[quote name='redstriper' timestamp='1377859963' post='2192834'] I still don't understand why foam core panels are not used by any commercial cab manufacturers other than Flite. [/quote] Using a laminated panel isn't a panacea which cures all ills. Panels transmit sound because of flexure but also because they transmit sound within the structure of the panel. The ideal filler for a composite panel would vary depending upon what job you want it to do. If you wanted great sound damping you would use something like the mineral loaded rubber that is used to deaden sound in car panels. This would make the panels really heavy. Foam makes it lighter but not necessarily better sounding. MDF is actually a really good compromise material with greater density and better internal damping than ply but it isn't resistant to damp and it isn't as tough. In other words the choice of speaker panel is a compromise even where cost isn't an issue. Cost is always an issue though, no-one is going to buy a £20,000 speaker cab, In practice you could easily pay hundreds of pounds on exotic panel materials and certainly it could add £50 to the cost of the materials. In most cases you would get a bigger improvement in sound by spending that on the speaker itself once you are building well braced conventional cabs. The final issue is whether you would actually notice the difference. Saving a couple of kilograms on an already lightweight cab might not be worth the extra cost, and you will reach a point where the extra bracing might reduce resonances but they are resonances you never notice anyway.

[quote name='wateroftyne' timestamp='1378411569' post='2200027'] This is what I was thinking as a possibility. Maybe Neo drivers are more efficient and 'accurate' which is a godsend for a lot of players. But not my thing. Maybe... [/quote] I'm a great believer in using your ears to choose a cab. It's so much more effective than listening to people like me. Don't get me wrong, i have a probably unhealthy obsession with speaker design and I'm happy to discuss it with anyone. I don't even think it is particularly difficult to understand if you are willing to do a bit of reading. It's also true that the theory works, speaker design shouldn't be accidental, but you will be buying speakers not designing them. Any knowledge will inform your decision making, help you home in on speakers which are likely to please and help you resist the advice of sales people, but time spent on this is a bit less time spent playing and listening and you do need a lot of knowledge to really work out what a cab is likely to sound like with theory alone.

One of the important differences is because neo magnets are expensive. This means that in the most part they aren't used in anything but relatively high end designs with fairly strong magnetic fields and well engineered magnetic gaps. The speakers are generally all fairly low Q highly damped designs and tend to be fairly revealing so you could end up with a cleaner sound. A lot of traditional bass speakers used lots of cheap drivers with undersized magnets which means they are a bit woolly sounding and have characteristic bass humps which tends to drown out the mids a little. This is the sound of one of the older 4x10's and probably the sound of rock. If you are trying to replicate the sound of the 70's bands then basic speakers still do that job. If you want versatility then you probably ought to go for a better quality driver and dial in the eq you want. So you might think you hear a 'neo' sound but you would get the same sound with a ceramic speaker magnet if it was large enough. It isn't the material intrinsically, it's just about decently powerful magnets.

[quote name='Mr. Foxen' timestamp='1378299819' post='2198313'] No more sound difference than between two different normal cabs. 'Neo' isn't a sound factor. [/quote] This is spot on, neodymium is just what the magnet is made of, It's expensive and much stronger so the magnets are smaller and lighter. The 'sound' is about other things like the cone the surround and the suspension. If you can afford it then just look for one that sounds the way you want. Use your ears to choose.

They are good speakers and they are an especially easy repair, you just bolt the old magnet onto a new speaker basically. Unfortunately the repair kit is a new speaker without a magnet and is priced accordingly, you can often pick up cabs with working speakers in for less than the price of the repair. Having said that I've seen broken BW's going for silly money on ebay. They are a good speaker and the repair means they are as good as new but you can buy a new speaker from Fane/Eminence for a similar price to the repair. I'd repair if I had a cab I wanted to fix as the cab would match the speaker but otherwise I'd look elsewhere.

Probably too pricy and now hard to find but I picked up a hartke Kickback 10 for £125. The sound is great and just loud enough for gigging at a pinch.

