Phil Starr

Here's my two pennyworth. I think you've asked the wrong question. The size of the speakers is one of the least important factors, how they sound and how that compares with the sound you like is much more important. Speaker area isn't insignificant in the design process but there are compromises all the way like cone design and magnet size that equally affect the final sound, not to mention cabinet design. It's a bit like deciding your dream car must have 6 cylinders without looking at handling, power output, weight etc. What you need to do is to set priorities and more importantly start auditioning cabs. it looks like you are looking for something portable/compact and maybe lightweight. but you are also liking the 'room filling' sound of your old 1x15, which I guess had a fairly traditional 'warm' sound. you might well find a 2x10 that gives you that but you might also find a modern compact 15 that does the job just as well in the same sized box. !2's might do it as well of course. I realise that this isn't helping you narrow anything down at all, your problem is probably too much choice but go and listen to some bands and see what people are using that sound the way you want to go. Plan a couple of trips to the bigger stores and try out a few cabs and home in on the sound you like.

Bassist are generally good people it seems.

If you like the sound then buy a matching Peavey speaker TKO 115, anything else will change the sound.

As you say with a new capsule it is effectively a new mic (in a shop soiled case though). the beta is a much better mic than the SM. Only you can decide what it is worth to you.

There's a slight difference of opinion here about mixing drivers. It's certainly an added complication but not necessarily a complete no-no. In any case you need to think about matching it to your 15, do you know what that is? the Beyma is a personal favourite of mine and will work in your cab. It is slightly unusual though in that it has a pretty flat frequency response compared with most bass speakers and a more extended top end than some. Useful as in this area it won't be competing with the 15 but if the old 12 had the usual mid peak you may miss it by using the Beyma. Because the cab is sealed it will work with a range of speakers including cheaper ones, equally if you want to spend a bit more you might have the option of just using the 12 at some gigs. I had no difficulty in keeping up with the drums using a single SM212 for example. What is important to you? Just getting the old cab back into use, keeping your old sound or looking for improvement? Getting as good as you can or saving money? what sound are you looking for?

I replaced the pups on my action bass, first with Wilkinsons then with Kent Armstrongs, both were much better than the stock pups.

I had the same problem and all the usual things you have tried were suggested. In the end i changed Pups and the problem went away.

I don't see why this shouldn't work extremely well. For a while i used a little harke Kickback in the same way as you propose using your monitor and it was all positive for me, I could hear much more detail with the speaker pointing at me and the rest of the band could hear themselves better as the overall stage volume decreased, We had much less bleed through on the vocal mic's. the downside was for the drummer who likes lots of bass flapping his trousers and disturbing his stomach contents. Mixing speakers is often overstated as a problem in these forums. It has implications but they aren't extreme, In this case with the speakers well separated and pointing in different directions it won't cause a problem for you.

This is very simple, Go and play your bass through them and choose the one you like best. Don't give a seconds thought to the size of the drive units, just the sound.

An ideal power stage wouldn't colour the sound of course but there are always going to be some limitations. I doubt that in practice you would hear a lot of difference between say, a new 400W class AB power stage and a 400w class D one. In this case you are talking about an old amp that will have a lot of components which will have drifted out of spec over the years so it won't be sounding like new and you might well hear a difference. A lot of old amps had big capacitors to decouple the speakers from the power rail and this limited the bass response, In the end the power amp will contribute less distortion than the pre amp stages but that won't mean nothing at all.

You might find this interesting [url="http://www.talkbass.com/forum/f15/replacing-blueline-speakers-ashdown-abm-combo-563934/"]http://www.talkbass....m-combo-563934/[/url] I use Deltalites at the moment and they do sound nice. The Kappalites are as good as it gets and do work in a cab like yours. I wouldn't use the alpha/beta/delta 15's though it might be worth looking at the DeltaPro's if you want a cheaper speaker, I'd go for a Celestion in preference. If you want a very neutral sounding speaker with very controlled bass these look interesting [url="http://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=BMA15MI100&browsemode=category"]http://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=BMA15MI100&browsemode=category[/url] If you can scrape together the £200 though go for the Kappalite, you won't be disappointed.

Not tried the Jazz pups but replaced my P pups with Kent Armstrongs and they were great.

