Phil Starr

I've got the kickback 10. Neither of these cabs will go terribly loud. You are pushing only 120W through a relatively small cheap speaker. They are excursion limited and you can see the cone working like crazy. At low frequencies they will move beyond their recommended limits (Xmax) and 'fart out' Probably best to turn down if this happens, it won't get any louder anyway and you will break the speaker fairly quickly. You say you like a warm tone, I suspect you are using some bass boost, even a little bass boost means the speaker will overload more quickly and turning to 3 o'clock will halve the volume available. Shoving your amp back against the wall will give you some natural bass boost and pushing it right into a corner even more. If you do this you can cut the bass on the amp and get more volume before it distorts. I would only expect a kickback to match a quiet to medium drummer in a small room, they really won't give rock volumes at a gig. Plugging in a better speaker will give you a lot more potential volume but you can use them for gigging. I run mine with bass cut on stage and use the DI out into the PA where I cut the top and boost the bass. This gives me a nice clean sound on stage and kicked back I can hear really well. The audience hear a really full sound from the mix of backline and PA. I like this set up because it stops most of the bass feeding into the vocal mics and takes up less space. I retain the tone shaping on the Kickback which I quite like.

Ok the speaker has a coil inside the magnet which is what makes the cone move when the amp pushes electricity through it. The coil has a resistance because uncoiled it is a long thin bit of wire and thin wire resists electricity. Coils do something else though they have inductance, they resist the passage of high frequencies and the higher the frequency the more they resist. So to work out the total resistance you add the two together, resistance and inductance and this gives the speakers [b]impedance [/b]which is what the manufacturers give as 4,8, or 16 ohms. This means the impedance is always bigger than the resistance you measure. Actually as it varies with frequency an 8ohm speaker may be less than 8 ohms at one frequency and 80 ohms at another. If you look the specs of drive units they usually say [b]nominal[/b] 8 ohms. If you look at a graph of impedance you'll see what I mean [url="http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Kappalite_3015LF.pdf"]http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Kappalite_3015LF.pdf[/url] If you have two 6ohm resistance speakers then they are 8ohm units and the cab is probably 4ohms or it could be 16ohms.

You need to think about what use you are going to put them through, just vocals or will the band be fully mixed? FWIW I use Yamaha S112V's and i'm pretty happy with them The bass is OK (but I wouldn't want to put the bass through the PA without the bass bins) The horn is a real gem though and vocals really cut through. I've not heard any better vocal sound from bands using gear in this sort of price bracket. Worth a read [url="http://www.performing-musician.com/pm/dec09/articles/pabuyersguide.htm"]http://www.performing-musician.com/pm/dec09/articles/pabuyersguide.htm[/url] You probably know all this but [url="http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/columns/gear_maintenance/a_guide_to_live_sound_speakers_and_amps.html"]http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/columns/gear_maintenance/a_guide_to_live_sound_speakers_and_amps.html[/url]

I've used the mixers and the EP power amps and had no trouble at all. Talking to some of the dealers after sales support is almost non-existent though. Thomann's support might be worth having here. I once played through a behringer 2x10 combo. Sounded awful. I think i'd avoid cheap speakers generally though, too much of the cost of a speaker is down to materials for you to be able to make a cheap one without cutting corners

It may also be a problem with those speakers. 4x10's will always be bass heavy and top end light because of the way the multiple drivers work together. Even slightly to one side and the top from one speaker will cancel the sound arriving a fraction of a second later from another speaker. Unless you have the speakers angled so they are pointing directly at your ears you'll not hear most of your top end. It's really unlikely you aim the speakers at your drummer so he isn't going to get any of your top. Adding an extra 15 (also very directional) is only going to make things worse. You can test this at your next practice by resting the 4x10 against something so it points at your ears and the 15 so it points at the drummers ears. That doesn't mean the other posts aren't true of course, it may be eq etc etc, maybe a little of everything.