Hey chaps calm down. This is a really interesting debate which I'm sure a lot of people are finding quite interesting. No need to be personal. Here's my two pennyworth. There's merit in both sides of the argument and some truth in both the argument for thicker and thin braced panels. A lot depends upon the design criteria and there is some muddling of two criteria here. Because of Barefaced and Alex's pre-eminent position here people have become muddled. I hope if i have this wrong Alex will correct me. Barefaced seem to me to attempt two things. To make lightweight cabs but also to engineer cabs that control spurious resonances. To an extent these two criteria conflict. To reduce the weight of the driver will save weight however you construct the cab. Using big magnets and long throw drivers means you can reduce the size of the cab due to better damping by the magnet and reduce the number/size of the drivers for a given sound output. Using neodymium means your powerful magnet doesn't have to mean heavy. Again this is all independent of the cab construction. To reduce resonances you need to add stiffness, mass and internal damping. In one of my hi-fi designs I used lead to make the cab, a great material for cabs but not appropriate for a bass cab. You can add thickness to the panels or brace them or a bit of both. this all increases mass. If you look at Alex's diagrams the bracing constitutes nearly half the material used. If he uses the same thickness for the bracing this will double the weight of the cab. Obviously this is about resonance and not weight saving. Build the same cab out of 18mm MDF and it would sound better but be too heavy to lift. If you want bracing this extensive you have to use thinner material. Alex has come up with a compromise of weight and rigidity which he has optimised to meet his own criteria of neutral sound and practicality as a portable cab. Stevie is correct in his Physics, All he says about thicker panels is true. Build a cab out of conventional 3/4" materials, add minimal bracing and you can have a cab almost as non-resonant as a braced cab for very little additional weight and a huge saving in costs. In addition you have to question whether you can hear the difference when you are talking about a bass being played in a live situation on stage. I've recently heard both a Barefaced cab and a 'thick walled' cab with the same driver at pub gigs, both bassists had a great tone. Equally Alex is right in all he asserts. as far as stiffness goes his cabs are the equal of a wall the same thickness of the panel plus the brace at the point they attach. This is how an I beam works. All that bracing will work fantastically well as Stevie has acknowledged. There will be resonances but they will be raised in frequency and reduced in volume, more importantly they can be controlled by where exactly the bracing is placed. There is nothing new in this, It was used in 1930's designs and more recently too. Celestion used it extensively in a lot of high end 1980's hi fi speakers. As to materials Stevie has a point, the commercial availability of panels in a wide range of materials is fairly limited and even fairly big manufacturers don't tend to design their own plies. For the rest of us the choice is limited to three or four types of ply, MDF and high density Chipboards.

At one point the company was called Rola Celestion. Those magnets were always pretty weak and lost what they had over time so they are more interesting as collectors items than as usable speakers. They are also liable to burning out because they date back to the time of paper formers and low temp adhesives, They always did burn out even when new. If they are working 40 year old speakers then they could be valuable to a collector.

[quote name='PauBass' timestamp='1377263376' post='2185522'] Thank you all for your comments! I know these new cabs are very efficient and loud but, can a 2x15 or 2x12 match a good 412 in power/volume/presence? This is my main concern, I don't want to spend big money and then fin d out they can't. [/quote] You've stumbled into a question with a moderately complex answer. Firstly let's deal with the whole concept of 'presence', 'distortion' and 'sound'. Different speakers sound different, that's as true of speakers today as it was in the 1070's and is as true of lightweights and neodymium as it is of heavyweights. You can probably get the sound you want out of a lightweight or a heavy old school speaker but without psychic powers I can't judge what you are looking for. Even a word like distortion has many meanings, for an engineer is is anything that deviates from the original signal, for a guitarist the warmth, punch, presence or whatever might be very welcome parts of the sound they want to achieve. If you are choosing a new speaker then you have to try it out and love the sound it makes first of all. If you can get that from a light speaker and it fits your budget then you might be prepared to pay the premium. Like Stevie says there are two ways to save weight. Mass is one of the things that affects panel resonances, stiffness another and there are more, there is nothing new in making thinner speaker panels and bracing and damping them or even looking at alternate materials with different mass/flexibility/internal damping. Bracing any panel will reduce it's resonance and shift the frequencies involved. The lightweight cabs may use 12mm panels rather than 18mm saving 1/3 of the mass. Then use some of this saving to create the bracing, they may even then be more rigid and less resonant than a conventional cab. The next thing is to look at lighter magnets using neodymium. There isn't a neo sound. Neo speakers all sound as different from each other as conventional speakers except that neo is expensive so is only used in better speakers. One of the advantages of using neo is that you can make a more powerful magnet though. This extra power can be used in two ways, to increase the loudness/efficiency of the speaker or to increase the coil length at the same efficiency (or a bit of both). If you increase the coil length you can get more bass out of the speaker, double the length and you'll get the same bass you get out of two similar sized conventional speakers. A really good 12" speaker can sound as loud as a conventional 2x12. It has nothing to do with presence, it can be measured and calculated. The rarely mentioned downside however is that in practice you can't go on doubling magnet powers for a number of reasons so long throw drivers often need bigger amps to get the best out of them. This makes good sense to do as amplifier watts are relatively cheap. So to answer your question it is true you can buy a lightweight which will match a heavyweight and will make your trousers flap and cause hearing loss with its presence, but you pay for the extra design/material/build costs which is fair enough. The only way to see if you like the sound is to try them, just as it is with old school cabs.

