Phil Starr

Yeah, Yamahas have been busy with the new budget range which kind of relate to the Club series in the way the Mackie Thump does to the SRM450's, a cheaper, less able alternative that trades on the name but sounds OK so long as you don't push them. The DSR's look good on paper but I haven't heard them yet. 12" drivers are really not good for vocals as the polar radiation pattern is usually poor, I'm not surprised you liked the 10's if vocals are important. I really liked the old Mackies with the midrange driver but haven't seen any around for a while. I'm going over to my own designs now, tweaking the Yammy 112's was just an idea I thought I'd try, they do sound better though and feedback rejection is a lot better so if anyone out there is using them .....

I absolutely agree about the PV PA speakers, their horn driver is just not up to the job and I think they use the same driver in all their cabs. There are rumours that the driver has been changed in the more recent cabs, if it is true then it is about time. It's either bonkers or laziness to put such a poor horn in with a great driver like the Black Widow. The Yammy is a strange one, I quite like them, better sounding on vox than some of the JBL's and EV's. The horn driver is a little gem (marked as yamaha but I think it is the Eminence PSD 2002) let down by the bass driver. The upper frequencies are rather nice sounding and the bass at low levels is good but the mids are fairly dreadful. If you look at the plot of the Delta 12A [url="http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Delta_12A.pdf"]http://www.eminence....f/Delta_12A.pdf[/url] you can see why, there's a huge peak of 9dB above 1.5kHz and through the crossover region. Why you would choose this driver when you have the buying power of Yamaha I don't know, excursion is poor too, though not a problem if you keep the bass away or use subs. The crossover is nicely made but they haven't really dealt with that mid hump. Reversing the tweeter is normal practice with 2nd order crossovers. (theirs is 2nd order for bass and 3rd to the horn) it took me 10 mins to try, I wish I'd thought of this a couple of years ago. Spot on about the PA too, it is such an afterthought for too many pub bands.

If you have these PA speakers then you'll know about the bright sound they produce. They really punch vocals through the mix but have a tendency to shouty harshness especially with female vocals and can also cause feedback problems. I rather like them for PA as I like vocals well forward but I tired of the harshness,even though you can eq most of it out. Here's a zero cost fix, reverse the connectors to the tweeter/horn. This reverses the phase of the horn so at the crossover frequency there will be a small dip in the frequency response. The shoutiness (and feedback) is caused by a mid-range peak made worse by the very ordinary Eminence Delta driver they use (I think they have moved away from this in recent models but you'd need to check) which has a sharp midrange peak far too close to the crossover frequency. You'll hear the phase reversal as a veiling in the middle range of female voices and the peak is still there but less noticeable. Overall the sound is a lot more natural and a bit less wearing for the listener. If you prefer the factory sound you can just put the wires back where they were.

sorry i didn't see this earlier. The best joint for a DIY cab is the reinforced butt joint, where you run a 1" sq batten along all the joints as recommended by Fane, Eminence etc. you can screw through the battens which holds everything together whilst the glue dries. It doubles the glue area, lends some mechanical strength through the screws and adds a little bracing to the panels. Plain butt joints lack glue area and I find are prone to failure, finger and dovetail joints are more suitable for a production line and need high skill levels, Rabbet joints make clamping easier but add little strength. This is the main supplier of cabinet corners in the UK [url="http://www.adamhall.com/en/Cabinet_Corners.html"]http://www.adamhall.com/en/Cabinet_Corners.html[/url] click on the pic's for dimensions.

[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.