Phil Starr

[quote name='deepbass5' timestamp='1364147047' post='2022487'] [url="http://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=ALTSXM112A"]http://www.bluearan....p?id=ALTSXM112A[/url] [/quote] Have you actually used these? The previous Tourmax with the separate horns were good. I tried these out very quickly at PMT in Bristol just by plugging my iPod in but wasn't impressed with the sound. Without trying a mic through them it was hard to assess how they would perform in a live situation to be fair.

this all looks fine to me. Hope it sounds good to you, I can't wait to hear what you think of the result.

If it looks like a capacitor and smells like a capacitor...

I'm a bit of a techie, I've designed and small scale manufactured gear and still repair stuff. First my actual experience with behringer. I've had two EP series PA amps and they have been utterly reliable and are well made, also a Xenyx mixer, which is utterly reliable also. I used XM8500 mic's, the SM58 look alike which sounds slightly better than the SM58 but with slightly worse feedback control and much more handling noise. The mic had to be rewired and I can't tell you how bad the original soldering was. I think to understand Behringer you only have to think what they are trying to do. To make stuff cheap you have to look at costs across the board. Labour costs and electronics are cheap so the boards are often OK. Materials costs are similar if you make them in the UK or China so shaving materials costs is worth doing, slightly flimsier mouldings, cases and crucially connectors can cut costs. Quality control is expensive as you need skilled workers to do this. After sales care is also expensive. Anything with cheap connectors is going to be less reliable and rushing me-too products onto the market can lead to problems. Having said this behringer won't actually want anything unreliable to come out of their factories they will just engineer a compromise which keeps costs down. Components like speakers which have a significant materials cost can't have the costs shaved without affecting the quality, so the speakers are designed to a price. Most of the dissatisfaction seems to be about the products with speakers in. Ultimately the reason I am wary of Behringer because of their after sales. Some of the retailers I talked to have said that the new distributors in the UK don't provide the support out of the guarantee period that other companies do. Because of the method of construction (shared by most electronic stuff these days) repairs are difficult without new boards being available. No worse than say, Apple but something you factor into what you are prepared to pay. Personally I'd rather pay 10-20% more and get a better product but this gap isn't filled by many manufacturers. Behringer represent great value and the reliability isn't as bad as their reputation but you will find the odd bit of horsemeat if you dine at this end of the market.

There should be no problem plugging even a passive bass into the PA. The only problem with going through the PA is that there is usually only a tiny performance space and you often get tucked behind the speakers where it is difficult to hear. I bought a Hartke Kickback 10 (no longer made) for just this job. The notch filter lets you dial in an acoustic like sound and I found little practice amps just don't sound good in most venues. The trick is to be physically unobtrusive so if you do this regularly it is worth looking out for a cheapish small combo. I've never had any negative comments about taking a bass along, generally you find most of the guitarists end up asking you to play along with them.

Oh Good, I'd completely missed out on the 20Hz issue and I didn't want to break it to you, frankly you don't need to go that low for most hi-fi unless you listen to a lot of organ music with 32foot stops. Glad you've sorted your problem. Yet more Kudos to Alex.

Anyone else had problems in this area. I had a crackle on an amp that I bought from a bass chatter, which obscurely was worst every time I played a G! Fortunately the clue to the fault, vibration opening up a dry solder joint. I went in tapping components and homed in on the power supply, sure enough there were a number of poorish looking bits of soldering and it turned out to be the regulator chip which is only supported on the soldered legs and has a too heavy heatsink clipped on, naughty Mr Hartke. Anyway I checked over a tea break and it looks like I am far from the only one http://music-electronics-forum.com/t7354/ so if you have an odd crackle it isn't the valve necessarily or dirty connectors. Anyone else had this problem. The amp however sounds awesome, well done Larry. Oh, the link above will also link you to a circuit diagram if you need it.

If you are going to brace then 15 should be fine. FWIW i use reinforced butt joints. 1" batten along all the joints. This means you can use screws and glue it stiffens the cab a little and you can keep one panel removable. Don't forget to recess the baffle so you can get a grill over the front of the speaker. the cab needs to be airtight so it isn't a bad idea to go round with a mastic gun after the cab is built. The easiest and lightest bracing is broomhandle dowel across opposite panels avoiding the dead centre, which shifts the resonance up an octave without spreading it. Good luck

The tuning depends upon the area of the port and the length, so a round port of 20 sq cm and a shelf port of 20sq cm would need to be the same length for the same tuning. WinISD gives the option of rectangular ports but if your program gives you round ones then calculate the area and away you go. For example a 10cm diameter port has an area of 78.5 sq cm so if your cab were 39.25 cm wide the port would need to be 2cm high.