This is either a wind up or you are seriously richer than the rest of us. If I had £1500 to spend on gear for home use most of it would go on a bass which would give me much more pleasure to own than a nice amp. I use a Hartke kickback 10 which cost me £125 and sounds great in a small room. That leaves £1375 towards the dream bass. If you already have a bass fund (£5,000?) then my dream amp would be the AER Amp One which is small, heavy and sounds like a dream. It will also do gigs if you change your mind. About £1,000. Wish I had your problems.

Just a thought, the head isn't the only thing controlling your sound. The bass and the speakers will have more effect than the amp. Have you tried the ABM with other speakers, if not it might be worth taking it into the shop with you and trying a range of speakers with your amp, if you are thinking of spending Ampeg money they should be pretty helpful. Good luck in your search.

I'm glad its working out Steve. There are two possible benefits to doing the ports properly. The noise from the ports, which so far you haven't noticed and also the tuning. To get maximum bass volume you need to tune the port to the speaker and you have now changed the speaker. It works the same way it does on a bass. Pluck an E string fretted at the 5th and the A string vibrates because they have the same resonant frequency, but this only works when the bass is in tune. If your port isn't in tune with the speaker the air inside won't vibrate any more than the A string if it is out of tune and you won't get any output from the port. If you give us the inside dimensions of the cab we can tell you if there is anything to be gained by re tuning the cab.

Reading all this tells me I'm a total malcontent or just unlucky in love. My Jazz bass is lovely to play but I can't get it to sound right, the bass on mine just keeps on going down and there's plenty of clean top to play with but it just seems too characterful for me, however I EQ it just invades the mix and drives the rest of the band out. I've tamed it with flats for the time being but ther is little love there even if she is a looker. I've just bought a Gibson Thunderbird (well it was cheap). Gibson are insane. How could they build such a wonderful sounding instrument and give it that lovely neck and then stick on a body that has nowhere sensible to put the strap. Thunderbird players aren't really all posers, they a wrestling with a guitar that is constantly trying to dash itself to pieces on the floor. The only one I really love is my starter bass, A Cort Action IV which more than matches the jazz for action but sadly doesn't sound good enough with the band, at home though I keep sneaking back to it. Sooo comfortable.

There's a few practical questions to be answered here before you should pick an amp. Is it weight, ease of carrying or bulk which is the problem or a combination of all three? Without a car an amp you can put in your gig bag and a small speaker which is a one handed carry makes sense as it is easy to beg a lift from a band mate if your stuff is small. If it is absolute weight then the AER might be out, it is tiny but fairly dense. Can you go through the PA? This is critical, if you can then your 'amp' becomes just an onstage monitor and you can dramatically scale down. How long term are you thinking? is this a temporary solution to fit your current band or something that you expect to play for years with possibly different bands and at a wide variety of venues? I'll give you a for instance, I've got a 600W Ashdown with a collection of 12's,15's and 2x10's. I use a Hartke kickback10 for rehearsal. About three months ago we were playing in a tiny pub so I took the Hartke and went through the PA. The sound was better for the audience, the sound for the band on stage was better by a much bigger margin. Because the Hartke was only really doing the mids and highs with the thunder coming from the PA I could hear my own articulation much more than usual and played better. I haven't moved my cabs since and i'll only keep them against the days we do outside gigs. The freedom to walk to the car with guitar in one hand and amp in the other is just total liberation. If you can't use the PA then the classD/2x112 solution looks good, you might get away with one speaker only at smaller venues especially if you go for something reasonably loud. Two 12's will solve a lot of the weight problem but not the bulk one. It is probably out of your budget but the AER amp one is the ultimate solution. They are tiny and the sound is genuinely immense in any normal venue, There's some very clever, well worked design going on there.

