Phil Starr

This

Wow, you really notice it on the voice, it's actually quite pleasant at around 10ms. I use a G30 for my bass but not much in the way of fx, I've just bought an SansAmp to use with the band as I'm going to lose my backline as soon as the rest of the band are happy. The singer doesn't listen to the bass, if the guitar goes off she loses the note or the beat Thanks I'll give her the options and your advice and talk it through. She's very rational but makes quick decisions. She asked my advice on in-ears and ordered the ZS10's on her phone before I finished the options, borrowed my Sennheiser 935 and ordered that straight away too. Giving her advice is a bit scary. I won't tell them your advice about the Xvive on the other thread

Thanks Russ, I was never a doubter or even a sceptic but it just boiled down to the learning curve, choosing the battles with the band and cold hard cash. Gigs are rolling in so cashflow will improve. The sound I'm getting at rehearsals with the P2 is just superb, good enough to pick up the difference in mic pre's. I'm learning to live with the mid scoop in the ZX10's, bass is never a problem The Trantec is usable but not rewarding to listen to. I'm concerned with latency, we've got to have some on the M18 mixing desk and the Xvive is another 4.9ms. We've been playing with dep drummers recently and getting solidly locked has been an issue, that could be just learning to play together or it could be latency. With no rehearsal who knows? In the end I'm going to have to recommend something to the singer and as it isn't my money I want to get it right. I think I can explain the Compander issue as saying it won't be better or worse than the Trantec but explaining latency might be a problem. I encouraged her to read this thread but no joy there Thanks for your patience and all your help

I guess the question is which mixer do you all use? I'm using a digital mixer and I'm not sure what the latency is on that. Adding a further 5ms could be an issue. FWIW I use a P2 for rehearsals and an old UHF wireless at a gig. The sound quality in rehearsal is stunning, at a gig not so much which i guess is down to the compander. It's workable with and saves my hearing but not very rewarding.

And now you are at it Al at a quick look I might have gone for this, four more mic pre's and proper sliders. Where's the drooling emoji

Damn you Steve, that's just down the road from me

You might struggle for volume Al, they aren't headphone outs they are balanced line but just use TRS jacks instead of XLR's, I have a set of six short jack to XLR leads that I use to convert to XLR. They do have enough signal to make a sound through the headphones but the P2 gives you more volume, a better impedance match and better sound.

Hi Russ, thanks to your help plus a bit of psychology from me my band are all going in-ears nowadays, with a lot of ZS10's and Behringer belt packs. They are all mixing their own monitors on their phones too. The big trick was to get them to wear over ears in rehearsals. Once they'd played for a couple of hours with 'phones they were keen to get that experience at gigs. Phase two was to get them to realise they needed to ditch the supplied earbuds with the in-ears and experiment until they got some that fitted and sealed out the bands noise. I have boxes of buds salvaged from every headphone my family have ever used so they have plenty to try The problem now is that I share my ancient Trantec with our singer and we share the same mix, interesting when her in-ears became loose and she cut everything other than her voice out of the mix for both of us, not realising she could hear the PA. She wants to buy her own radio system but budget is limited and she'll struggle to find £200 never mind the £500 systems you are recommending. The previous singer used an LD MEI system which she was happy with, though she relies on poorly fitting 'phones and leakage to hear the rest of the band Any suggestions? Would the LD U305 for example be worse than the Trantec? I get where you are coming from, I'd never recommend something that I wouldn't use myself but over a £1,000 for moulds plus the recommended radio connection is way beyond budget.

I wondered what you'd offer here. I can't imagine you would design anything but systems. You aren't working at the bottom end of the market and there is some quality engineering going on. I guess each new range starts with a design spec and a blank sheet of paper. Everything in a new range of products is going to work well together but do you retrospectively check a new amp will work well with all the old speakers and vice-versa? That would work for a manufacturer with a 'house sound' but limit some innovations. It would be interesting to expand upon this. If all manufacturers are conscientious and competent then buying a whole rig from one range would make a lot of sense. If they are consistent in their house sound then buying an amp from one range and mixing it with a speaker from an older range would still cut down the variables they would have to deal with. There would be advantages to both customer and producer in brand loyalty. People will still mix and match, I guess it's the difference between cooking from a recipe where someone professional has blended the ingredients to produce a consistent and reliable result and trying different ingredients each time in search of the unobtainable best with the risk of something awful. Your detailed thoughts would be really interesting.