I thought someone else would have answered this by now. Just swapping drivers is a bit hit and miss for two reasons. Technically cabs and speakers form a tuned unit and fitting a mismatched speaker into the cab won't get the best out of the speaker. It's like dropping a car engine into the wrong car, connect it up properly and it will go forward and back but things like handling will go to pot. Secondly you can't really tell what a speaker will sound like in a cab until you try it, by which time your money has gone and it is too late. An experienced engineer will be able to make a stab at prediction but even that will be an approximation. We also don't have very good ways of describing sound, so often end up talking at cross purposes, for example the 'thud' you talk about to me means the sound of a poorly damped speaker fitted to an undersized cab with the characteristic 100-150Hz 3dB+ frequency hump which most low-mid priced commercial cabs exhibit but could mean good clean bass extension to someone else. The sensible thing would be to sell the speakers you don't like in an unmodified form, as this gets you the best price and then use the money to buy a speaker you do like and which you can try before buying. That's all the negative stuff out of the way. If you are a gambling type, just like fiddling or even want a learning experience then you'll go ahead and take the chance despite the good advice, but the advice[b] is[/b] good and will be the cheapest way of getting sound nirvana. You may in any case want to retain the look of your rig or just want to self build without all the woodwork. If the Celestions you used before sounded good to you why not just use those? Celestions bass speakers generally have high resonant frequencies, so no deep bass. They have only moderate excursion and need a big cab to avoid the hump I mentioned, usually they display the hump. They usually have a bit of an upper-mid peak in frequency response so sound quite lively. The Fane Sovereign and Celestion Pro Audio speakers are mostly better damped and go lower and lose the upper mid peak. They are much cleaner in the bass frequencies, produce more deep bass before farting out and sound very neutral, unlike most commercial cabs. Eminence have a hell of a range so it's harder to generalise but they tend to make underdamped, humpy speakers and they usually have fairly dramatic upper mid cone break up so can be very lively/shouty. the other thing is budget, there are some great speakers and you could try fitting the Eminence Kappalite [url="http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Kappalite_3015.pdf"]http://www.eminence....palite_3015.pdf[/url] in the 15 cab. It's £200 ish but one of the best speakers around at the moment, you could then probably do any gig you wanted with the one speaker. Skidder of these pages made just this change and it sounds great.

If you are going through the PA you probably aren't as boomy as you think. If you are behind the speakers you will only hear the lower frequencies as the higher ones are directional and only go forwards from the PA, the audience are probably hearing much less boom. I only tried bass this way once at an open mic and i had no idea what I was playing until I stood in front of the PA speakers. Now I take a little kickback combo with me and control my own tone. If you have control of your sound then move your speakers away from reflecting surfaces like rear and side walls and even think of lifting them off the floor, each reflecting surface gives you an extra 3dB of deep bass so having your amp/speaker in a corner gives 9dB bass lift, pretty much the same as full bass boost. Also think of using a little more bridge pickup and a little less neck pup.

there's nothing wrong with a decent PA amp for bass, You usually have decent drivers that go low enough for keys which are more demanding than bass then you have a proper crossover and the upper frequencies dealt with by a lightweight hon driver which is going to track the movement of your strings a lot more accurately than a huge paper cone. Not true of cheap poorly designed stuff necessarily but hey-ho. the other factor of course is the room, churches are traditionally designed for the sound of a big pipe organ with 16 or 32' pipes for bass and more bass energy than you'll ever get out of piddling 15" speakers. Church organs literally pump air. Old churches copy designs that really worked for sound and modern ones are calculated to sound good. even church halls are big spaces with no nasty reflecting surfaces within critical distances and long low resonances off usually very substantial walls and fittings. I'm not a religeous person but the chance to hear music in a great setting, lovely.

Not sure if this is a question or if you are just disagreeing. No matter, you'll have noticed I said "not completely unpredictable" so i only have to make one sensible prediction. If both speakers are 10dB down at 40Hz the combination will be down at 40Hz. In fact if I have an octave averaged frequency response for both speakers then I could give you the octave averaged response of the combination. If I had a third octave response then with a bit less certainty i could give more detail. Of course if I have no data as Bill suggests I can't make any predictions even about a single driver. So yes, you can make sensible suggestions about how a combination might sound. In fact you could put the parameters of two drivers into winISD, model them separately and then sum the results to give a reasonable prediction of the low frequency response. Given enough data you could calculate quite a lot including phase effects should you so desire, though most phase effects apply even if you use identical drivers. There is no doubt that this wouldn't give a complete picture of the results of mixing drivers and it isn't something I can ever imagine doing but even at a non-technical level you could make a stab at predicting how two speakers might interact. My main point however is that because designers rarely take on this challenge that the results are doomed beforehand and that because of this anyone who mixes cabs is inherently foolish. Empirical results trump theory, this is the basis of all science.

Just to redress the balance. It isn't true that mixing speakers is always a bad thing or that the effects are completely unpredictable. If this were so then everyone who ever mixed a 15 with a 4x10 would sound bad and that simply isn't true. What is true is that if you mix speakers of different types (not just sizes) then the results won't be the best of both speakers, Normally you will lose the character of both types a little but if the resonances in frequency response coincide you might get something new appearing. It is also true that 15's aren't automatically more bassy than 10's or that 10's have more top, though this happens more than the reverse. It depends upon the model. I'm not advising anyone to mix speakers and certainly the only way to really know if a combination works is to try it before buying but if a half truth becomes repeated often enough it becomes the received wisdom.

