Phil Starr

As a practical solution go to Ashdown. Any other speaker is going to change your sound and devalue your amp should you ever want to sell. Ashdown bless them have the best after sales you might’ve ever get. The only reason to go different is that there is something you want to change about your amp or if after sales is not available.

This is a very simple set up and I suspect a copy of the Hartke Kickback which had the same arrangement. The speaker will almost certainly be 4ohms so you can't add another speaker with a splitter to any real advantage. However if you have other cabs they might be more efficient than the inbuilt one so you could just try unplugging the one in the combo and plugging the other cab in. Certainly in my Hartke that gave extra volume. If you like fiddling there might be the possibility of changing the internal speaker for an 8ohm one and then adding an external 8ohm cab and it might be fun to try but if I just wanted more volume I'd probably not start with what you have but move the combo on and start afresh as that would probably work out easier and cheaper.

I use the Line6 G30's No problems at all bar when i dropped them. The plastic case on the transmitter isn't the toughest but a replacement was fairly cheap so no long term issue. The sound is better than using a long lead.

It's always hard to judge how much detail people want. The way we measure output of amps and the power handling of speakers is entirely different and separate and power handling for the speaker isn't the same at every frequency. On top of that the input you are using is music and not a test signal. All music definitely isn't alike. Another issue is sound level: you can drive a 12" speaker to it's limits easily with 200W and few of them are thermally rated above 300W so why make a 600W speaker if it is no louder? You can give it a bigger coil which increases power handling and then trade some of the extra power for driving a heavier cone of having a stiffer suspension but you rapidly get to the point where you are trading a lot of expense for marginal gains in performance. A lot of the boutique modern 12's have drivers chosen to be around this point to get the most that is economically sensible out of a single 12. They will probably not handle 800W if you run everything flat out with loads of distortion and bass boosted and won't be much louder anyway than if you use them within their recommended limits but if you are running any normal sort of signal into them and have the volume and bass anything other than maxxed out then you'll be fine. In any case you'd be running them at levels which would be damaging your hearing and overloading the vocal mics long before they reached the point of failure.

Hmm, Tuff Cab is water based, and smells like an acrylic emulsion. I wonder if it would take the pigments they use to colourise emulsion paints. Out local shop will have a go at colourising pretty much anything. I wonder if you got a lighter blue or grey you could get near the colour you want by getting someone to add in more pigment. Obviously that risks wasting a can of paint. The base paint they use for dark emulsions are the same colours as the grey undercoats you use for for dark paint. Damn you @Pea Turgh you have me thinking

Duratex and Tuff-Cab seem to be the same thing. Great to use and you can get anything from a linen like finish to a heavy stipple by changing the rollers. It's unbelievably easy to use and stays open for a long time so if you don't like the effect you can flatten it and have a second go. It's really tough and easy to repair if you do manage to wear it down. I've use all sorts of cloth coverings back when I had no money. Natural fibres seem to soak up glues and varnishes better as they are more absorbent, They are easier to work with than Tolex as they are more pliable. They'll also take stains well. I did a lot of cabs in Hessian which is cheap and strong. If the cuts are well glued to the cab then they shouldn't fray. If you use corner protectors the joints are mostly covered anyway.

It's probably just a generic 'hardwood' ply. Judging by the pics it looks like one of the outer faces is a decent hardwood and is darker and redder than the others. Ply is graded with the outer faces of various qualities so A/B would have one good face and one OK but with the odd filled bit/knot etc. Hopefully you will have all the good faces on the outside. It won't be mahogany but an african/Brazilian or other tropical hardwood which looks mahogany ish. If you don't mind the effort sand it and see what it looks like. wipe the sanded surface with a damp cloth and it will give you a reasonable glimpse of how it will look when oiled/varnished. If you don't like it then the sanding will give you a better finish for painting with Tuff Cote or whatever else you decide to use. For a cab that size I might have an off-cut of vinyl. I'll look when I get back home next week.

The Captor is a specialist thing with one trick, it reduces the output of a valve amp so you can run the amp into distortion without deafening everyone. This is really designed for the recording studio so you get your stage sound without stage volumes. This one has an extra 20db attenuation output which reduces the signal 100 times down to roughly line level. The cab emulation sims are plug ins for your computer based recording. If that’s what you want there are loads available without any need for an expensive attenuator.

