Phil Starr

Hi Dave, I've nothing to offer you really as I've no direct experience with Turbosound gear other than having a listen to a couple of local bands who were using Turbosound PA speakers. Both bands knew what they were doing and the speakers sounded really very good. I've also seen/used them as floor monitors the few times we've played festivals but these were the 15's. As a company they are a really quite interesting proposition. Turbosound are part of Music Tribe one of the high end companies taken over by Behringer who have also absorbed Midas, TC Helicon, Tannoy, Klark Technic and so on. They seem to leave these companies largely untouched but spread their technologies throughout the Music Tribe group and production over to China. Turbosound was a long established UK company specialising in pro level touring gear. Looking at their catalogue they still do. There's not a lot of choice in floor monitors, you'd probably have to look at PA speakers that are shaped to work on their sides to get a choice. I've used the RCF 310's to good effect, the gain before feedback is excellent and the sound is good if you trim the bass back a little. The TFX 112's have the advantage of the bass already designed for floor mounting and they have a more directional horn so you aren't spreading more sound round the stage causing problems. these look to be well designed. The price is good too if they are the quality of the PA speakers I've heard I don't think there will be many people with 'real world experience' of these though. You might get someone who has a Turbosound PA come along. Maybe buy one and try it if it's distance purchasing you have a return period. Let us know how you get on. Are you going to make the bass bash this year? Phil

Really glad it is working out, love the Roland drums. Electric kits make so much difference to the vocal mics and really cleans the sound up.

You don't say what the blown speakers are or what went wrong, they may be fixable. Or it may have been an accident waiting to happen which is kind of the assumption you are making. Speakers blow for two main reasons: they overheat because they are getting too much power or they move beyond their safe limits (over excursion) due to too much high power low frequency content. They also just degrade with time though they last a long time but not forever. So subs will take the high energy low frequency content away from your tops and will protect them from over excursion but only if you use a crossover, this is usually built into the sub or subs but mixing active and passive speakers makes that a bit more 'interesting'. If you do this with a proper crossover then your tops will bave all that power taken away so will also be less likely to over heat as well as over-excursion and will also be less distorted at high levels. I'm not familiar with your desk, some do have crossovers built in. I wouldn't really recommend just adding extra PA speakers. Adding more speakers that aren't designed to work that way causes other problems with phase issues as the sound from paired speakers interact. the line array speakers you see at big festivals are designed to work together and are stupidly expensive for small bands on a budget. Increasingly fewer passive PA speakers are being made and there isn't a lot of choice, equally a lot of older passive stuff is for sale quite cheaply. Another solution might be to fix or replace your current system with similar but there are tricks you can use to improve the current systems handling of the drums. A bit of compression and some HPF on that channel might help or you could look into Aux fed subs. It might be worth getting this moved to the PA sub forum to get other opinions

If @EBS_freak is happy could we have this moved to the new PA section please and then Pinned

I'm completely in agreement with that, now it's here I think we say 'thanks very much' to all at BC for giving us a home and get on with proving that it is a worthwhile project. I'm very happy that this is a great place for PA to be discussed. This is a community of people who by and large come to know each other, we learn who we trust and like and the whole place is helpful supportive and collectively knowledgeable. i don't know how many of us are performing musicians but it's a fair proportion of us judging by the posts. Let's just get on with it for now, when we hit 50 pages and 10,000 views we can revisit getting a change of address

7th improvement tell your singers if they dont improve their mic technique they have to pay £111 for the optogates

I've never used them so probably not the person to ask, I've read the usual complaints about the recent ones not being as good as the Italian made ones but no direct experience. I think they used to use RCF drivers. I do know that back in the day a lot of bands managed to sound very good using them. Depends upon the price

Russ as usual has spoilt our fun by rationally listing all the options It's pretty clear from your own comments so far that the issues are essentially the human failings of your band mates. Unless things are going catastrophically wrong they aren't interested in what they see as unimportant. we all know that nagging doesn't work. It's frustrating but I've always found in my bands that once they've reached a certain level any interest in improving any aspect of their performances starts to wain. Any suggestion of improvement is likely to be taken as personal criticism rather than help. What you might be able to do with the X18 is to record all their individual channels and play them back to them individually so they can hear how much backline is bleeding through their vocal mics. Do it quietly one at a time starting with the most committed/engaged band member. I showed our singer the meter levels in their mic when she was standing at the desk with me and that helped the penny drop about what I meant by bleed, I'll let her tackle the guitarist for me. If they hear the problem and they are being lost in someone else's sound they are going to be motivated to find a solution. If they also notice they can't be heard at times they might want to fix at least that part of their mic technique. If you can say I was trying to mix the live performance for a recording and noticed this it might not be seen as looking for problems. The problem when a band member mixes is that they will only see you as a band member and an equal and resist accepting any technical expertise you might have. Equally if you are seen to be helping one band member in particular to sound better then a combination of curiosity and jealousy will make them want the same. As an aside I once had a singer whose response to any acoustic feedback was to move the mic further away from her mouth and then ask me to turn the gain up so she could be heard. Some people you can't help Anyway good luck with the wetware