6.3A at 110V is marginally under 700W. Even class D isn't 100% efficient so your fuse could blow if you run at high power with any distortion effects or a lot of compression. However if you run 'normally' ie less than flat out with a clean input from the bass and without overdone fx then even if you run into limiting from time to time your average power drain is likely to be less than 100W so a slow blow fuse is unlikely to blow. They are heat devices and they will cool in the gaps between notes. They also deteriorate over time so a new fuse is less likely to blow than an old one. If the fuse is easily accessible I think I wouldn't worry about having a 700W fuse in my amp, I'd just carry a box of spares and make sure I replaced the fuse once a year. It's going to be pretty loud after all if your average power is 500W! If it became a problem I'd go for a 10A fuse. Again I wouldn't worry, the fuse only really does anything if there is a real problem with a short circuit or catastrophic breakdown inside the amp, It's there to stop things catching fire really, if your amp is drawing a continuous current of over 6A then there really is something wrong and your amp won't be working anyway. If I was moving to the States permanently I'd check with Markbass and have it converted though.

The shelf port is pretty self explanatory and you'll see it in a lot of commercial cabs so go take a look. The port is the full width of the cab and a few centimetres high. At the bottom of the baffle there is a shelf inside the cab. This traps a body of air just like a circular port. The area of the port and it's depth are part of the design. The advantage is no need to cut any extra holes in the baffle and the use of the full width of the cab usually means a space saving. the disadvantage is tht a shelf fixed in place is hard to change once the glue is dry. It is easier to trim a cardboard tube if you need to change the tuning.

You have an earth problem which makes your amp dangerous, it sounds to me as if an internal earth connection is broken or possibly something inside the amp is touching something it shouldn't. Not getting it fixed and putting up with the noise isn't really an option I'm afraid. It is dangerous and time off work won't come cheap if the worst happens. Actually scrap that the worst thing that could happen is death, an unlikely but possible outcome.

The volume of the cab is 4x that of a single speaker as bremen says. the port however tunes the volume of air in the cab so you need to recalculate. With 4x12" speakers you will be shifting a lot of air and so the port will need to be a decent size or you will get wind noise from the port. You should be able to find an online port calculator easily enough but if it is aproblem give us the volume of your cab and the tuning frequency and someone will give you port dimensions. It might be worth building a shelf port for a speaker like this

[quote name='rednose200' timestamp='1363479152' post='2013304'] Today I'd forget them and go the Eminence route [/quote] If you are talking about the 1980's speakers he may as well go on enjoying them whilst they keep going. As for the modern Fane speakers I think (I was told by someone with connections to Fane) at one time, when they relaunched a few years ago, they came off the same production line as some of the Eminence speakers. Certainly at the time there was a model for model matching of the alpha/beta/delta and some of the horn drivers. the Fanes were quite a bit cheaper so were a good buy. Both companies have moved on and there isn't the overlap any more. Generally though the quality remains similar in the same price range. A lot of Eminence speakers have a fairly dramatic response peak around 1-2kHz due to cone break up. In the Fane sovereign range the breakup is better controlled. (I just meant the breakup is better not necessarily the sound which is down to taste for instruments) If I wanted a touch of brightness for my cabs I'd look at the current Eminence and Celestion bass speakers, if I wanted something more neutral I'd look at the Fanes or the Celestion PA speakers. Of course not all Eminences or Fanes sound alike and you'd have to assess each speaker individually, but I see no reason in principle to go for one manufacturer over another out of these three, quality is very similar.

[quote name='Delberthot' timestamp='1363208450' post='2009942'] Another thing - if the 4x10" as it is now has 2 ports then should the 2x10 only have one? [/quote] The short answer is that it doesn't matter. Basically for a given port area the port just balances the mass of air in the port against the air in the cab. At the resonant frequency this mass of air will vibrate and create a note. Tune this to the frequency where the speaker resonates and the extra output from the port makes up for the loss of output from the speaker. (I've simplified this for clarity, some will say over-simplified) The reason for two ports is that sometimes if you have a big bass output so much air rushes through the port it starts to make a noise you don't want, so you need a bigger port. If that won't fit then two little ports of the same area or a shelf will do the same job. Any change in the speakers or the volume of the cab will mean you need to completely recalculate the ports. If you can get the Thiele/Small data on your drivers it's a 5min job to do this and you can decide what ports you want within reason. The bracing will reduce your internal volume but if you are using dowel not by much. I wouldn't worry excessively about this unless you are going to use a lot of material for bracing. A litre of bracing material in a 50l cab isn't going to throw your port tuning out by too much but 10l of bracing would. It would also make each cab nearly as heavy as a 4x10

My first guitarist, who started me off (so I owe him) got gradually more and more erratic, then we realised he was losing his hearing and was deaf in one ear. Sad for him but it is really hard for a beginner when things go off piste. Good luck with the gig, you've got plenty of time and you can always do the bassists thing of hiding at the back. Give my best to Berkshire, I lived in Reading for 28 years.

