Phil Starr

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

Good question. I've also come across situations where the PA is set up with a smiley face on the graphic as a starting point. Please don't listen to this advice. I came across it only a few weeks ago when an inexperienced guy hired in a PA where we were playing. We had a BBC engineer on the monitor mix and the hirer on the FOH. Result was the on-stage sound was glorious and FOH a bassy mush throughout the whole day. So you want your PA to sound like what you are feeding in. The graphic is only there to adjust for room acoustics IMO. If you want the bass or kick louder turn them up in the mix. If the bass sounds thin then adjust it with the channel controls so it doesn't. Don't boost both if you only want to affect one of them. The trouble is that a lot of these 'rules of thumb' date from the times when PA and backline were in their infancy. If your PA was composed of underpowered amps and WEM 4x10's and you were mixing with the bass coming through a guitarists 4x12 boosting the bass and treble made some sort of sense, though replacing drivers was routine as a result.

Here's the thing though, and this has only just occurred to me re-reading my own post. Turning up the bass and treble at means that you are effectively turning the mids down relative to the two extremes. The equal loudness curves show that just turning up the volume sounds like you are turning down the mid balance. Ever had that experience of a band being really loud but somehow not being able to pick yourself out of a mix? Well the mids are what you need to hear yourself and a nasal mid balanced sound always sounds awful at home but a better fit once you are mixed in with a band. Equal loudness could be most of the reason for that. Especially if everyone else is turning up at the same time. That's why I love these discussions, I'll be mulling over that all day, and i now feel stupid for not having thought about it before

Back on track, I did warn you I like a graph. This next one is probably familiar and I think the 'science' reason behind the 'smiley face' eq so many amps have when the controls are all set to noon. Each curve measures how much energy you need at each frequency to make sounds equally loud. Effectively it draws where you'd need to set the graphic to get a flat sound. You'll notice there isn't watt in sight, sound is measured in decibels. The easiest line to explain is the 'threshold' line. In this case 0db is set at the quietist sound you can hear with all the other decibels set relative to that. Originally the first measurement was taken at 1kHz so that is where zero was set, a bit like setting 0 as the lowest temperature they could get at the time at the bottom of the Fahrenheit scale. So this is why we like a smiley face eq. If you look at all the lines they show a broad dip in the middle with lots of extra volume to get you to hear the bass and treble as loud. And let's face it when you only had two tone controls on the radiogram you only ever boosted you never cut. Looking carefully to hear 40Hz (bottom E) at all you need 50db of bass boost. That's 100,000x the power! If you look at the other extreme at 100Phon (about the level of sound where the drummer sits in a rock band) you only need 20db of boost. The bass sounds 30db louder and only needs 1000x the power. Subjectively it will sound 8x louder relative to that 1kHz mid. So turning up the volume of anything amplified makes it sound like you've boosted the bass and treble and here's the punchline: boosting the bass and treble at any frequency makes an amp sound like a bigger more impressive amp. I wonder why anyone would want to do that in a showroom situation

OK it looks like I'm going to have to do this What about the shape? As John has said the only consideration so far has been to match the Ashdown After 8 in shape. That's pretty niche so I can change the shape to a more conventional one. Less cube more Golden Ratio. this would cut down any potential resonant modes inside the cab and potentially clean up the sound a little and it would also help portability as a deep cab can bank against your legs. On the minus side it looks quite cute as it is and is so small anyway that portability isn't really an issue as it would be with a larger cab. I suspect this will also be used for home practice a lot of the time. what shape has the most room appeal, something with the minimum height or something with the smallest footprint?

I'm looking at using REW which is free and pretty powerful. It's also fairly well supported and there are plenty of instructional videos on You Tube. Any 2 in/2 out interface should work and I'm probably going to use my USB mixing desk. REW lets you do a calibration plot so if the interface does have any artefacts they can be allowed for. There might be a problem with connecting some BTL (bridged) amps to earth but most DI boxes should let you fix that. Currently John is doing his measurements with an oscilloscope and other software. I'm not sure if that is an issue, if they lead to different results then we can investigate. The only other issue I can think of is all agreeing a protocol so data can be collected and compared. For measurement I think 20-20kHz measurements at low power makes sense and REW allows you to centre results at 0db. Displaying results as a graph is useful but a table summarising results would also be good as a quick reference (-3db points, frequency range, rate of roll off, centre and size of any frequency anomalies) Ideally it would be good to make the data files themselves available to anyone who wants them. I've no idea about how they are stored. I'm no expert on this so any help/suggestions are very welcome. We might need to take this across to another thread if this takes off

That's a shame, I'd have loved to have a listen to your combo but when i get back from setting up for the shootout it had already disappeared. Maybe next year.