Now this is where it gets interesting, to me at least. Let's have a look at one of the classic bass speakers used in a lot of mid-priced cabs, the Eminence 12A-2 and beside it what happens to the bass response when you put it in a 50litre box. You can see the speaker has a natural peak of about 4db in the 1-4kHz region and almost 3db of bass boost just above 100hz when you put it in a portable sized cab. Once again you have a smiley faced loudness contour, the auditory version of a high salt, high sugar snack. It's almost the same response as the ELF just slightly less exaggerated. Obviously if you mix these two they are going to add their irregularities to make a super sweet, super salty mix. Only palatable to a few maybe. Can you tame it with the tone controls? Well that depends, you have that 400Hz mid control but it of course is only centred there. Turn it up and it will boost the 120hz as well as at 1kHz where the eminence is starting to peak. Turn down the treble? Well the Eminence is starting to fall off the side of a cliff at this point so cutting a few db at 2kHz is going to cut the highest frequencies right out of your sound. If your sound is Jamerson of course that won't. worry you. (Brilliantly Jamerson is in the spell check) So now we are back to art. No-one is going to sit down with all these graphs and use them to set their tone controls. By the time you've factored in the bass, pups, strings, fx and room acoustics it is just too complex but it is easy to see why some marriages just break down. Marrying the slightly bright old school sound of the ELF with the slightly bright old school sound of one of the bass world's best loved speakers isn't going to let you maneuver very much and you might miss those mids when you are playing with your over loud band.

OK back on track having got rehearsals and gigs out of the way. So having established that amps aren't neutral 'wires' that just increase the volume and that humans like a smiley faced eq because of the way our hearing works it's time to address Trace Elliott watts in the shape of the ELF that "never ceases to amaze"; magic or clever use of science? Oh, look it's a smiley face with 5db of bass boost at 100Hz and 7db @ 4kHz with the bass rolling off nicely below 80hz. The loudness control is set to always on so an instant hit in the showroom and in home practice and that big peak at 3-5kHz is just where our ears are most sensitive so it is going to sound loud. Interestingly the mid dip and the mid control centre frequency are at 400Hz just like the Warwick and the TC BAM as is the quoted power output. No criticism of any of these amps, a lot of people are going to love the baked in sound of the ELF, I mean really love it and it is boosting those upper mids so it is going to sound loud! Filtering the bass a little just makes sense with a little amp likely to be used with little speakers and with limited ability to dissipate heat, and frankly most of us won't miss it. It's a very different approach to Ashdown with their flat response across the range of a bass.

Or bargain of the century the Zoom B1-4 which also has built in tuner, drum machine, fx, amp and speaker emulations, runs on batteries, standard power supply and usb.

You can pay what you want for ply. the grading system is for the outer veneers from A to D where A is perfect and D will have large knots and quite a lot of filling and even some voids BB is pretty good and will have a nice solid core, unless it is Russian. Marine ply is waterproof as you'd expect and will have a high glue content so it is tougher, high quality hardwoods resistant to rotting are used in the core plies, hence the weight. Exterior ply is in between. I go to wickes for a lot of my ply, you can select your sheet and really examine the timber and some of the exterior ply is quite nice. It varies from batch to batch. BB grade Baltic Birch is what most pro cabs are made of so your timber merchant steered you in a good direction. It is worth looking out for Poplar ply which is really lightweight and the basis of Barefaced and LFSys cabs amongst others. This varies in quality too with European sourced boards being great and Chinese boards still good but made with a different species of 'Poplar' outer veneers and cored with Eucalyptus. It's really well priced though and I sourced mine from Jewsons for the original 110T. I'm really pleased you built the second cab with decent plywood. The panels won't be flexing the way the original flake board did and that's why it sounds better. The marine ply will be great and is what touring grade gear is made of but at the cost of extra weight, which doesn't matter if you have roadies .

That's pretty much what I do, I mark out the panels using off-cuts of the ply I'm using for the cab and use the outside of the thin pencil line to align the battens. That pencil thickness is just enough to leave something easily sandable. Don't leave too much though, sanding off more than a fraction of a mm takes forever. You'll find all timber sizes are nominal, especially planed timber. At the sawmill they will re-plane anything that comes out rough and you'll often find it isn't square but rectangular with one dimension slightly bigger. Even plywood thicknesses vary and of course wood swells and shrinks depending upon humidity.

Not true of the M18, the router is excellent, I've never had problems even when I've forgotten to connect the external antenna. The range is better than our household wi fi. That was a crucial deciding factor, I didn't want an external power supply either. The band have all gone in ears now and mix their own monitors with their phones. their tech fear is dissipating

This I can say from bitter experience that hearing loss is no fun at all and may one day end your bass playing altogether. I have the very first LFSys Silverstone 001. I'm lucky enough to be a friend of the designer (through BassChat) and helped test out the cabs in development. It's now my gigging cab. It sounds great, really clean sounding and very much what you put in is what you get out. I've tried it next to the BB2 and they are both great cabs but the Silverstone has the edge in the midrange and top end for me. To be fair the BB2 is lighter, a real triumph in that area but the Silverstone is still a lightweight and an easy one handed lift for me (I'm a not very big 70 year old) and probably a 1/3 to 1/4 of the Ashdown depending upon which one it is. Where the Silverstone scores is over audibility. It doesn't have to be pointing straight at you for you to hear what you are playing clearly. That's down to the cleanliness and strength of the mid-range and the attention paid to the off axis response. It has a real quality horn flare and a PA quality compression driver. It's also several hundred pounds cheaper than the Barefaced. There's an offer of free carriage or a half price cover for BassChat members.