there is something very holier than thou about the people telling us to just 'develop our ear', just a touch of arrogance. Of course in an ideal world we'd all be able to read music, play scales sing in perfect pitch and be able to improvise in 11/4 time etc Guess what some of us have cloth ears, others have jobs and families and other commitments, for some of us it is just a hobby we enjoy. If tabs help us on the way then what is the harm, actually if they help people get started then that's more than OK it's brilliant and the sometimes inaccurate tabs are done by people who are kind and generous enough to give their mite to strangers. Come to think of it who decided being able to read music notation is fab and reading tab is for thickies? Rant over, sorry. Actually you are allowed to copy small parts of copyrighted material for private study. As far as I know this has never been tested in court for tabs so how much constitutes a small part is completely unclear. Is it just a riff or could you copy the whole part for a single instrument? I feel sorry for UG, as the biggest player in the market they are such an obvious target for the big music publishers/copyright holders they had to do a deal. 911 is just a crawler I found all the 12 versions of Nutbush City Limit chords are the same (incorrect) version I put on UG several years ago interesting that one claims to be a piano piece and some are rated 5* and others 3*!!! Actually most of the tabs on 911 are found on other crawler sites so I guess each time one of the sites finds a tab on 911, 911 will log that as a new version a nd eventually the internet will crash under the combined weight of billions of incorrect Nutbush chords

As you are an electrician I'll assume you know about watts,volts amps and ohms law. the trouble is that speakers and amps aren't rated in the same way because they don't work the same way and the processes by which they fail are different.. Excluding old age speakers fail in two ways. They can be driven so hard that the coil leaves the magnetic field and suffers mechanical damage when it returns, in any case it will sound crap when it reaches this stage. this is the excursion limit Bill talks about and is a real problem with bass speakers. It isn't usually mentioned in any of the cab makers specs. The second and probably most common cause of failure is burning out. With 300W going through a tiny copper wire it gets hot (200C isn't unusual) and eventually the materials in the construction of the voice coil break down. This is the thermal rating, the 600W that Orange rate their cab. The problem is in measurement and interpretation. You can't just feed DC current through the speaker because in real life the movement of the cone creates a cooling effect. For a long time a 1000Hz signal was used as a test signal but this doesn't work for all speakers, like horn drivers which only operate at very high frequencies. Now the most common method is to use some sort of filtered mix of a wide range of frequencies (often called pink noise) as the source. Pump this continuously through the speaker for several hours and, if it survives, that is its rating. There are a number of international and national standards for doing this sort of test but basically this is how they work. The problem is that speakers don't run continuously like electric motors so this isn't a very fair test. Music has loud and quiet bits and in the gaps the speaker cools down. So long as you don't distort the sound speakers will handle short bursts many times their thermal rating. Hence the 'normal music programme' and 'peak' ratings many manufacturers give. So you can use a 1000W amp with a 250W speaker so long as you don't distort and so long as you don't push it beyond its excursion limits, which you probably will as a bassist. Amps are rated differently. By and large it is very hard to break a well designed solid state amp as they have protection circuits built in which limit the power when you push them hard. However they will only swing a certain voltage, just below the power supply voltage and then they run out of volts and distort. Their ratings are then given at the voltage where distortion cuts in. As an electrician you will realise that applying a voltage across a lower resistance will give more current and power, so adding an extra speaker in parallel draws double the power from the amp. In practice the power supply in the amp will be limited to a certain current and so the full doubling won't happen so it is a rare amp that will actually double its power into 4ohms from 8ohms. Just to complicate things a little as the amp warms up the resistances (especially in the power supply) increase so the current available is less in a hot amp than a cold one. Valve amps run at very high voltages and have transformers to match the speakers so provide the same power to any speaker they have a tap in the output transformer for. So, don't get too hung up about wattage ratings, most of the time you will only be operating at a few tens of watts or less anyway, The extra power is only to keep the loud bits clean. It's unlikely you will ever really need more than 200W for bass so any amp that gives at least 200W into 8ohms will do nicely. Most speakers will handle several times their rating of undistorted music but as a bassist you need to be aware of the possibility of over excursion. If you hear your speakers distorting at high levels on the low notes you need to turn down or roll off the bass and fairly promptly. I'd roughly match the ratings of my amps and speakers but I wouldn't worry too much if I had 1000w of amp going through 800W of speaker, frankly at that volume I'd be more worried about my hearing than my speakers. Choose something that sounds good, try it out before you buy.