Please don't take this as my telling you what to do but I feel sorry for anyone trying to choose PA speakers on the basis of specifications alone. The claims made by Alto are off the scale of credibility, it isn't just them either Yamaha are similarly over claiming and so are just about everyone else in an arms race where telling the truth will lose you sales. this is what they claim Now power handling is limited initially by the ability to dissipate power and for the bass unit also by excursion. Ultimately they are limited by the heat radiation of the voice coil which in turn is limited by diameter. The 35mm diameter of the HF driver would indicate roughly 30W continuous power handling. So 450W so they have an amp which will overdrive it 15x and burn it out in seconds if all the power ever reached the driver. The LF driver has a 63mm coil which will dissipate 3-400W. The sort of rating that Eminence/Fane/Celestion/RCF for example show for their 63mm coil drivers. In practice almost none of these can handle those peaks over the whole frequency range because of excursion limits. Whatever these speakers claim they are actually 3-400W cabinets. The secret is of course that they are DSP speakers (Digital signal processing) where whatever the amp might do the digital processing stops damaging power levels ever reaching the speakers. The probability is that the 12" drivers produce about 94db/W in the flat part of the lower frequency response. They may be louder in the distortion peaks under cone break up conditions. If they did handle 1600W that would still only get them to126db but the reality is that they will only produce an undistorted output of 120db, a long way from the 132db they claim. This is all just as well, you couldn't draw 5kw for a pair from a 13amp socket anyway and would seriously challenge a 30A ring main with anything else plugged in. 132db would very quickly send your audience off to the hospital with permanently damaged hearing. The reality is that the majority of 12" PA speakers are 3-400w units whatever they claim and that you can't trust any of the figures manufacturers give out. It does save them money in fitting the same amplifiers to a wide range of products and throttle them back to suit the drivers and it doesn't hurt to use a more powerful amp than the speaker can handle to get undistorted sound on some of the peaks but these claims are absurd and misleading. Please don't try and choose a PA based upon over-optimistic specs. Lot's of people love their Alto's and they do represent good value for money but try and get to listen to them and compare them with other systems. The good news is that it is getting increasingly hard to buy an actually bad PA speaker and good ones like the better Yamaha's and RCF's are brilliant for the average band. if you are going for the Alto's I'm guessing you are looking at new gear, that's fine but there is a reason why people are recommending other brands and that is direct experience. Going used brings these speakers well within your budget and easy to get your money out if you don't like them. Even if Yamaha are just as guilty as Alto in over-claiming.

You might be better off asking on the IEM Bible thread where most people struggling with this hang out. I doubt anyone would have tried both though they aren't going to be terribly different. The other thing to be aware of is that a lot of your experience of in-ears is about fit. If they fit your ear shape they sound better and because we are all different shapes we might have preferences based as much upon that as the nature of the in-errs themselves.

I feel so sorry about all this. I do love everything about BassChat. The sense of community, the general good manners and positive contributions everyone has made over the years. I'm trying very hard not to have a knee jerk reaction to this but I am not happy to be part of this world where everything I do is tracked and ultimately to have no control over where data about me ends up. I have read through each and every post on this thread and it seems quite clear to me that Ezoic is not a morally responsible partner. The idea that because we have left the EU this is legal and somehow therefore acceptable is not one I subscribe to. To date Bass Chat has held higher standards than the general population not lower ones. I'm not prepared either to spend my days trying to outwit tech companies by installing extra software or ticking and unticking boxes or clearing cookies, the whole reason I am here rather than on social media is because this is a community, a safe space, somewhere I can trust. I don't know how deep the financial need is, it would help if this were shared with us. My greatest hope is that it is accepted that this is not the way to go, that Ezoic is not a suitable partner and that it's practices have no place in this sort of forum. I hope that the community spirit of BassChat will be able to continue. That this partnership with Ezoic will be ended and other solutions to a problem that has not fully been explained can be found. I hope that those who run BassChat will think again and recognise that this is just a mistake. It would be a shame to see Bass Chat end this way.

