Phil Starr

Hi Russ. @EBS_freak So the $64,000 question is whether there is a difference in practice between the pre's in the sorts of mixers that bands are using live and the ones in the 2in 2out interfaces that most of us start off with? I've been using a very basic Alesis mixer as an interface at home, just for practice, and swapping an interface in for that gives a whopping improvement in sound plus a noticeable drop in latency when recording, I've used the Alesis for rehearsals where we've also used a Yamaha MG series mixer and the Yamaha pre's are just so much better. Swapping my bigger Yamaha MG for my RCF M18 digital mixer has given another very noticeable improvement. I ought to compare the M18 with an interface for myself but the M18 is always packed up for gigs. Subjectively I suspect the M18 and the interface would be comparable in sound quality. There are very definitely big differences in the quality of mic pre's that are clearly audible even to my very worn hearing. We probably don't pay enough attention to that when choosing mixers. So the question, are the pre's in digital mixers like the Behringer and Soundcraft in the same league as the sort of Focusrite Scarlett type interface that most of us use at home?

We've toyed with the idea of a BC 1x15 cab and I have one here using an Eminence Deltalite, not quite the spec you are looking for though. I'm afraid Covid rather interrupted our plans as all our designs are tested playing live as well as being measured in the 'shed'. Limited playing opportunities and other more personal issues have meant not getting out most weeks. There are a few technical problems with your scheme. Availability of a suitable driver being the biggest issue. If you want a single 15 for a bass cab it has to have reasonable output up to roughly 4000Hz. For a 15" driver that means it is operating under cone break up for a lot of it's range and the cone breakup has to be well controlled. Because the high end is bound to be compromised most 15's have a bit of a peak in the kHz range which kind of compensates for the early roll off at the top end. Almost all the commercially available 15's are designed to be used in multi-way systems and to extend the bass downwards rather than the treble upwards so they have heavy cones to lower fs and make them pistonic up to the crossover point. This lowers their efficiency. If you want 600W handling then you really need a 4" voice coil so you are now in the realm of pro-audio bass drivers. The other limiting factor is excursion, a speaker might be able to handle 600W of electrical heating but if it reaches it's excursion limits at 300W then there is nothing to be gained by using a bigger amp and more expensive, heavier driver to achieve the same output levels. Similarly if you go for 4 ohms to get more power out of the amp the same physical limits on excursion mean that you gain nothing in sound output. There aren't many if any drivers that meet all your design parameters. Few meet the 100db/W even on the manufacturers spec, most are dedicated bass drivers so won't have enough high end to be usable as a single bass cab. I'd probably opt for the Eminence Kappalite 15HO as the best all rounder and now priced fairly competitively in the UK. That's not news, Barefaced used them in their first cabs and BFM recommends them as do many others. It's 450W and sounds good with bass but excursion is only 5mm. You'll achieve sound levels peaks of 125db+ though which is plenty enough to destroy your hearing. The other possible candidate is the Faital HF520 a bit more expensive and heavier but with an acceptable looking top end, that is 600W but lower quoted efficiency than the Eminence. It does have better excursion but I haven't modelled the two against each other so I can't really say if you would gain much at this point. A Kappalite in a box is a good solution and would come in at around £300 as a self build. It would need a port

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This is the best place I've found so far Grillcloth - KLDGuitar tube guitar amp amp kits grill cloth and vinyl tolex http://www.kldguitar.com/Home/SearchBranch?keyword=Grillcloth I did track down the factory that makes them too but can't find the link. You can get most of these on Ebay or there are shops that stock some of the grille fabric. A lot of the stuff on Ebay /Amazon is for domestic/hi fi speakers and isn't tough enough. although the shop is in China I've had no problems with them

It is, I bought my first two basses there and a few bits and pieces over the years and it was always a bolt hole for an hour .when a day out ended in clothes shopping.

I'm not sure whether we will see it again, the only place I ever saw P-Audio was Blue Aran so if they aren't importing them this could be a permanent issue. The B&C is a reasonable substitute. It's a problem with these designs that they have a shelf life. Even Celestion bring out new models. Eminence seem to have the most stable range but until recently US speakers were more expensive than the European produced ones and Far East production like P-audio is frequently changing. That's one reason why I've stopped specifying the pre made tuning ports. Building materials have to fit standard fittings so are reliably sized and black waste water pipes are easy to find. If I ever get time I want to revisit these designs

What amp were you using? We did a lot of testing with recorded music and i didn't notice a veiled sound particularly. I have had some issues though with phones running into a mono input. I've tried these at home with my hi-fi, they don't sound as good as my hi-fi speakers but of course they aren't designed for that but the Silverstones give my RCF PA speakers a run for their money. That horn (the Celestion No Bell) is the best horn we have found for this size of driver to date, it is more expensive than the recommended one and slightly heavier, the other horn to look at is the B&C ME10 if you want something as cheap as the P-Audio.