[quote name='skidder652003' timestamp='1348602618' post='1815917'] purely out of interest!!? if i enlarge the ports to 100mm now whilst waiting for the speaker, do you think it would improve the current ashdown driver? [/quote] You'd only notice a difference at high volumes and you would need to re-tune the cab, the bigger the ports the longer they need to be. In a way it is a little like changing strings, you need to re-tune after you change them! The reason the Ashdown holes are causing concern is that at high volume levels a lot of air needs to move in those ports and potentially that causes noises you don't want. The Kappa is going to be louder and move more air making the problem worse. If you want something to do take the speaker out and measure the inside dimensions and within a day you will have someone calculate the port size for you. If you wanted to you could fit ports that would tune for the kappalite not the Ashdown you have. The Ashdown would probably work OK with these ports so you could put it back in and try it if you wanted.

Should have said that is the only problem with Blue Aran. Good to deal with but a bit slow. You can track the progress of your order on the website though.

Just an update, I wanted to sell this monster for ages but decided to try and get used to its bad behaviour (neck dive and twisting away from you to save anyone from having to search the thread) Less than a week ago I was all ready to sell it out of frustration, the neck is a wonder to play and the sound is fabulous but the playing comfort is maddening. Anyway four days ago I shortened the strap, really silly short, I look like I should be playing in a sixties band. All the problems disappeared pretty much, though it feels really odd changing to the T-bird. Last night I gigged it for the first time, [b]I love it![/b] The sound is just wondrous and strapping it on feels like becoming Jim Carrey in The Mask. So if you have one of these use a wide strap and straplocks, and shorten the strap just like one of the guys said and it cures 90% of the neck dive and twist, then you can enjoy the good bits of this amazing but irritating bass. Thanks for your help everyone.

I think we are all pretty much in agreement. The Mag is the better cab to adapt as the size is a pretty good match but you ought to put in bigger ports. All the air shifted by those big speakers (and remember they move further than the old ones has to exit those tiny ports at resonance and the air will be doing a significant speed and will make chuffing noises. Aren't the ports on the back of the Mag? If so how worried are you about how they look? You could probably find a chippy to cut the holes for you for a few quid if you are nervous about it. Get hold of the porting first though, I use black soil pipe or drain pipe mostly. Still need the internal dimensions ideally.

Good call Steve. Balcro or i will calculate the ports for you, or someone else might. It would be helpful to know the size and shape of the ports in the Ashdown cab Using the smaller cab will give you a little less deep bass but a smoother response, to get an idea have a look at the responses that Eminence give here [url="http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Kappalite_3015_cab.pdf"]http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Kappalite_3015_cab.pdf[/url] the Warwick is nearer Emineces biggest box and the Ashdown is halfway between the large and medium box. Personally I'd adapt the Ashdown rather than the Warwick simply because it is the cheaper cab

I use a Hartke kickback 10. Discontinued but I picked mine up for £125. It's not much bigger than a practice amp but also does for practice with a drummer and the odd gig using a bit of DI. Most of my practice is with a Jam mate hipster headphone amp [url="http://www.boomerangsounds.co.uk/product.php/3196/jammate-hipster-ppgm"]http://www.boomerangsounds.co.uk/product.php/3196/jammate-hipster-ppgm[/url]

thought I'd posted earlier but it doesn't seem to be here. We're looking to upgrade, we have the Laney 12 and our keyboard player had a Laney 10. they are cheap and reliable but the vocal sound is pretty poor to be honest, hence looking to upgrade. I was looking at the Wharfedale EVP's in a shop in Bristol which are well spec'ed for the price but the sales guy said the Alto's sound better, I didn't have time to check this out but if I do I'll get back to you. Our singer uses a Yamaha Stagepas 300 for her vocal monitor. Sounds good and is very compact and comes with useful mixing facilities (4 mics + 2 line) for the smaller gig. The only problem is the output is limited at 112dB which is struggling if you are very loud . Let us know how you get on

[quote name='skidder652003' timestamp='1347780354' post='1804778'] Thanks guys, have emailed blue aran to change order to standard 3015 Bc comes up with the goods once again! Mr Starr see you on Lemonrock! [/quote] Hi, guess you won't want my old Black Widow then. If you can give us the internal dimensions of the cabs you have and the sizes of the ports then we will calculate the sizes of the new ports for you. The Mag looks to be about 100l and the Warwick 150ish so either will be possibilities. You should end up with a good sounding speaker. Phil.

