Phil Starr

WinISD is the program most of us use. It's free. You have to input the parameters from the manufacturers data sheets and once these are saved you can ask it to design a cab and it will print out the bass response of it's design. You can then change the size and tuning of the cab and it will show you what the changes do on screen as you do them. It's quite useful to set up two projects with the same speaker at a time and it will show you two responses, you can then tweak one and see exactly how that compares with the suggested design. The cab only really affects the bass response directly so that is all it calculates. It also shows you things like power handling, maximum output and so on. The sky (or your growing knowledge of cab design) is the limit but it will design a simple box for you too. If you get stuck there are lots of BassChatters here to help. http://www.linearteam.org/

Note to self: I don't need more speakers!

RCF have always done this, fairly constant marginal improvements. The Firphase improvements in the crossovers did tidy up the midrange which was already good by industry standards. They introduced that piecemeal at first and then rebranded everything as IV series. At one point they were selling mk2,3 and 4 speakers all at the same time. The latest thing is XBoost which looks to be DSP operating on the bass frequencies, hard to tell from the blurb on that link but it would seem to be some bass boost combined with some clever compression to protect the speakers. They did this already on the Mk4's so my guess is some more tweaking rather than anything radical. Expect Mk5 for the 9 series soon. I guess they just keep the design team working constantly to keep them together and with driver production in-house prototyping must be streamlined. The marketing is clever too, there are RCF's at just about every price point and you can always pay a few pounds more for something genuinely just a little better. All the sizes in all the colours The good thing is that last time they did this there was a sell off of the old Mk2 and Mk3 kit and I got some ART310 Mk2's for a knock down price from Andertons. I think Thomann had the reductions as well. If anyone is thinking of buying new it might be worth keeping an eye open.

Funnily enough I'm looking to buy a new car and the Skoda Superb estate was on my list. How are you getting on with the 945's?

I've had these for almost two years now and I wanted to put something down to help others make choices when they come to buy their PA. My experience with them over 30+ gigs has been generally good but there have also been a few issues so that what I thought would be my forever speakers certainly haven't been perfect so for me this is a chance to re-evaluate. I'm not generally too prone to GAS, I love my basses but regard bass amps and speakers as just utilitarian tools of the job. I've reached a stage in life when I have all the things I properly need and all my band money goes into a pot to pay for my music. For years my PA was based upon the old Yamaha S112IV and a Behringer amp, then I upgraded to a well used second hand Wharfedale EVP system. The last band I joined had their own PA using QSC 12A2's until the singer left and took her PA speakers with her. That gave me time to save and plan for my 'dream' PA speakers. I decided that what I wanted was one pair of speakers that would do everything. Everything a very ordinary covers band would be called upon to do anyway. Loud enough to fill any indoor space we were ever likely to play, to make a decent fist of playing outside but portable enough that I could pack everything into a decent estate and compact/light enough to make setting up manageable. Also something that could cope with bass and drums without being concerned or needing subs. I'd previously had subs but they only came out once or twice a year so I was storing stuff I didn't really use. I felt the QSC's just fell short of the last bit and that I needed 15's to get drums and bass loud enough without having to compromise. I auditioned speakers and thought the bigger horn drivers just sounded better for vocals and plumped for RCF 735's as being the best I could afford when a pair of 745's came up used and I pulled the trigger. OK the good stuff. They've been utterly reliable and plenty loud enough even in outdoor events with 250+ people. We have E-drums and I go out now with no back line so all the bass and drums go through the PA. We've used them for all our pub gigs too so the Swiss Army knife theory worked out. The sound has been outstanding, we've had punters and promoters commenting positively more than ever before and you kind of grow in confidence when you hear just how good it can sound. Vocals are really well presented. The speakers have behaved faultlessly. They came with covers that don't need to be removed which speeds up set up and break down. The down side is that they are huge. They won't stand upright in most cars and are too tall to go through most car doors upright, laying them on their sides takes up a lot of space and packing the car can be a struggle. They don't feel heavier than the QSC 12's but something that big is still an awkward lift onto the stands. That's ok on one off gigs but it gets a bit old after a year or so. Being big makes a one handed carry difficult and they bang your legs a lot. You don't need that much power for most pub gigs and big and heavy means less stability on the stands. They are also quite imposing/space hungry in some of the smaller venues and frankly are overkill in most of the places we play. The bass is prodigious too and is generally rolled of heavily at 50Hz in most venues. We don't often need the extra that the 15" drivers offer and bass is sometimes overwhelming on stage. The other thing I didn't consider is comb filtering. When the bass is coming from two different speakers separated by a few metres you get significant cancellation and the bass sounds unnaturally loud or quiet as you move round the audience area. With subs you can push them together but you can't do that when your subs are also your PA speakers. It's not noticeable indoors as the wall reflections are significant and you don't really get bass dead spots but it's been really noticeable in some of our outdoor gigs. It's a really boring conclusion to say that a couple of speakers costing £1135ea sound really good but I have to report that they do, it's also true that for most bands they are going to be enough to handle all your needs in a single pair of speakers without subs. TBH I don't think we've ever needed to drive them hard. The thing is though that we are carrying way more than we need for most gigs, in fact nearly all our gigs. With my duo we take a couple of RCF310's and they also sound good with a great vocal sound. I carry one in each hand and they pop up on the poles almost by themselves. I've started to wonder if a couple of slightly better 10's plus a decent sub wouldn't match the 745's, be just as quick to set up and more convenient more of the time. So in conclusion I'd recommend them but say ask yourself if you really need something that big. Interested to see what other users think and to see what anyone else's experiences are with other PA speakers