I wouldn't have thought that you'd be hearing more treble after breaking in the speakers. The BC 112 mk 3 is essentially a proper FRFR bass speaker. The bass driver and wooden cab will handle bass better than almost any PA speaker and the frequency response has no nasty peaks or troughs. That makes it very different in it's sound from most bass speakers which will have a peak in the upper mids which is in the top end of a bass. You would need to re-eq for this speaker in all probability. I suspected the 110T would be good for DB, the extra volume and extra low frequencies are going to lead you potential feedback resonance problems but the gentle early roll off of the 110 would help with that. Try rolling back the bass on your amp with the Mk3 and see how that sounds. We've all got very used to the coloured sound of our normal bass speakers and when you first listen to the clean sound of your bass through a flat response speaker it is somewhat underwhelming at first. You will really miss the artificial colour of a traditional bass speaker. Then when you hear the extra details you'll start thinking 'OK yeah I get that' but you will still miss what you have lost. For me it was only when i realised i was in charge and started resetting the tone controls that I gained confidence and started enjoying the flexibility. I'll be interested what you think in a months time. you probably need to gig and rehearse with it a little On the other hand the 110T is a little gem, I've not fallen out of love with mine and it is such a practical solution for my needs so long s ultimate volume is not the issue. I still use it a lot.

Noooo

Exeter has a fairly lively covers band circuit and there are bands that gigged 100+ a year before covid. Although I live 25 miles from Exeter I've played in Exeter bands and the gigs are better than those where I live . There are a fair amount of gigs going on in Exmouth too. Further down in Torbay there is a lot more going on. I know nothing of the scene for original music, my idea of a good night out is to be playing myself I'm afraid. There's also a good number of open mics and a bit of a folk scene. Exeter has good music shops with Mansons the stand out. There are a few originals bands that have done well on the covers circuit but they have to play a recognisable genre. Average fee for a band is around £300 so you won't get rich There are differences down in the West Country. Population density is lower so pubs tend not to be so rammed and the money isn't as good or the gigs quite so closely packed. Distances to gigs are further and it isn't unusual to travel 25 miles to a gig, the upside is that the roads are emptier so travel time stays similar. The population is older too, lots of people turned 40 move down here for a better all round life Audiences are largely going to be older too, hence all the covers bands. Lemonrock works quite well down here so tracking bands is fairly simple. I've played with a lot of people who have moved here, genuinely good musicians who were pro before moving down. There's adjustments to be made in lowering expectations, fewer big gigs not enough work to go pro without doing a bit of teaching and very few big pay days. You often don't get four pro standard musicians in a band and big egos don't find it easy. I enjoy the music scene down here. I've met a lot of positive supportive people and most of my friends I've met through music. I've never been between bands for long and tend to play roughly every other week. I'm not going to get rich but it pays for bass strings and the odd meal out. Let's face it you are moving down for a better lifestyle, cheaper housing, beautiful countryside and so on. it's not a musical desert but you might need to play Sweet Caroline more than you would wish

That's actually quite a good set up if the stage monitors are up to the job, if they are at the budget end the sound engineer is often reluctant to put enough bass through for fear of damaging their speakers. I pretty much always take my own back line to a gig where I have no control over the PA. If the engineer gives me enough then I turn it right down but if I and the drummer can't hear what I'm playing I'm not left stranded. I guess that's what you want to achieve. A single 12 or a 2x10 is about as small as you can go for this and your budget looks good, very good if you go used. The trick is that you want to match the gig volume of the drummer. One of the critical things in good stage monitoring is the directional response of the speakers. Speakers without a horn are like sonic flashlights sending out a beam of sound in the mid and upper ranges. They need to point to your ears if possible. A horn gives the designer much better control of direction but ideally the horn needs to have a low crossover point. Many older and cheaper designs have poor crossovers and horns which add a lot of tizz and hiss without adding much to what you need to hear. Better modern designs really help but these are the FRFR designs. The other way is to get the speaker pointing at your ears so very tall speakers or stacks are great in this respect as are kickback designs otherwise get an angled speaker stand. If the PA is really large and loud then there is often a problem with a muddy sound. Bass is omnidirectional so you'll get all of the bass from the PA and none of the top end. You can counter this by rolling off the bass frequencies in your monitors and boosting the mids to compensate.