Any news of your Beyma yet?

Looks like you are considering spending quite a lot of money and effort on this. I don't know what speakers Ashdown use in the ABM's but the ones in the Mags wouldn't justify this much effort if you are spending £4-500 on an amp and pre-amp. You might want to consider buying better drive units. However if you stick to a fairly normal cab and are prepared to change the ports then you could try out with the Ashdowns and upgrade later. One of the best lightweight bass drive units around at the moment is the 15" Eminence Kappalite 3015, £200, as used in the barefaced compact (I think) I helped another basschat member with a cab based on this and went to hear him. It sounded fabulous. Don't get hung up on 10's the sound you get is much more dependent upon the actual driver than it's diameter which is only one factor of many.

Hi Phil, I started from scratch at 55 and was gigging within the year, well six months actually. Five years on I'm now in two bands and doing guest spots with other bands and playing with anyone who'll have me. I've no talent but I work at it and I'm reliable. It is amazing how much progress you make with regular practice and I just love it. So will you.

if you like the bass tone of the current cab then make two cabs each half the size of the 4x10. The 4x10 may be technically undersized for the speakers (most cheap/mid priced commercial cabs are) so it is possible you could increase the size of the 2x10's. This would in all probability give you a deeper bass response but reduce the hump around 100Hz you probably have now. given that your intention was to have easier to carry cabs and you like the sound I'd go for two half sized cabs. Yes, you will have to change the ports. If you can get Ashdown to cough them up the Thiele/Small parameters of their drivers would really help us calculate the best size for you. Just a thought though, If you sell the ABM you could spend that money on some new drivers.

You'd probably be better off with the speakers in two 2x10's as a vertical 4x10 is just as awkward as a 'normal' 4x10. (PA speakers used to be this shape) Make each one half the original volume. Keeping them the same volume overall will mean that they will 'load' the speakers in the same way so the bass performance will be similar. If they are ported you will need to recalculate the port sizes but someone here will do that for you. what will change will be the mids and top. As Mr Foxen has pointed out any change in internal dimensions will change any resonances which will sound a little different, maybe better maybe worse. What will also change will be dispersion which will change from a narrow cone of upper frequencies to a wide flat fan. this means everyone will hear you a bit more clearly not just the people in line with the speaker. With the current arrangement the radiation from the four speakers are interfering with each other rolling off the upper/mid frequencies so you cab will sound a bit more open and less bass heavy, though there will actually be just as much bass. Finally by having speakers at nearly ear level you will hear yourself more clearly which will sound strange at first but is much better as a musician.

Fane have been going for years, originally based in Batley, Yorks I think. One of the original makers of Pro Audio drivers in this country. Their stuff was widely used in all sorts of cabs in the seventies. They still make stuff after a hiccup a few years back and I've used a few of their new drivers which are very comparable with Celestion or Eminence for quality.

[quote name='xilddx' timestamp='1362597422' post='2001979'] I don't have an amp or cab. I have a POD X3 LIVE that goes direct to the FoH desk. On stage I rely on whatever monitors are available (not always a big bass sound, but fine really), and if there's an amp with a power amp send / return I'll sling another POD output into the return for a bit of controllable stage pumping bass power. It's sometimes a bit hit and miss at unfamiliar venues with weak monitors, but as long as I can hear myself I'm alright. Most of the time it's fine and I can rest assured the FoH gets my same big old bass tones at every venue or studio. The only addition I would like would be a titchy but powerful power amp and a small cab like a Barefaced Midget. [/quote] I'm happy with my sound coming out of the PA but I use a Hartke kickback10 as my monitor, it's small, portable and points at my ears, Something like this means it isn't hit and miss as you have your own monitor.

You don't say if you DI or if you have a FOH engineer mixing for the band. If you are then your FOH sound is nothing to do with what you are doing and you can concentrate on getting the sound you want on-stage. Though if the audience hears a good sound and you can get enough of your sound to play then you might not want to disturb a set up that is basically working. If what the audience hears is your rig, or mainly your rig with just a bit of PA support, then you are just dealing with room acoustics and are limited by the physics of sound. Because of the long wavelengths of bass a lot of what the audience hears is reverberant sound reflected off the floors, walls and ceilings. By and large this will reinforce the bass for them, but in a large room not so much for you. In the practice room the reflections are completely different so your sound is different. If you spend hours in the practice room getting your tone settings right you will lose that tone as soon as you move your speaker to another room, Don't expect to set up your eq in one room and expect it to be right in another. If you can, get a long lead during the soundcheck and go out into the audience area and listen to how you sound to them. Use your eq to get it right out there, don't set it up for your own benefit and have the audience listen to a poor tone. Be aware also that as more people pack into the room your tone will change. Room acoustics are a real pain for bassists, you can never really be sure you are hearing what the audience hears.