I went down that route for a while, I started with the B205D and then upgraded to the TC VoiceSolo. I also tried the Mackie that the Behringer copied. On its own the Behringer sounds like a loud transistor radio, the Mackie sonded identical. The TC had a much better sound but the Behringer at a gig actually worked much better, it's the mids you need so that boxy/tinny sound worked way better than you expect. The Behringer is so top heavy on a stand and I ended up with it on a separate stand. The TC was better but still clumsy. Aterr this I bought my own floor monitor which was better but you need to figure out how you will mix, that three channel mixer and feed through on the B205 and others is really useful. In the end I went in-ears and couldn't believe how much effort money and time I'd wasted on what is a way inferior sound.

I think a few more details about how you want to use this would help, and maybe what you mean by 'cheap' which you mentioned later? How small is small? What's the budget? Where will this be used? Does it need to be battery powered? As the designer of the House Jam Cab I would say that it is the perfect cab for jamming with a few friends at home or as a practice cab at home. It was originally designed to match an acoustic guitar for volume with a 15W amp so a small battery amp is simple enough to organise. Standard amps in car stereos give 20W so 12V amps are really cheap. What I didn't design for was running 100W out of a micro amp (Gnome Elf) It handles that with ease and then becomes an incredibly compact portable amp for open mic nights and the like. However I use a couple of Studio monitors at home (I use RCF Lyra but the Yamahas above are just as capable) Obviously using the separate cab lets you swap amps around for home use or battery use if you need it

I didn't spot this earlier but we've been doing some measurements on frequency responses of amps. We specifically started with the micro amps; Gnome, BAM and Elf. It's on a thread here somewhere. None of them are flat with the controls at 12.00 though you can tweak them to be more or less flat. They all have differing scoops at 440Hz but all three have the mid control at 440Hz which makes eq simpler The Gnome and Elf all have decent HPF keepint the subsonic frequencies under control which will help protect your speakers, ideal for small amps which might be used with smaller drive units. The Elf has a classic smiley face/old school eq with everything at 12.00 the BAM is similar but slightly less pronounced and the Gnome is also scooped but with a more lively top end which gives it a distinct 'hi-fi' sound. In listening tests at the last SW Bass Bash the Elf got a lot of love with everything set to 12 but all three are tweakable to give a flat sound if that is what you want. In other tests we found the Bugera Veyron M to have the flattest response we measured rolling off the frequencies that a bass doesn't make only. It is a 700W amp though so you'd have to use the volume control judiciously. The Gnome in our tests is mine, bought as a back up when my MB Tube started having problems. It is now my go to amp much to my surprise, for what you want it is ideal but the Elf or BAM would probably do the same job for you. It's a silly price too. If you genuinely want a flat response amp with lots of tone options the Bugera is a great option and on the basis of the tests and subsequent listening tests I bought one which I use in preference to my Peavey and MB. I'd be careful about people's subjective opinions about how an amp sounds. You should see the range of terms we see in descriptions they give of the same amp or speaker we collect in out shoot outs, mine included Miost amps withan fx loop are flat beyond the fx input though. Oh DC resistance 5.9 ohm is typical for an 8ohm impedence speaker as you surmised