Actually my Gnome didn't measure flat at all with everything at 12.00 but your 280W big brother may well be eq'd differently. Mine rolled off quite early, had a bit of an upper bass boost then a huge upper mid/treble boost. That does give it a clean, hi fi sound with the right speakers but it is ultimately not a very accurate sound. I only mention it because it is objective evidence of how manufacturers do flavour their amps, they aren't just wires that have gain as the old Cyrus amp was meant to be but full flavoured additions to your bass sound. The Bugera turned out to be one of the most neutral amps we tried at 12.00. As to the point about dialing bass out I find you need to do that as a matter of course to get a good live sound and to boost the mids. That's even worse with PA speakers that are meant to be flat response when flown and are way too bassy on the floor. The LFSys Monza and Monaco's are designed to take that into account and have an extended but tailored low end.

Lot's of us are doing this though it's a only minority, but one that is increasing. I've played through PA amps into PA speakers, bass amps into PA speakers, PA amps into bass speakers and recently regularly straight into active PA cabs. My regular set up is currently Sansamp into active PA monitors or into a Bugera set flat and on to an LFSys Silverstone which is a flat response bass speaker. That's when I don't just use in-ears. The best sound I get is at home putting the bass straight into studio monitors sometimes using the Sansamp or often just into the mixer. You can get pretty close to this on stage but room acoustics can make that difficult at times. Going this way is great if you like the sound of your bass 'au naturel' it also makes eq simpler. If your bass amp has a 'shape' then you can only really control it if your parametric tone controls can be set to the same frequency and Q and you have an ear educated enough to make that happen. Otherwise your tone controls work like a committee, eventually compromising because they can't actually reach agreement

Not dense at all that's exactly what you get, except that when you buy a bass amp you are stuck with someone else's choices. By and large if you feed into the effects return in a bass amp then you'll get the same sound going through to the speaker. Not all amps share the same architecture though so don't hold me to this. The tone shaping in a bass amp is in the pre-amp section and so you are stuck with any flavour which may be designed in. There's often different amounts of HPF, smiley faced pre shaping and not all tome controls are flat at 12.00 o/c. I'm guessing the OP wants to control his own pre shaping. Almost exactly a year ago we had hold of the three micro amps Gnome/Elf/ BAM. They all come in almost the same dimensions with the same controls/facilities and so on. We measured the frequency responses and they are all different. With controls flat the Elf is classic smiley face, the Gnome has a raised top end and the BAM in between. All of them had a reduced output at 400Hz and all the mid controls were centred on 400Hz. Interestingly it was almost/totally impossible to make each of them flat or to make them sound completely identical despite the mid control conveniently lining up with the mid suckout and having the measured frequency response in front of us. The same will be true of pretty much any bass amp. As an analogy I'd say its a bit like using pickled onions in a recipe when you've run out of fresh ones, you'll never quite get rid of the taste of vinegar

Are you mad? Pictures of cabs are never boring I'm toying with the idea of a 2x8 design, there's a few drive units that just call out to be made into cabs and the 6" and 8" Fanes both appealed. I've still got my Mk1 and the bass is as crazy as you say. I've crossed it over to the 6 at 200Hz and it makes a lovely smooth balanced combination but soooo deep sounding. Next time you get an open air gig try the SM212 cab with your BC112T on top.

Jon your builds have inspired and entertained us. I think the whole point is that a decent home build can exceed pretty much anything you can buy. Those cabs of yours have been put into shootouts against top speakers from the likes of Barefaced, Vanderkley and the likes and they come out on top. The only designs that have come close in listening tests IMO are the 15" Greenboy designs, another home build. I guess the build costs for your cabs came out at around £400? For that you get the equivalent of speakers selling at around £1,000 ea. I'm sure you could find a pic or two of them set up at home so people can get an idea of what is possible. For those of you at home a group of us here have designed a series of cabs, most of them simple builds with all the details available to copy. It has been an interactive process with a lot of Bass Chatters asking questions, sharing their builds and reviewing the cabs after they've been built and gigged. It's been a real co-operative effort. To date we have the following designs in order of size/expense BC 112T (Mk 3) a lightweight 300W 12 with horn FRFR cab as good as anything available commercially BC 112 (Mk1) Conventional 112 with a powerful bass response and high excursion driver, compact and portable. (There was a Mk 2 but the drivers were discontinued) Very simple build BC 112 'Easybuild' a more compact 12 Deliberately designed with reduced bass response to cope with the poor acoustics of the average English pub. There's a video somewhere of me building one in 37 mins, hence 'Easybuild' all of the above will comfortably keep up with a drumkit BC110T the 'lockdown cab' this was built to re-use the 30l cab from the easybuild using a 10" driver and a quality horn. It has a simple crossover that can be built with 3 components and no soldering. 10-11 kg so lightweight and portable. Lovely clear sound and no horn tizz from this carefully integrated design, it's my go to cab for most things. BC House Jam Micro Cab a tiny cab with a 6" driver that is startlingly loud, it was designed for home use where you want a great sound but without annoying the neighbours. I'm currently working on an 8" design which has a remarkably full and extended response without a tweeter and because of it's lack of nasties also works well with a double bass.