This is a coincidence, spent last night playing a pub in Hereford with the original little cab. I take it on holiday with a Warwick Gnome for impromptu performances and practice. It does fill quite a decent sized pub so long as you aren't trying to match a drumkit. Good to see this about to happen, hope you enjoy it and your son get's the grades he wants

I have a Warwick Gnome, only because it was the only mininamp in stock anywhere when I bought it. I liked the looks of the TC more and couldn't justfy the extra for the TE. I've used it regularly for rehearsals and at a gig with a single 12" 8ohm speaker and it has been perfectly adequate. the DI out is good too. I've no idea if the others would have been better or even very different but for me it's a great proof of concept. It drops in the pocket of any gig bag and does the job. The sound is absolutely fine and sounds good with a BD121 in front of it, so maybe any of the above with a Sansamp.

Do you fancy building something. There's a freely available design on BC BassChat Mk3 which will be more than adequate and has outperformed some of the cabs you've mentioned in blind listening tests. One of the special features in it's design is the midrange dispersion which is shaped so you can pick yourself out of a mix even when close to the speaker. I'd better declare an interest, it's not my design but I was involved in some of the development. If I'm up in Reading you could maybe try mine out

I'm assuming that is you in the video? If so the bass is sitting about where I'd put it in the mix, I can pick out every note but it isn't overpowering everyone else and there is a little bit of snarl coming over when you dig in on the odd note so for me all is good. The whole recording is a bit light on bass, the kick drum is coming over as a slap rather than a good heavy thump but that is probably down to how it was recorded and where in the room the recorder was. My guess though is that the audience were hearing a good sound, I enjoyed it. The second thing is that your worry seems to come from the rehearsal room. Every room has differing acoustics and sometimes you just sound *****! If certain frequencies are exciting room resonances and you are right on top of your speaker because there isn't a lot of space it's tough. Pointing your BB2 at your head often helps so taking a stand to rehearsal might help Do you like your on-stage sound generally? Ever had complaints from the audience about not enough bass? My suspicion is that you may have a problem that doesn't exist in practice. I'd expect your set up to give you plenty of power easily enough to keep up with your drums and if the guitar is too loud then get them to point their cab away from you. Take your time and see if this is just a one off or a recurring problem before you set off on an expensive quest for the perfect amount of heft.

I'm great at upsetting my band members with my unpopular opinions . You should have seen my current band's faces when I said I can't stand musical theatre. Previously it's been the Beatles, Eric Clapton and many others. I'm happy enough playing them and I'll pretty much always go along with the majority opinion but other musicians seem to be amazed I don't share their tastes. I'm baffled why I'm supposed to like everything they do. I don't understand the hatred for Coldplay. Is that controversial?

If this is an amp you cannot do without then it would make sense to simply buy another, they are going for around £350 here in the for sale section. You have no guarantee about what part of the amp might go wrong. If it was the power supply or the pre amp then you'd have spent a lot of money for nothing. Having said that I don't think you need to worry. If the failure rate is 5% a year the chances are that you'll have a long wait before you need the spare and modern amps are incredibly reliable, just relax and enjoy the amp you obviously love.

Ha ha, if I was wiser I'd spend less time talking about speakers on BassChat and more actually playing through them I'm pleased it's worked out, Last week we did two gigs with our ART310's, bass, guitar and two vox. I used a BD121 and guitar used a ZoomG1xon for a bit of shaping. It's just so easy and the sound you get out is lovely but importantly consistent. Mixer is an RCF M18 and I've got settings saved so all I need to do is load the scene from the last rehearsal. That was my duo, today we had a full band rehearsal and again just call up the settings saved from the last gig and away you go. Singer and I shared a radio link as I have three belt pack receivers both had in ears and for her it was her first experience, you should have seen her face! I started her off with over ears and swapped for some ZS10's halfway through. She's ordered a pair and I don't think she'll ever go back. Suddenly our guitarist wants to join in and our new drummer too. I'm expecting to go all in-ears within the next couple of months. You'll work out yourself how far to push the ART310's, you know they won't do everything but I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by what they will cope with. I do like a happy ending

Obviously the piano, like an acoustic guitar is a very different case, what you are listening to is the soundboard and the timber is absolutely critical, more so than the strings which are just a way of exciting the sound board. What interested me was that they tried moving the bridge point and investigated the effect of that on the vibration and that they measured the movement of the string and board to the point where they new what the phase relationships were. The article is just a stub from a lecture about the research but I'd imagine they explored a lot of maths to determining how the interaction between moving string and board worked. Apparently the bridge moving out of phase with the string increases sustain which I found counter intuitive. However I suppose if my 75kg walking over a 300ton suspension bridge can make the bridge bounce then a string can make a bass body bounce.