OK it is starting to look like a plan, it might take a while to sort out the easiest way to do it and write a how to guide but worth doing. I'll have a chat with John when he gets over his covid and I'll have a good look myself. That might take a while as we have a couple of new band members to rehearse in but it could be an interesting project.

Welcome to BassChat Go for used, if you buy sensibly then you will be able to use your bass for a year or two and then if you want sell it and get all your money back. With the amp you will get something that will sound better and encourage you to stick with playing, cheap practice amps are often unrewarding to listen to. £500 is a good budget. the good news is that there are a lot of really excellent budget instruments around, it is almost hard to go wrong and if you spent half of that on it you could get a really usable gigging bass. A lot of us are moving on from old heavy amps and speakers to more modern lightweight gear so again there are bargains out there. I've picked up some real bargains off FB marketplace recently but it is worth buying from the ads here if you see what you want. There is kind of an honour system here and you can also check people's history as sellers so it isn't as unreliable as Evilbay.

. We had hoped to measure a lot more amplifiers. There were plenty there at the bass bash but we simply ran out of time. The result for the Gnome was so unexpected that we spent precious time checking everything over. I had to set up and run a speaker shootout in the main hall and couldn't act as gopher for John. Anyway it was an interesting experiment I think we'll repeat and try to grab more data on other amps. There is free software to do this so if you have a simple two in and two out interface you should be able to do this at home so maybe a few of us could work together and build a database

You are perfectly correct, it could be described any number of ways, but I see it as a shaped response. I'm looking from an engineering perspective and trying to reverse engineer what is going on inside. Any power amp will have a flat response up to whatever frequency that particular amp can manage and flat down to the point where capacitance and inductance filters out the bass. Generally this will be in multiples of 6db/octave. So 6/12/18/24db for ist,2nd.3rd,4th order filters are what I'm looking for. That means the response is shaped from flat, probably in the pre-amp stage and somebody has designed that shaping into the amp. In this case they helpfully quote 400hz as the centre frequency of the mid control so it is set deliberately down by around -4/-6db at 12o/c, turn it up by that much (around 3.30 on the mids) and there will be roughly a straight line between 150 and 1.8khz. That leaves the rising response of 6db between the bass and treble. Clearly that is effectively a cut in the bass and a boost to the top end to give it a bright sound.

You'll have to ask John @Chienmortbb that. I was demonstrating speakers for most of the time whilst he was taking measurements. The aim was to find the 'flat' response though so I'm fairly sure it was flat.

I do feel sorry for manufacturers, they have to do these things even if their engineering instincts tell them not to. Though to be fair a 'sounds good when practicing' button isn't a bad idea Below is the response of the Ashdown RM500, you can see the rest of the measured responses we took HERE So when looking at this I ask three questions. Is there a low end roll off/HPF (where and how quickly)? Is there a high end roll off (same questions)? Are there any irregularities that make the amp non-flat. So roll off I take from the -3db points and the rate of roll off I calculate over 2 octaves from there. The highest sensitivity of this essentially flat amp is around 13db so the minus 3db points are where it crosses the 10db line and the roll off is more or less 6db/octave. Ashdown clearly know what they are doing, -3db at around 50Hz and a gentle roll off is going to give you plenty of bass without overpowering and offers a little protection from idiots blowing speakers. Bass output is almost all in the 100-4,000 Hz range and that is flat with another gentle roll off above that. If you want a midrange dip there is a button and tone controls. The top end roll off will also tame one of the problems with single driver cabs (as opposed to ones with horns and crossovers) where most cone drivers have cone s breaking up in the low KHz region