If it is a standard voltage [url="http://www.rapidonline.com/Electrical-Power/115-230V-Toroidal-Transformers-Dual-Primary-82719"]http://www.rapidonline.com/Electrical-Power/115-230V-Toroidal-Transformers-Dual-Primary-82719[/url]

Stevie is right, try it out. Laney are pretty nearly budget speakers. Having said that even a middling 4x10 should meet your needs. There are lots of cheap 4x10's and 1x15's out there though as they are no longer fashionable. To be fair they are all limited by thee size and weight. Better speaker technology means you can now make a smaller lighter cab that does the same job so as soon as we can afford it most bass players look to upgrade to something easier on the back. This means there are plenty of cheap functional cabs out there, you don't need to buy the first unless you like it a lot. You can get a Peavey BX BW 1x15 for less than £100 and a 4x10 for just a little more. Great stuff but heavy. Take your time, if money is tight then spend it carefully.

You don't need to worry too much though avoid extremes. 400w into 8ohms is about 7amps current and 400W is a lot for a single driver especially as in practice this is a peak value. I'd use a wire that would carry at least this though which means 1 sq mm. [url="http://www.diynot.com/pages/el/el003.php"]http://www.diynot.com/pages/el/el003.php[/url] most speaker cables are 1.5 so you might want to keep the same cable throughout the chain. You don't need to worry about resistance with such short pieces of wire, or heating effects as the heating of the coil in the speaker itself will be much more significant. Don't go too big either, at one point I used 79/02 speaker cable and it ended up breaking off the solder tags because of the weight and rigidity, With any speaker wires it is a good idea to fix them to the speaker frame to stop them moving around too much and to avoid rattles. Don't worry about oxygen free or any other muck and magic specialist speaker cables either, if they are any better it is only because they are better made. 13A mains cable is fine but strip out the wires from the overall cable and use single wires as this lightens the wires and increases their flexibility.

Welcome, there's a sticky in this section about gain,volume and power which might be worth a read. Basically you are just using a bit moire gain in the input but then still using the gain and volume controls to control the overall sound level. It's possible that you might introduce some distortion but if you like that sound then go for it. There's an outside chance you might damage a tweeter horn by feeding a dirtier signal but that is pretty remote and would happen with any dirty signal

In an open arena bass radiates in every direction evenly. Normally it radiates forwards only because the rear radiation is reflected off the rear wall. You will also get some reinforcement from floor, ceiling and any nearby side walls. Speakers are directional at high frequencies so this is less of an issue for guitarists. You are going to lose about 6dB depending upon the exact conditions which means going from 500W to something like 2000W, so 800W isn't going to fix the problem. You reach a point where covering the distances, and reproducing your normal experience on stage from a back line amp isn't really practicable. If you are playing outdoors it is much more sensible to let the PA do the lifting and to use better on stage monitoring.

1.4dB which is only just noticeable. You really need to double power to get a noticeable difference. Don't worry about it. I use the 3500 with a 2x10 with no problems and you'll be slightly louder than me.

This is dangerous and you have to have it checked. All the parts you touch should be at earth potential and they aren't so something isn't connected to earth that should be.That's a big link missing from the chain that keeps you safe. A mains shock may be just round the corner, it probably won't kill you but it just might. Better to get it fixed