Phil Starr

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.

The bad news is that MB aren't really home repairable and that in the UK at least after sales support is poor. The good news is that it sounds like at least something is working and that there is a possibility of a few checks before you have to seek drastic and expensive repairs. It's possible that with sound coming out when you turn off that there is a power supply issue or it could be a contact issue. Turning it on and off when everything lights up and the fan switches on is encouraging. The fx send and return are interesting. The return gives you access to the power amp bypassing the pre amp and controls, Try just plugging something into the return and see if that comes out of the speaker, it might be quite quiet because you will have less gain at that point but if it is undistorted the amp section is working. Plugging in a jump lead between send and return as above might help too. They are linked internally with a switch which sometimes corrodes causing problems. If that re-establishes the connection you know the problem, it can be worth spraying a little switch cleaner into the sockets and wiggling a plug in and out to clean up the sockets. If not you are probably going to be in the hands of a tech.

I use either with the bass matched to who I'm playing with. A passive J with my duo and an active P with the band. TBH I could probably swap them round and nobody would notice. I don't do a lot of tone shaping though and I have control of the desk so I adjust it there if I need to adapt to the venue. I use a SansAmp or my Zoom B1 for a little pre shaping to get 'my' tone. My plan is to get two or three pre shapes for the duo where there is less opportunity for changes in texture when there is just the two of us.

Damn you now I have another job to do. I go ampless to most gigs but have 5 amps which is a bit excessive, now I have to clear some of them out. FWIW Bugera Veyron (my go to) Warwick Gnome (backup and open-mic) Peavey Minimax (now never used, I really ought to sell it) Hartke 3500 (probably my best sounding amp but too heavy and long in the tooth, again I ought to sell but it's worth so little) MB Tube (currently dead) (I need to fix this or sell it on for someone else to tinker with)

I really didn't want to play this but then I actually listened to the bass and fell in love. So simple but made by the notes he left out. The under-rated Tommy Cogbill

It's always a tough one isn't it? We lost our singer and drummer during "you know what" We took a punt on a singer who had sung in choirs and acapella groups but never with a band and our drummer is an old pro who was better than the old drummer even at the audition. She's moved the band on a mile and so far so good with the singer. Both are great to work with too. Having to re-build is a pain though.

Mixing cabs is a bit of auditory cookery really. You can put unusual ingredients into your cake and it might taste delicious and it might not be very nice. the only way to find out is to mix it up and taste it. In all probability your first attempt is less likely to be successful than following a recipe but there is also the possibility of a happy accident. in any case my taste is different from yours. I've never liked advice that is categorical and its the never part of mixing cabs that is the issue with that sort of advice. In this case you've cooked up a couple of ingredients you had in and the result is tasty. Why wouldn't you try it out?

I'm in your hands but it might be interesting, We've done speakers for the last two bashes, though I suspect the amps will be less varied, we might be surprised though.

The crew got a bit iffy when I suggested taking a feed from the floor monitors, they were at the limits of their technical ability I suspect. They'd set up the subs under each of the flying arrays about 20m apart when they had plenty of space under the stage to acoustically couple them. They'd also set them to overwhelm the tops which weren't working hard at all and there was very little top end for cymbals. Sometimes you just have to smile, hope and get on with it. Nobody loves a smarty pants. Mind you having been very suspicious of the in-ears my lot wouldn't go back. I quite like the splitter idea though, we've got a couple of active DI's that would have done that. I see @Alfie Noakes was at the same gig the day before

Aaaarghhh. Another mini festival gig ruined by the hire company. Too much through the subs so overwhelming bass out front and impossibly poor on stage monitoring. We were promised an in ear mix only to be told they only had one lead available and that had been given to the drummer. Not prepared to give me the feed from the floor monitor. We have an electric kit so poor monitoring is a real problem.

Good luck

I feel your pain. Replacing your singer is the most disruptive thing that can happen to a band. Any decent guitarist, bassist or keys player is going to be able to bang out most or all of your set. The human voice is just not that adaptable and your singer is inevitably your front person. If the songs don’t suit you will have to drop and replace them. That’s just reality, they have to sell the song not just sing the notes. It’s hugely disruptive and not really the singers fault. I really think you’ve answered your own question 80% of your songs are ‘male’. Look for a singer male or female but if 80% of your songs were written for male voices you have to be realistic about what the most likely outcome is.

Spend wisely and spend only once. £800-900 is a good budget so you should be aiming for good kit. Of what is suggested RCF and Yamaha are good and pretty much bombproof. QSC too but I’d go for RCF for the best quality for you vocals. RCF have recently discontinued the 300 series which was their base level kit but you may just still find some discounted. The 700 series are really nice and 900 even better. The numbering is fairly simple the 712 is 700 series with a 1” tweeter and 12” bass speaker. So a 935 is a slightly better 15 with a 3” tweeter. You can just about afford an RCF 712 system new but I’d probably look for used. There are three pairs of 712’s on FB Marketplace today for£600 for example. I’d happily gig with 312’s as well which should be cheaper. If you do want to save money then the old passive speakers can be found really cheaply but you’d need to know enough to match the amp and it’s just a little more fuss to set up. A good option if you know enough and money is tight though.