Is this a semantic argument where anyone can come up with a definition and point out a few people who fail to meet the criteria for 'vocalist'? There are many trained classical singers who would fail your 3+ octave test. Come to that re-classifying folk singers as folk-vocalists or come to that Placido Domingo and Maria Callas as vocalists sounds a bit odd too. I think that the webverse has it the right way round, that vocalists are people who sing pop music in its broadest sense and singers are just people who sing. By and large vocalist is used to define a musician whose instrument is their voice, guitarist, bassist, trombonist, vocalist. By and large vocalist became a popular term with jazz bands in the early 20th century and continued in pop and rock after that. In a way it defines a role rather than whether they are any good or not. The first recorded usage of vocalist was in 1790 by the way. I'm a bit worried by the test of quality of what you need to be a singer/vocalist. Almost no-one in the music I play has formal training which is the norm for classical musicians. Then what constitutes formal training? A few tips or half hour lessons with someone a bit more experienced than you or years of study with people who have previously followed the same studies and have formal qualifications? Does it involve testing and exams before moving on to higher levels? There's no doubt that some people are better singers than others, or that practice and knowledge help them to get better but what constitutes a 'good' voice is complex and also relates to what music they are singing. I doubt you'd find any two of us to agree on what constitutes a good voice. Anyway I'm clearly not a bassist, 3-octaves? I never visit the dusty end of my bass

It needs to be an airtight seal so yes you need some filler for any gaps. The speaker should have a gasket that will seal against the wood. I can see that the outside does have a gasket but not all speakers have one on the inside. That doesn't matter because you can just use some draught proofing strip between the wood and the speaker frame. This will then fill any irregularities when you screw the speaker down. So when you fill you just need to make sure there is enough filler to support the gasket so it can be squished between speaker and baffle. It doesn't matter if there is a provided gasket or you need to make one Just congratulate yourself for helping others not to make the same mistake We've all been there!

Damn you all, I'm going to be playing this later instead of rehearsing my set list

First of all Ashdown will offer you the best after sales in the business. You'll find plenty of tales here about them repairing amps bought second hand and sometimes not charging. They even come on BassChat from time to time. They don't have a particular problem with reliability and most bass gear is pretty reliable. You can buy Ashdown with confidence but choose your amp on how it sounds. If you like the sound then the amp is good. So much just depends upon taste. Go for used, you are probably going to be trading up as we never find out perfect amp first time and circumstances change anyway. You may get all your money back when you trade or only lose a fraction of your purchase price. Unless space at home is an issue go for something gig-able. 2-300W and at least a single 12" driver or a 2x10. There isn't a hard and fast rule but most of these will be loud enough and a 'proper' amp is going to sound better than most practice amps even at practice amp volumes, but you found that out for yourself with the little Fender.

Thanks this is really helpful. Obviously we were aware of this which is why I mentioned it. We used an isolating transformer to separate the amps from our measuring equipment and spent most of our time checking that this was not affecting the results. Hence our failure to take more measurements. I probably should have warned people not to rush out and home test their class D amps until we have a safe method. Thinking about it there’s no place for probably. We aren’t proposing to encourage people to make measurements at high power. The kit for that is not something that most people can cobble together and some of the currents and voltages can be dangerous. The aim is to develop a simple method for people to make repeatable measurements of the small signal frequency responses of amplifiers only. It’s good to have you on board and any practical experience you can offer will be really valuable.

We were measuring the output of the amplifiers only. No speakers were involved so none of these concerns would be applicable. I wonder if you are confusing these measurements with the speaker shootout I carried out at the same meet-up.