I don't use vinyl very often but I've been building cabs for over 50 years so I've tried all sorts of glue. I started with 'hide' glue: animal protein bought in pearls and melted in a heated pot, PVA and aliphatic glues and latex based glues. in the end I've settled on impact adhesives as the best solution, though PVA is fine for the body or the cab I always use impact adhesive for the edges as maintaining pressure on the edges which are always trying to unfold is a complete pain. If you do use Pva then one tip is to use a hair dryer on the vinyl as it goes floppy when warm. Too hot and it melts though, nobody at all will wonder how I found that out Not long now, well done so far.

Just checking that I understand this, at the moment are you just going straight to PA with no on-stage monitoring and no back line bass amp? You currently have no speaker at all to go with your amp? If that is the case then no wonder you can't hear yourself. The most important thing to hear on stage are the mids and you need to be in line with the speakers to hear your bass's mid-range.

Mostly I'm playing with just a SansAmp but I do have a Zoom B1ON which I use with my duo, I just use one of the preset tones. I also plug straight into the amp and into the Silverstone sometimes and to me it sounds good, so yes my experience is that if you like the sound of your bass it does behave well. We all have differing tastes though, I like an uncomplicated sound. Your MarkBass is quite coloured already, I used to have an MB Tube500 myself and as well as a little tube compression you have the VPF, VLF options. I wouldn't say FRFR is experimental/exploratory or even exotic, just another option. We've been moving in that direction for at least 15 years. It goes hand in hand with putting most of the band through the PA as what you hear is what the audience hear. A lot of the cabs from Barefaced are pretty close to FRFR as are the Vanderkleys and a lot of other high end cabs It's really easy to find out if you like the FRFR sound. Just use some decent headphones as they should have a fairly flat response. One think I quite like about making the change is I now get pretty much the same sound out of my studio monitors and headphones as I get through the PA and my bass cab without having to regularly reset the eq. I'm not going to try and talk you out of a coloured cab though; decades of bassists a lot better than me have gone that route, I wish you well but if you want coloured don't buy anything you can't try with your bass and amp. Mixing colours at random always ends up with a cloudy brown.

Yeah, I have a Peavey MiniMax and the sound out of the box is just as you describe the Minimega, the fx controls are well chosen and intuitive so it is relatively easy to get the sound you want. the only downside are the noisy fans, not a problem in a rehearsal room or at a gig

This is right. The most important thing is that you are happy with the sound. That's a matter of taste and I'm pretty sure nobody here has the exact taste as you or anybody else here. I wont go into too much technical detail unless you ask but amps are measured on the maximum power they can give at the moment of the highest level of sound. Speakers are measured at the continuous level of power they can handle without over-heating. Speakers also fail if you ask them to carry too much fundamental bass but no data is available from the box manufacturers to tell you when this might happen. You could probably use a 300W speaker with a 500W amp forever without the amp blowing it. Your MB Tube has a volume control so you don't have to run it on 800W all the time You talk really sensibly about overkill with sound output and using a 4x10 and also about using speakers other than MarkBass. One thing you may want to consider is whether to go for a full range, flat response FRFR speaker. Essentially one that accurately reproduces the sound of your bass and amp without colouration. There is nothing wrong with a speaker that has a sound of it's own but it will always have that sound. If you want to always sound like you then try as many speakers as you can, if you want different sounds for different bands then FRFR has a lot to recommend it. I've recently started using an LFSys Silverstone an FRFR speaker within your budget. My first step into FRFR and I won't go back to coloured speakers. I know the designer so I got a deal and bought two. One is all I'll ever need. They also make a second model with higher power handling but I haven't tried that one. @scrumpymike has one and might be the one to ask. LF Sys Another way of doing FRFR is to use a high quality PA Speaker. RCF, QSC and Yamaha are the brands frequently tried I've used RCF and QSC and they are good.

It sounds encouraging so far, hope to see you at a bass bash soon. Good luck with the recovery. FWIW I had a DVT/PE incident, probably very different as mine was idiopathic (came from nowhere) but once the clots cleared it was a non-incident. I've stayed on riveroxaban as a precaution but the only side effect is that you bleed more when you cut yourself.