This is the sort of experience I've tried to give people at the South West Bass Bash for the last few years. Over the years we've tried all sorts of things to try and make it a fair test but in the end it's just a bit of fun, there are too many variables to control. So, yes please to the mic being well back from the cab in the 'audience' area, directly in line with the cabs and in as non-reverberent a space as you can manage. Outdoors would be good and as far away from any walls as possible. Then think about amplification. Most bass amps are highly coloured so we take the bass straight through a desk and a PA amp. The problem is that any frequency irregularities in the amp are going to flatter some speakers more than others. Any peak in the amp that lines up with a peak in the speaker is going to make that bit of the spectrum really jump or if the speaker is weak there the amp will fill in the gap. Come to that some speakers will work better with some basses. So many variables Finally you need to think about volume. Some cabs are going to be louder than others, fundamentally we prefer loud sounds and due to the way our hearing works louder boosts the bass and treble we hear more than the mid-range. At the bass bash I've tried to make sure the sound levels are the same from each speaker turning the amp up and down to match the sound levels, I've even tried using sound level meters to match volumes. Just swapping speakers with the amp settings unchanged will tell you mainly just how loud they are, if you wnat to know how good they sound then you need to set the amp each time for equal volumes. Or do both as two separate tests I think this is going to be a lot of fun for all of us, don't worry if it isn't the most scientific study ever done, there's far worse on You Tube and we all still lap it up. I'm sure you and we will all learn something. I can't wait to see what you do

I sympathise with you if you are running FOH sound, playing bass and trying to keep your band happy with their IEM mixes. Your own monitors always come last and I've usually just got mine in when someone has logged themselves out of the mixer, logged in to someone else's mix or has a flat battery in their headphone amp. I have to unplug to listen to their problems and then no time to do any last minute tweaks to my own mix. You have to sort isolation. If you get that right then in theory once you have a good mix it will be the same everywhere. It's external sound leaking in that messes up your mix. I use triple flange tips with my ZS10's pushed right into the ear canals. It is a bit intrusive at first but the isolation is great and you get used to them.

That's encouraging then, glad that much worked out for you

Oh I'm not recommending abstinence 😂 Maybe I should sell some stuff on though, make space for the new.

I hate to break it to you but what you were looking for doesn't exist and probably never will. If you look at the output plot of an amp it may have half a dozen irregularities, the frequency response of a speaker may have hundreds, some of these are very narrow peaks and others covering more than an octave, you'd need hundreds of frequencies adjusted and variable Q on most of them. Even if you had 12th octave tone controls your ears would still detect a difference 3 band eq isn't going to cut it. That's just eq too. Do you know of any hi-fi system that is indistinguishable from acoustic instruments? Our science just isn't up to realistic reproduction of anything that will fool our ears. Then there are room interactions to think about, your cherished sound will only work in one spot in one room, put it in a bigger, smaller, more reflective, higher ceilinged space or any of a hundred variables including how many people in the room and the magic will go. The sims are getting better all the time and AI may eventually be able to design something to fool us, we may eventually replace the loudspeaker with something better but for now you'll never be more than close to a sound in you head being reproduced accurately in every venue. Sorry just read these later comments, you've already got there The only thing I can help with is the woolly mush. If you are putting bass or drums through the PA then remember the bass from them is 360 degrees and the upper mids and treble maybe 60 or less and probably louder than your backline. You'll hear all the bass from the PA and almost none of the top end the woolly mush is the result of bass from the PA flooding the stage. You can only remove this with earplugs or in-ears but it's helpful to filter all the deep bass out of your stage amp and just pass the frequencies you need to restore a balanced tone.

I gig around 30 times a year and also run the PA. I carry back ups for pretty much everything especially when we are further from home. I carried a spare bass for pretty much the first 10 years but I've never had a failure of a bass or broken a string so in the end I've stopped bothering unless I take my active bass. I have spare batteries for that but never trust batteries completely so a passive bass keeps it company.