It's pretty much impossible to be certain but I'd certainly be having a quick look at the capacitors in the power supply before even tuning the amp on if I opened her up. Those two big caps are smoothing capacitors. Electrolytic capacitors often do degrade over time. It's not really a diy job for a beginner. You at least need to be able to use a multimeter and a soldering iron to locate and replace components and there are serious risks to you working on a power supply inside an amp like this. DC shocks from the power supply are much more formidable than ac shocks from the mains and neither are to be recommended. Big capacitors can store significant charge for hours even after the amp is turned off so you are at significant risk of a shock that might at the extreme end result in death. I'm reluctant to say anything is beyond a skilled DIY'er but poking around inside a bass amp is not the ideal place to start the learning process. Having said that these amps are easy to work on and shouldn't be fearsomely expensive to repair. HNAudio and rocknrollworkshop are in Newtownards and Belfast respectively a quick google search reveals. Get a quote/estimate and make a decision.

Thanks. Saved me looking it up

How it works is that many bass cabs are definitely not designed to be flat response but are instead deliberately coloured. Any testing is primarily done by listening tests and it's possible to 'design' a successful guitar cab by luck, a bit of experience and lots of experimentation. They may have used dozens of drivers and a hundred combinations of speakers to hone their cab. Before the early 70's when the mathematical models of speakers were developed this was how cabs were all designed. More cookery than science really. But, Stradivarius used much the same mixture of skill and happy accident to develop instruments that remain unsurpassed to today. It is ultimately music and sound

Always check their FB profile, our Anwar has no pictures or posts or anything, I suspect he will want a payment up front to hold the bass for you and you won't see the bass if you put a deposit down. Ask for his address if you haven't done so already and check if he is on the electoral register, looks like a scam Insist on looking at the instrument before you part with a penny.

That's quite a lot of experience and your experience would seem to say that single cabs or pairs of identical cabs have generally worked out better, that makes sense as somebody has at least optimised them. It doesn't rule out the happy accident but gives some idea of what the odds might be.

Ha ha Thanks for being kind. I did actually start with a paragraph on phase issues, then it grew to two paragraphs including variable path lengths, then I thought about doing something on room acoustics and decided I'd gone critical mass and nobody would want to read it. I decided non-technical was probably better.

I think that is completely fair. We'd be doing nobody any favours advising them to go out and buy a cab without direct experience. The questions we get are usually of the nature of 'I've been offered (unknown cab) and I want a bit more heft (or other vague term) from my 2x10 which I love. The answer is pretty obviously in that case to buy a second identical cab. If the question is "Can I buy another cab to make up for the shortcomings of my current cab" then the answer is go and listen until you find a cab you do like and part exchange for the one you don't. Nobody should be advising people to spend money which won't do what they want. So we advise them not to waste their money on an untried 'solution' that almost certainly won't work. I think people have extrapolated from that to say mixing cabs is somehow forbidden or technically illiterate. It isn't, but it is not a good way to spend your money.