I think you just want the Ampeg and there is no shame in that. Just before Covid I went out and did what I often did when my wife was at her book group and saw as many cover bands as I could squeeze into one night. Two of them stood out for the glorious bass sound, different amps but both had Ampeg 4x10's. The Ampeg is a really unsophisticated cab packed with loads of really cheap speakers and has a really coloured sound. It's designed for sheer bass volume at a time when PA's weren't so great. Sometimes you just luck out, it works and it is probably the defining sound of rock music. You can probably get more or less the sound and loud enough for your monitoring from a good lightweight cab and an emulator but if you want to experience for a year or two then go for it. Every 8x10 is going to sound different but there is a generic difference difference as well. Old people are generally less physically able than young people but for any two individuals that won't necessarily be true. For any given cab adding a port is going to give you roughly an extra 3db in the lowest octave and lower the f3 roll off point so you'll get deeper bass as well. Port loading also reduces the excursion of the speaker so improves power handling at the lowest frequencies. You'll probably get more bass and deeper bass. The ampeg gets away with it because standing a cab on the floor reinforces the bass at the lowest frequencies. The floor reflections add to the bass coming from the speaker so the reflected bass fills in the missing bit. For a lot of ported cabs the response is flatter and so the floor reinforcement can be boomier if you don't roll off the bass. That's why so many modern speakers sound great at low volumes at home but are way too bass heavy at gigs. A few designers are starting to design a 'shelving' response at the bottom end. Go on you get the Ampeg and I'll get the 3litre Cosworth

In my dreams i live in a comfortable little house with the biggest shed in the world

Wondering if you have made any more progress on this?

looking good, can't wait until you give your verdict on the sound.

Hey Charlie I see you are sneaking black cabs into the house

I think that's the point isn't it. "fun to try" I don't think you 'need' a crossover, at least not yet. The thing that matters is that you have two amps with different sounds and you can explore the effects of setting extreme eq's on one or both of them and then blend the sounds using the volume controls on each. Back in the day it was a recognised technique to 'bi-amp' with a bass amp for the lows and a guitar amp for the highs for bassists who could afford it. It wasn't very scientific but someone with a good ear could sometimes find an interesting tone. Crossovers do something very different a 24db/octave crossover will effectively split the signal so one speaker only gets the highs and the other gets the lows only. Both your speakers will have plenty of low end and neither have any real highs unless they have tweeters. The extra brightness is probably coming from the midrange. The muddiness from a lack of midrange at some frequencies. Using a crossover doesn't make a lot of scientific sense with the amps you have as they probably have similar frequency ranges just with differing timbres. Save your money and experiment with what you have. It'll be fun to try

Sorry to cause you trouble , if I ever get time I'll start a new thread as someone who has gone this route, slowly and with trepidation. It's been a voyage of discovery You have to see if it going to work for you and fortunately you don't have to take it on trust. You can use rehearsals to try it all out and you can do this without disturbing the rest of the band or spending a fortune. Go wired to start with, just to try it out, Any headphone amp will work for a trial even an old mixer is good but the behringer PM2 is good and cheap. You can use any headphones at rehearsal (not bluetooth though) and the best phones are ones that blot out a lot of the outside noise. Over ears are great but I've got away with some £25 sennheiser ear buds. You can take a feed from the mixing desk or even from wedges or the pa speakers if they have a line level XLR out. Honestly the moment you get a proper mix through the phones you'll glimpse nirvana. It's like playing in a studio, you can hear everything, it's like playing along to the record. Nothing else comes close. In the end you'll play better because you really hear the music and every undamped note and mistake. Once you have it all working at rehearsal even if it is with giant Cyberman 'phones you can make up your own mind what to buy. I go wireless on big stages but most pubs you can't move anyway.

OK that changes everything. I too have hearing loss and like you due to self abuse; too much loud music/machine tools and so on. The sound levels of a band are enough to cause permanent damage (usually high frequency losses) in minutes and repeated exposure is cumulative, i.e. it just keeps getting worse. You need to move to in-ears as quickly as possible or it will get bad enough to stop you playing permanently. Well fitting in-ears will block out most of the noise at least as well as ear plugs but then allow you to hear clearer than ever before all the stuff you need to hear. Get it right and you have a volume control for the wildest drummer and the craziest guitarist. Honestly it's a game changer you can plug the lead to your monitor into a Behringer P2 instead and connect a set of KZ ZS10 pro in ears for well under £100 and hear like a kid again as well as stopping the inexorable destruction of your remaining hearing https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/389429-the-iem-in-ear-monitors-bible-thread/#comment-3944325 Losing some of your mids and high range makes it really hard to hear the details you need to make out what you are playing, being of axis to your monitors will mean you are having what you hear further reduced as off axis it is the mids and highs that are lost. You'll experience this as there being more and more venues where 'the acoustics are bad'. As to hearing aids according to Which the NHS provide the best hearing aids which are now all digital and can be set up to mirror the frequency losses you have. There is no advantage to be gained by expensive commercial ones. I think the RNID have said something similar.