[quote name='Mr. Foxen' timestamp='1347734083' post='1804497'] You'll likely need a crossover and a midrange for a not dull or weird sound from a 3015LF. The 3015 not LF works pretty well in a Mag 15 cab though. [/quote]Sorry but this is good advice, you'll have a much better sound from the non-LF. The LF is really meant as a PA driver to work with a horn. Change it if you can. At least it's a neo if you have to pay postage,

If you can get hold of the 'loudspeaker design cookbook' there's some interesting data as Vance Dickason actually tries out different stuffings and measures the results. The air pressure is essentially what excites the panels and this is largely unaffected by the stuffing. The idea of the knobbly foam is to prevent reflection of sound from the back panel straight back through the paper cone. absorption is meant to work in the same way as the fibreglass wedges in anechoic chambers. The trouble is to work the wedges need to be as deep as the frequencies that they are meant to absorb and they aren't big enough so they only work at relatively high frequencies, though they do this well enough. The trouble is that 'stuffing a cab' describes at least four different techniques of removing distortions and some have probably insufficient research carried out.

Resonance isn't a necessarily bad thing of course. If you are building a double bass then the resonances of the body are all a critical part of the sound and your design philosophy for an instrument amp could quite reasonably regard the cab as an extension of the instrument and a part of the 'sound'. Many older designs did this though newer ones tend to go for a flat response and use electronics to mimic the 'vintage' sounds as well as offering new timbres to play with. However if you don't deliberately want a resonant cab then you really should avoid the middle, Even a slight displacement (11th fret?) will have the same effect of raising the frequencies an octave but there will just be much less of them. The cabs we are talking about are lightweight rigid cabs here and are meant to be non resonant. Stuffing, in the sense of the polyester/fibreglass fluffy stuff doesn't impact on panel resonance at all, it is meant to affect only the transmission in the air in the cab. There are heavy bitumnent or mineral loaded rubber pads that are designed to damp panelk resonance but I don't think you mean these.

[quote name='Mr. Foxen' timestamp='1346952187' post='1795305'] So the idea point for a brace is the same sort of deal as the idea place for a piano hammer to strike the string, where it doesn't hit any harmonic? [/quote] That's exactly right, which is why the advice to put the brace straight across the middle (given by someone who should know better in another thread) wasn't very clever. You don't damp bass string by putting a finger above the 12 th fret after all.

[quote name='alexclaber' timestamp='1346950984' post='1795292'] I have a suspicion that a thin-wall but heavily braced panel can exhibit high rigidity at lower frequencies, thus giving good lows but the sections between the braces can have a degree of damped flexibility at higher frequencies which can absorb unwanted midrange, especially if those braces are positioned to give each part of each panel a different resonant frequency whose harmonics are an non-coincident as possible with each other panel section. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to scientifically test this but it makes sense from a mechanical engineering perspective and it certainly sounds good in practice! [/quote] I think I agree with this in part. moving resonances up moves them away from the low frequencies where the highest energy inputs are in the cab so the problem is reduced. Critical positioning of the braces to spread the panel resonances has to help too as you won't have a single resonance dominating as with an undamped panel. Having said that we are much more sensitive to sound in the midranges which adds another layer of complexity. The bit I am less happy with is the transmission of sound. My understanding is that the energy is absorbed by the panel and that some of it is converted into kinetic energy in the panel, some will be transmitted laterally within the panel and some vertical movement of the panel will occur which will drive the air outside the panel. This will be frequency dependent so the net effect is that the panel acts as effectively as a frequency dependent filter. The absorption of sound in the panel will depend upon its composition, some will be turned into heat. Ply is quite a lively material compared with MDF or chipboard and is even used in cheap guitars and cajon fronts for this reason. The laterally transmitted energy will either be reflected if it meets a hard junction or absorbed at a soft junction. I would guess that how panels are fixed to each other and how braces are attached is crucial. It's a pretty complex system. I would guess that nowhere near all these resonances would be heard in a real life situation though. A friend of mine has just been appointed to Land Rover to work on this in their cars, I'll have to bore her on this when she gets back to see what modelling they do.