Let us know how you get on with that, if the return process works smoothly then you've lost very little and AliExpress remain a viable option in the UK

It's a difficult thing to manage. You don't talk about a band leader but if one of this couple are the band leader then you have a problem. I'm also suspecting that up in Barnstaple there aren't huge numbers of gigging bands so if it got heated you'd be pushed into the wilderness. On the surface it's simple, you clearly don't want to share bass playing duties and why should you? You've learned all the songs and taken part in all the rehearsals and everything else being in a band entails just so you can be the bass player. It's the only reason you are there and committed to the enterprise. I actually think it's a really rotten thing to have asked you to step aside even for one song. In terms of the band if she isn't a decent keys player she could put her efforts into improving her keys for a better return for the team. I don't know the people, it's maybe she is just keen and naive, not thinking about how it would affect anyone else and innocent of band dynamics. Maybe just saying you really care about this and how being the bands bassist is really important to you will give her pause for thought. We've a young singer who is really enthusiastic and fires off ideas all the time, it's hard to know when to kill off the slightly loony ideas and when to indulge the enthusiasm. I think killing this off early would be my approach. The situation can only get more tense if nobody is talking about it. How does your fourth band member feel? Maybe the drummer can intervene. Who should you talk to first? Just be polite and say politely that you just aren't going to share bass duties. If it's a happy band they will understand, if not then do you really want to be there and steadily undermined?

I don't use mine much nowadays as I've gone in-ears and no back line for most gigs. However it remains an amp which kills all the reservations/fears/superstitions about class D. It has a great sound out of the box and a really solid warm bass as full as you like and a match for any amp. The tone controls are really flexible and the fan noise is the only obvious minus point.

Not my idea but I have tried it 😀

It can, there's nothing complex about it in theory mic->headphone amp-> headphones. There's a simple shortcut though; use a small digital recorder and plug the headphones in directly so you re using the internal mic and headphone amp. I've a little Olympus voice recorder (WS650), about the size of an old iPod which you can fix to a lanyard around your neck or to a mic stand. Other brands are available of course. You'll be dependent upon the on stage sound but on the plus side it's completely free standing with no connection to anything so you can carry your monitoring with you anywhere and you'll pick up all the chatter on stage.

If you already have hearing loss then you need to be thinking very seriously about in-ears from the start. I'm no medical expert but just turning off your aids is not going to stop the same level of energy reaching your ears. Even at an open mic with an unknown PA its possible to use an ambient mic to run your in-ears and hear the same mess of sound as everyone else but at a lower and safer level. Most band nights will either provide some simple back line or someone will lend you something so you may be able to play if you choose the right mic night. No guarantees but a bit of research might pay dividends and give you more time to sort out a longer term solution. So the advice David gave you about the bottom octave is correct, You really don't need to worry about 30Hz and a B string. They sound rich and thick because of the harmonics, we can barely hear 30Hz and in any case because of the positioning of the pickups there is almost no 30Hz passed to the amp anyway. Most mid to high priced PA cabs will handle bass as well as a bass cab and many of us gig with PA cabs quite happily, I've actually done Jam nights with a single RCF310 as the drums at these things tend to be stripped down ancient kits without the volume of most bands 'real' kits. Are you proposing to use your MAG with a passive cab as backline or will you buy in an active bass cab to do the job? The theory of using flat response systems and using your Digbeth for tone shaping is a good one. I've gone down that route and it does simplify set up even if it isn't quite as simple as it sounds on paper. The Ashdown has a pre shaped tone and I found it dull sounding when I had one. Great amps but they are coloured with the Ashdown tone and that may be fighting the Digbeth. The RB3 is probably just as coloured but in different ways. Don't be scared to eq the Ashdown differently when using the Digbeth. The other thing to consider is speaker placing and room acoustics. You may be using the Laney in tilt back mode with the speaker pointed at your ears and the 4x10 pointing at the back of your legs where you lose all the upper mids and treble. Your home practice space might be a bit livelier than the rehearsal room or the 4x10 might be jammed into a corner and just moving it might improve things. If you want to try the in-ears/ambient mic route let me know and I'll give you a quick run down. Look after the hearing you have though