Hi Pete, you need to go through the elimination process just to check that nothing is going wrong. the last thing that I can think of is that speakers can get hot if driven really loud and then lose definition and output. I doubt that you'd push your 4x10 hard enough to do that with a 300W amp though. Another possibility is that you are setting your tone for your practice space not the gig space. Bass amps are affected by room shapes far more than guitar amps and so you always need to re-set eq when you move into a bigger space. I usually end up with some bass roll off but eq differently in every pub we play. the other thing is the Ashdown gear, I started with a Mag 600 which i thought was great until I bought a little Hartke combo for semi-acoustic stuff. I then realised how much tone I was missing and bought a new amp, suddenly all my speakers gave very different tones from each other and my basses came to life. The Mag was making everything sound samey and was veiling the tone. Your MAG has the same pre amp/tone shaping as mine and may be killing your tone. I want to love Ashdown as a British firm and people who provide great after sales but the MAG isn't good IMO. You may just be getting more demanding as you gain experience.

OK the next thing to try is using the amp with no pedals at home or in the rehearsal room but playing at gig volumes on your own so you can really hear what is going on. Can you get a good tone? Is it stable over time? Is the balance between strings good? If everything is now OK it is the pedals. Try adding in only one at a time until the problem returns. If you have the problems with no pedals in the chain it is bass, lead or amp/speaker. Over to you

Sounds like a compressor problem to me too. Is the Mag the one with compression built in? that or the pedal could be the problem.

Don't fall for the idea that 10's sound different from 12's. 10's vary and so do 12's so there is a lot of overlap in 'sound'. You can't guarantee even that 12's will be deeper never mind the rest of the frequency range. It's a bit easier to design a 12" driver that will go a bit louder or deeper but you aren't going to be designing the drive units. 2x12's can be louder/deeper than 2x10's but it depends upon who makes 'em. Go for the sound you like, play through a speaker before buying and listen to local bands to see what they are using.

[quote name='bassman7755' timestamp='1370510646' post='2101921'] Personally I would stick with full range systems designed specifically for bass, like the ones I mentioned. Your going to struggle to get close to the low end response / size / weight as say a BF big baby, even with high end generic PA gear like FBT. Budget and mid range PA gear is not even in the game. [/quote] Ok I'm sure the Baby is a competent speaker and I love the design philosophy alex uses but you are talking about a £750 speaker that still needs an amp. Even mid-range PA is pretty competent at bass, They are designed to handle bass and potentially keys which can have even more bass energy than our stringy things. Take something like the yamaha DXR12, it is £200 cheaper and has a 700W RMS amp built in The frequency response is 10dB down at 52 Hz so the baby goes lower at 30Hz but sensitivity and maximum out put is a lot higher 130dB plays 121. Bass excursion may be a limit though the higher fs will compensate a bit. In any case the speaker is protected by a signal processor so this speaker isn't going to fart out. the speaker weighs in at 6lbs more than the Baby, but that includes the amp. There's loads of others to choose from too. I'm sure your system sounds great, why wouldn't it? But it isn't really the only solution.

One more for the PA route, and they are, or should be, designed for low frequencies. Active cabs usually have low level inputs/2 channel mixing so you can DI your bass too. They also come with built in speaker protection and are cheaper than bass gear of similar quality. It's easy to try too as you can just play straight into the PA to see if you really like transparency.

A lot depends upon the relative importance to you of having something you've made yourself versus a practical solution. A second hand speaker means you can try before you buy, you have good residual value if you need to sell, you know exactly what you are getting. If you decide to go ahead you could try this driver [url="http://profesional.beyma.com/pdf/SM-212E.pdf"]http://profesional.beyma.com/pdf/SM-212E.pdf[/url] I use them and like the sound, smooth and controlled. This is a ceramic magnet driver but still only 2kg more than the Celestion with better excursion and lower bass. 6V6 is building a cab at the moment with this driver, you could wait until he reports back how it sounds and then go for it. Here's the thread [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/200152-1x12-diy-cab-build/"]http://basschat.co.uk/topic/200152-1x12-diy-cab-build/[/url]

[quote name='Mr. Foxen' timestamp='1370293635' post='2098852'] Also twice the price, and about same price as the Kappalite, which has slightly better specs. [/quote] This is the problem with self build, you don't really get a guarantee as to how it will sound. I think these two drivers are fairly similar in specs and quality. The Kappalite shows higher headline efficiency and Xmax (excursion, important for deep bass without distortion) to the Celestion NTR but the extra efficiency is because of the K's peak in the midrange, bass efficiency is pretty similar maybe favouring the Celestion but not by enough to worry about. Xmax differences could be entirely down to the different ways the two companies measure Xmax. They are going to sound different though, The Celestion is a PA driver and has a fairly flat response apart from the dip at just above 1kHz The Eminence has a big midrange peak at 2.5kHz, much like the majority of bass drivers which will give it a livelier, punchier sound. Not knowing what sound you like makes it difficult to give you advice. Both of these would work well in your little cab the first cheaper Celestion would find the cab a little small, workable, but with a bass hump and roll off at a quite high frequency. Much like a lot of commercial cabs and a sound a lot of people like, but not accurate and lacking deep bass if that is important. You might get something you love and all the satisfaction of making something good, or you may end up disappointed. the trouble is that it will cost you £200 to find out.