Phil Starr

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' timestamp='1380232030' post='2222736'] Many amps incorporate HP filters, it greatly reduces warranty claims on blown drivers. [/quote] Quite right, with the almost wholesale use of ported speakers the only surprising thing is that switchable filters aren't incorporated into all bass amps. They are widespread in PA amps and in mixing desks. We know exactly what happens when you don't have them so missing them out is half-assed engineering on the part of the amp designers. The idea that manufacturers are putting out ported speakers with 3mm xmax drivers and claiming 600W handling, then making amps with 600W outputs down to 20Hz, incorporating 18dB of bass boost and selling them to people with 5 string basses and no technical training seems pretty cynical to me. Probably the triumph of marketing over sound craftsmanship.

Ok the usable frequencies are usually quoted to be the point where the sound drops by 6dB. If your speaker is ported, and most are nowadays, this will also be about the point where the bass port ceases to be effective. Below this point you won't hear much bass but because the cabinet has effectively become just a box with a big hole in it the speaker is free to flap around, the excursion becomes so excessive that the coil will leave the magnet gap and probably start banging against the back of the magnet. This will eventually destroy the speaker depending upon how much you do it. So, the only effect of trying to go below this frequency will be to distort your sound and damage your speaker. Below this point the power handling of your speaker will fall dramatically possibly to only a few tens of watts. Yes you will blow your speakers. The best way to protect them is to use a high pass filter, which will also clean up your sound. You are right to think about cutting out the treble to get a bassier sound rather than trying to boost the bass with speakers that aren't capable of this, the only other way is to use massive power and speakers designed to handle these frequencies.

[quote name='owen' timestamp='1379949295' post='2218591'] I do not want to de-rail this thread, but I am looking for some active PA speakers for work (FE college doing live gigs with bands) and for church (different rigs) and would welcome opinions from those of you who seem to be using them in the wild. Thinking about QSC/Yamaha 12" + Sub offerings. Wondering about the Yamaha 15" but thinking perhaps a 15" + 1" comp driver might not be a happy combination but fancy the bombproofability that the 15" would offer for learning how to use PA systems. I am fully aware that teaching them how to not abuse stuff is part of my job, but you would be amazed at what the dance teacher does to the rig (and her ears) when my back is turned. [/quote] Hi Owen I have both the Yamaha S112 and 115's. On the plus side they have proven to be bomb proof over a long time. The sound is very forward especially the 12's which have a strong midrange peak which brings vocals right to the front of the mix but can make them sound harsh and cause some feedback problems. The 115's are better mannered. I've always liked the sound of the horn drivers Yamaha use but am less keen on the Eminence bass drivers. The latest Yamahas have new drive units, I believe they are manufacturing them in-house but someone else may know more. I host a thread on PA/live sound on another forum [url="http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/showthread.php?p=31527243#post31527243"]http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/showthread.php?p=31527243#post31527243[/url]. Probably better to start a new thread here or to continue there rather than to interleave this into someone else's thread.

There are two coils wound in the opposite direction. only the one next to the string picks up the string movement but they both pick up mains hum and electrical noise. Because they are connected in reverse the current induced by hum and noise are reversed in polarity and cancel out,so only the sounds you want get through.

There's two parts to your question. is this ok as far as the amps and speakers are concerned and how will it sound. You can do this perfectly safely with a solid state amp if your existing cab is 8ohms or 16 ohms and the second cab matches the ohms of your Mark Bass. Two 8 ohm cabs will give you 4 ohms overall and two 16's will give you 8 ohms overall. If you use a valve amp you will have to match the output to the speakers overall impedance. In each case the power handling will be twice the power handling of the weakest cab. If your speaker is 4 ohms it is possible to add a second cab but you will need some special leads or to rewire your cab, if you just plug them in your amp will struggle and may die on you. If you absolutely want to go ahead with 2x 4 ohm cabs then you need to come back to us. As to how it will sound, if you add a second MB cab it will sound the same but louder. If you add anything else you will lose the identity of the MB in the sound and of the other speaker too, the sound sort of blurs together and the only practical way of knowing what you will get is to try it.

Good luck, hope you like the way it sounds.

If you want some basic advice then you could try this [url="http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1591207"]http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1591207[/url] any questions and I'll try and answer them there.

[quote name='JTUK' timestamp='1379617995' post='2214989'] I'm pretty picky with the sound I want to use... but I'll go with quite a few served up if it pushes me to hear and play different things. I also ALWAY want to hear everything I do tho... but there is something to be said for being somewhat 'buried' as you can get away with more. If I can hear everything I do ..then I like to think that translates out front...but that really depends, as we all know and there is only so much control you can have over that. I always remember my first 'solo'd track... I was mortified, but the sound mixed down ok... it was the rest of my playing that was the problem.. but these days I can live with a quality reproduction and don't always wnat the drums to hurry up and join the track Why do we think the grindy Ampeg sound was so popular... ??? [/quote] The trouble is you need to hear both. I always like to hear where i sit in the mix and if I'm not going through the PA eq for the band not the bass. I play with flats a lot not because I like them but because they suit one of the bands well. At the same time you can't use much in the way of intonation etc if you can only vaguely hear what you are playing. I love your point about the first time you heard yourself solo'd, I really didn't realise how awful I was, then in the mixdown it sounds like I know what I'm doing. The reassurance is that even people like James Jamerson sound ordinary when solo'd, well the tone does. This is an isolated bassline from the Clash if the link works [url="http://www.how-to-play-bass.com/support-files/fought-the-law-bass.mp3"]http://www.how-to-play-bass.com/support-files/fought-the-law-bass.mp3[/url] And this is Jamerson [url="http://www.notreble.com/buzz/2012/08/01/james-jamerson-bernadette-isolated-bass/"]http://www.notreble.com/buzz/2012/08/01/james-jamerson-bernadette-isolated-bass/[/url]

Ha, I have a Hartke kickback too and of course the Beyma in a cab, I might try it myself, if nothing else it'll tell me what the Hartke speaker sounds like compared with a flat response.

I think I've got some of these. If they are the same as mine the speakers are just junk, really awful. The cabs on mine were OK though and I simply threw out the baffle (the board the speakers are fixed to) cut a piece of ply the same size and put in some speakers I had lying around from a previous project, My band play a lot of small pubs and I needed some smaller monitors quickly so I bodged together something quickly, I've since tweaked them and they do the job quite nicely. The vocalists prefer them to my much more expensive Yamaha Club series monitors so they are now our go to monitors, despite looking like they come from 1973, which they do. The speakers I used are Fane 10-300's and some slightly unusual piezo's I got from Blue Aran. I keep meaning to put in some proper horn drivers and a decent crossover but actually they sound OK. If you are interested in copying mine we can check they are actually the same and I can give you a few details

[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.