We haven't had one of those rolling debates for a while and i thought I'd kick one off. It was stimulated by a post by @Tradfusion on one of the LfSys Monza threads so anyone not interested in that cab might not have seen it. This is his post edited down: "I bought an LFSys Monza about a month ago based on the positive reviews here on BC and I haven't been disappointed! Its a really nicely designed cab, I already own 2 Barefaced cabs, the Supercompact and a One10 and I love both cabs but sometimes missed the high end sparkle of a tweeter/horn. Naturally enough my next experiment was to pair the Monza with the BF cabs so on a dep gig with a fairly loud classic rock band I brought along my One10 and sat it on top of the Monza and suddenly the magic started to happen, that cab combination is nothing short of amazing, the warmer and naturally bassier One10 combined with the super clean and more hifi Monza seems to hit a sweet spot that to my ears gives me exactly the tones I am looking for from my basses. A mid punch and tight low end as well as a beautiful smooth top end sparkle.I have used this cab combination now on several gigs and have had many compliments on my tone so obviously something is right about it... I haven't gigged the Monza/Supercompact as a pairing yet but I have linked them at home and they sound fantastic together too so that will be my next experiment..." So that got me thinking, what happens when we mix cabs and why is so much of the advice not to do it when clearly it can work so well empirically. Empiricism is the basis of scientific advance so 'suck it and see' is the rational way to go and if theory says 'don't mix cabs' and it works then the theory has to be wrong, doesn't it? Well not quite of course, science experiments work by isolating single variables and working on them one at a time. It gradually models each aspect of interest starting with a single idea and keeps testing ideas until it has a rounded picture of what is going on. With speakers it's relatively simple system but even so there are dozens of variables that we can quantify and they all interact so even if we talk about a single speaker in a fixed place in a single room we'd struggle to model the sound completely at all the frequencies. So what does happen when you mix two speakers, and how does that work with what is possibly the simplest example above, mixing two different tens? Well first and most obvious is with two speakers moving air it's going to get louder, quite a lot louder because you are also drawing more power from the amp, if you stick well within the amp's limits then you'll double the power. We like louder sounds so combining cabs immediately sounds better. Adding extra speakers always subjectively sounds better and adding extra cabs and stacking them vertically is probably the most practical way of getting extra sound. The next thing though is that not all cabs will match each other. Electricity takes the easiest route so adding a 16ohm cab and a 4ohm cab will see almost all your amps power going through the four ohm cab. All cabs aren't equally loud either; adding a less efficient 1x15 to an 8x10 isn't going to work well with the poor 15 getting lost behind it's noisy neighbour. Getting a reasonable efficiency match isn't easy either as few cabs come with an accurate db/W rating. Most of the thoughts of cab mixing are confused too, adding a 15 to a 4x10 for more bass. Not all 15's are bass dominant and some 4x10's are very bass heavy. Again not made easy because few bass cabs come with a frequency response chart. You are left to kind of guess (maybe guesstimate) as to how any combination will sound. So there is one other problem of combining cabs. Speakers aren't ever accurate reproducers of sound, their response is never ruler flat and often less so once they are mounted in a cab. As well as the broad frequency response there are dozens of tiny lumps and bumps in their responses, especially in the higher frequencies where the cone starts to flex and for most speakers in the midrange of the bass. these are what give each speaker its characteristic 'sound' or timbre. If there is a bump it will make that note pop out when you play and a dip will pull that note back a little. If the bumps for two speakers exactly align then you'll get extra pop but that almost never happens. Most irregularities won't line up and a few will line up with a dip in a differnt speaker. My experience with mixing speakers is that you almost always get a 'smoother' sound as the timbre of both speakers merge. You'll probably lose some of the character of both speakers when you mix different ones, you may get a new character but frankly it's hard to predict and the only test is to try it. I had that demonstrated many years ago when a friend with more time than money built a cab with 50 mixed speakers salvaged from old TV's, it sounded remarkably good given the rubbish it was built around but vocals were wonderfully smooth. My take on this it that there is nothing at all wrong with mixing cabs so long as you pay attention to having a fairly decent match. You'll need to know something about impedance matching and power distribution but combining two 8ohm cabs is rarely going to cause problems. Mixing cabs of different sizes isn't necessarily going to give you 'extra bass' or 'more top' without a lot more knowledge of the speakers than their diameter Mixing cabs will probably lose some or all of their character and serve up something different and this is almost unpredictable. If you want more of a sound you love the advice is always to just add more of the same, don't mix, and stack vertically, never next to each other. My advice is never buy a cab just to improve your sound, not because it is 'wrong' to mix but because it is an expensive way of not getting the sound you want. Instead find a cab that does do what you want and sell the cab that doesn't do it for you, buy two if you still need that louder. That approach is going to work out a lot cheaper in the long run. If you have multiple cabs and they are all 8ohms then mix them all you want and see if it works for you. It'll cost you nothing other than time with your bass which is always time well spent. Experimenting is good not bad. Finally stop obsessing about speaker diameters and trust your ears. So come on what are your experiences of mixing cabs.