I think the choice of speaker is all about practicality. Your stage sound is more about the ability of the person mixing. Ultimately without someone out in the audience mixing dynamically then your sound will always be compromised. Let's be honest here Lewis Hamilton in a VW Polo would beat me round Silverstone in a Golf GTI by a very big margin. Buying a top of the range RCF (remembering that the ART series are their base range) won't guarantee better sound in practice. Sadly it won't improve my bass playing either The thing about designing active cabs with digital signal processing is that it's easy to get the design optimised. Class D gives the designer unlimited power at low cost and weight. It's cheaper to use a 1,000Wamp across the range and throttle it back in the smaller speakers than to make 6 different amps across the range. The crossover design, frequency correction and speaker protection are all done in the digital domain and cheaper components can be optimised to give a great sound. I've heard bands sounding great with Alto's, HH, Laney and even the much reviled Mackie Thumps. All plastic cabs are compromised by resonances, to a lesser extent all cabs even wooden ones are compromised by resonances and the best plastic cabs will probably beat the worst wooden ones. I've gradually upgraded my PA over the years, Passive Yamaha->Wharfedale Titans->Wharfedale EVP's->RCF ART310->RCF ART 745. Do the RCF 745's sound great? Absolutely, but so do the 310's with my duo but I used to get more compliments for the sound with the Yamaha's, everyone else has got better. Do we get a better audience reaction, only when we play better The biggest compliment I ever got for sound was at a free festival, I used to run FOH at the Windsor free festivals on stage 3. Steve Winwood turned up with Traffic and refused to go on the main stage because the sound was awful despite them hiring in proper touring kit. He rocked up at my stage 3 with a load of borrowed mismatched gear including a mix of WEM columns and some home built Altec A7's. All I really had was enthusiasm and a set of 24 year old ears, they sounded great because they were great musicians and i didn't get in their way. So get the best PA you can, but don't worry if it is modest. Match it to your needs not someone else's. Does it fit your car? can you lift it onto the poles? Are you playing Wembley of the Dog and Duck? Are you miking up drums and putting bass through without backline? Singing four part harmonies and needing the vocals to be crystal but not loud? So taking the example above the ART912's can be safely pushed a bit louder and will probably take a little more bass and deliver it a bit more cleanly. If you aren't needing that extra volume and you are only putting vocals through the PA then why pay extra? If you are using SM58's as vocal mics and the quality of your singers voice isn't the most important thing about your band anyway the 912 will do a good job, but it is limited by a 1" horn and you might want to look at the ART 732 if the vocal quality is more important to you. A 'good' speaker is just one that matches your needs. A great sound is more about playing well and the time and effort you put in to squeezing performance out of your rig.

I can testify that removing carpet is a truly horrible job. I rebuilt some Yamaha PA subs years back and managed to peel off the carpet and ultimately stick it back down but cleaning up the adhesive from the panels was awful. I don't think Tuff Cab will be flexible enough to form a continuous coating or that it will be 'Tuff' on a soft fabric undercoat.

I've never looked inside mine but I've assumed from the way they work that they are non latching/momentary switches. You hold them down to programme the settings so the switching must be done in the circuitry, the switch is just sending a signal to the processor. Mine all click when pressed so I'd guess that's a spring giving a good positive contact. I'd be looking to see how clean it is inside the box blowing out any dirt/dust/spiders that have accumulated, paying special attention to the switches of course. If that doesn't fix it use a bit of Servisol switch cleaner (not WD40 or anything oil based) might solve the problem. Only on the dodgy ones though. No point in disturbing anything working

Hi Smanth, with that cab I'd probably get up fairly close to one of the drivers only, rather than move out further and risk comb filtering between the different drivers. You'' also cut out other sounds like anything from the drums from feeding into the mic in a live situation. Apart from that I'd do it by ear, wearing headphones and listening to the changes as I moved the mic away from the centre of the cone towards the outside a small step at a time to find the sweet spot. Then measure the distance so you can find it again I'd only be mic'ing live if I particularly loved the sound of the cab though and even in the studio I'd be mixing it with a DI feed if I miked up at all. There's no right or wrong but its a lot easier to add to a clean feed DI'd from the bass than to remove distortion and eq after the feed.