Ok I think it is time I contributed my experiences using the Silverstone as I've been trying prototypes out during the development, watched the design process and listened to a lot of variants during the cab's evolution. So most of you will know that Stevie and I were involved in the Bass Chat DIY designs from the start. We've had some fairly intense 'discussions' through the process which I've thoroughly enjoyed even when it has got quite heated For the record I was quite interested in designing coloured/voiced cabs and Stevie was the proponent of FRFR. To be fair I think both of us were devil's advocates for each approach. Anyway on to the cab. First of all it looks great, really solidly made and the handles are not going to come off these cabs It's a deep graphite grey rather than black and the green front panel behind the black grille subtly marks it out as something just a little different. The cab is an easy carry for me, I'm 70 years old and a lightweight myself and I have no trouble carrying one of these in each hand. Not the lightest 12 I've ever lifted but an easy lift due to its two neo drivers. So coming on to the sound, I've had the usual history of cabs starting out with a Peavey 2x15 then a series of quite deliberately coloured cabs of my own design. I quite like a coloured cab, plug and play appeals to my lazy side. Asking me to test out an FRFR speaker was an interesting choice and an interesting experience for me. Recently though with my duo I've scrapped the backline and gone through the PA. Playing through the Silverstone is not like playing through a PA speaker on the floor. The PA speakers are designed to be up on stands and on the floor the bass is woolly and needs to be rolled back, up on stands you can get a great sound though. I've also compared the Silverstones with my RCF ART745's and the bass quality is cleaner. My suspicion is that injection moulded cabs just can't match a decently braced wooden cab but I guess that would need a bit more investigation. Plugging in the Silverstones don't sound hi-fi to my ears there's no extreme top end sparkle or overwarm bass and they don't sound soulless either (all accusations against FRFR generally) . What they do remind me of is the first time I heard what I'd recorded at a studio through the big monitors. Clean, lots of detail and definitely my bass and my strings. Swapping from my American Deluxe P bass to my Highway 1 J bass was interesting too. I tend to use the Jazz with my duo but find too much deep bass and too little punch compared to the P when I take it out with the full band somehow the mids are just a bit more present with my J using the Silverstone, the bass more controlled. It's not dramatic but definitely happening. You can hear the difference. At first band rehearsal I set up with my Warwick Gnome, it was comfortably loud enough even when the drummer went for it. Interestingly I set up the balance to my normal level and the band asked me to turn up. I wandered out front and they were right, the bass was well back in the mix even though everything was crystal clear back in front of the cab. I turned up until it sounded OK out front and the band were happy. Back by the speaker it was loud but to be fair not so loud I lost what the rest of the band were doing. I've had the same at gigs and other rehearsals and I've now had to adapt to having more bass guitar in my corner. I've readjusted to feeling my trousers moving but not being deafened. I've now gigged with the Silverstone a few times and it has changed my playing. First of all I've spent a lot of time on my sound, plugging in my BD121 brought my bass alive rather than just adding a subtle bloom with my older speakers. I've set up my Jazz bass much more carefully with a Hartke emulator (I miss my old HA3500) and a bit of compression which works well with the band. and at home I'm experimenting more with fx because now I can hear the changes it's just more rewarding to spend time on getting them right. When I'm playing live I'm just hearing more of what I'm doing so I'm self-correcting more. Paying more attention to note lengths/string damping and so on. Did I mention I'm a messy player The difference is in the mids, they are just cleaner, better off axis, no mid suck out and no upper mid peak. Balancing the upper and lower mids really works. There's no tizz from the tweeter either. You don't really notice it because it's nicely integrated with the bass driver, there's no point where you suddenly hear it jump out at you. The overall impression of this speaker is about cleanness and clarity. It makes you bass sound like a bass and hands you control. Because it isn't forcing its sound on you it frees you up to create the sound you want. Am I a convert to FRFR? Well I'd still be happy to play through an old Trace Combo and enjoy it for what it offers but if you had to have just one cab this might just be the one. It's the best FRFR cab so far and the big advantage is that it would be easier to make this sound like a Trace than the other way round.

Hi John, I can confirm that the Silverstone is using the Faital 320 and the same horn driver as the Mk3 BassChat design, where it differs is in having a nicer and more expensive horn flare and a lot of work on the crossover especially around looking at phase issues. You are also spot on about the relative sound of the Silverstone to the more expensive LFSys speaker which I hadn't heard before the Bass Bash. I'd love to try that at a gig but at the test the Silverstone hit the sweet spot for me too, the bass has a lovely warmth to it without being overpowering. The shootout wasn't a scientific process, I hadn't time to set up the levels beforehand and I didn't know what speakers I was going to be testing before the day, I just grabbed four of the 'best' speakers in the room. It would also have been interesting to have had a live bassist but I was stuck with something I downloaded from You Tube. It wasn't definitive but i hope it was fun and at least a little bit informative.

This is my delight, the sweet spot of musical speaker design. Everything we hear goes through huge reprocessing in our brains and our response to sounds is so subjective. The language we use to describe sound is so imprecise yet our response to music so visceral. The engineering part is pretty simple but converting people's thoughts into a design spec and then seeing how that all works in a real life situation is what really fascinates me. I've had the pleasure of designing a few one off cabs for people here and it's been a real learning experience. I've recently had a chance to talk to @TheRevabout the problems of amplifying upright bass. A fascinating new problem. This interface between music, science, woodwork and people is my happy place. Great to hear from you