I'm a sceptic on this as so many things. I'm not saying that the tone woods thing is true or false and rather suspect it's a 'bit' true, just one of many things that contribute to tone. I do a lot of carpentry, though cabinets and windows rather than instruments and wood is really variable, not only between species but between planks cut from different parts of the same baulk of timber. You can tap two pieces of timber and they often have a unique sound. I'll bet xylophones aren't just made of any old wood. So yes, I doubt that there is a characteristic that every swamp ash body has and no basswood has, and like you I'm not convinced of 'tone wood' per se but I'm open to the idea the body is more than a dead passive element. I'm guessing that sometimes you strike lucky and the combination of all the factors means you find a good-un. I'm off to look up xylophones

Uncanny I was about to start another thread on this, fortunately we are all spared this To state my position I'm agnostic about this and a You Tube video isn't really evidence, however interesting. For me it's about physics and the amount of energy involved in picking or plucking a string is limited and the mass of a bass large so if it does make a difference then that needs some explaining. So the reason I came here to post was some evidence/research on decay time in pianos using a single string on a soundboard, certainly analogous to a guitar if not a bass. Lots of interesting (to me) data but one graph stood out. So the plots of the decay times of each note on the piano and the time it took for a 20db decay. You can see there is a general trend for the bass notes to decay slowly and the treble notes quickly. What's interesting though are the differences between adjacent notes. In the middle of the graph Gb4 sustains way longer than G4. playing that piano Gb4 would really jump out at you and if held would colour subsequent notes very differently toa transposition up a semitone. The research went on from there and two things were shown to be important. The position of the bridge and the phase of the movement of the soundboard (whether it was moving in time with the string or against it) Klaus Wogram: The strings and the soundboard article here Now the point is that the bass body of all my basses vibrate all over,I can feel it against my body when I pick a string and when i lightly touch the bass, it's what the clip on tuners detect. We also know that different woods vibrate differently depending upon mass, Young's modulus (springiness), shape and internal damping. The bridge must be moving, and the nut and these must have an effect upon the strings including whether they are moving in phase or out of phase. On my Jazz A and A# on the E string jump out at me if I play evenly, other notes aren't even either but that's the spot I always notice. It doesn't happen on the A string. You know what? It could be the body

You may be over-anxious about this. There is absolutely no reason ever for you to be louder than the drummer. If you ever were then the balance could only be right if you put the drums through the PA and then you'd have to put everything through the PA including the bass. Two 15's driven reasonably hard will be louder than the drummer and you really shouldn't lack volume with the possible exception of a large stage outdoors when you really should have a great PA. Wanting to get the stage volume down is the right way to go if you can, as you have realised. You said hi-tech PA, what did you get? it may be able to handle more bass and kick than you think.

You must have younger eyes than mine, I need large print

It's these sorts of issues that make it so laborious isn't it? Is the Perform mode a useful feature of Studio One?

How are you getting on with this now? Did you make the change to Presonus one?

Power amps are designed to provide lot's of clean power for PA systems. They are almost all stereo amps. A bass amp is just one with the pre-amp and a power amp in a single box. The advantage of the power amp is that you can buy very high powered amps if you wish and because more are sold they are often a cheaper way of getting very high power. The price per watt tends to be less. Many people like fiddling and are very interested in having what they think of as 'the best'. Just look at anglers, car modders and the like and you can see they spend a fortune on Gear Aquisition Syndrome and musicians too can suffer from GAS. I've seen great bassists with the best of everything and great bassists with the pile of tat they have played for 40 years. there isn't right or wrong. There was more point to this when bass amps were less powerful but as you've already found out the output stages are clean and if you go through the fx loop you don't need to spend on another power amp.

I think either of these will be ideal for the use you intend and will sound good into the bargain, but not the same. The best thing you could do would be to look at both and make a decision by trying them out, you'll also get an idea of the weight. Both are essentially reliable amps, the Peaveys of that era had a great reputation for being built like a tank. Ashdown have a reputation for after sales second to none and still support their old amps. My first two amps were a peavey 2x15 of that era and a MAG 600 both good but different. However these are both old amps and components can deteriorate unpredictably, there are dozens of these out there still working though so you will probably be lucky and at that price if they work for a year that is only 30p a day. If they do break then everything is replaceable/repairable unlike more modern equipment. Like the others i don't like the customisation on the Ashdown and wonder if any other mods have been done but these prices for that sort of giggable amp you can't really go wrong. Just try before you decide.

I might as well confess it is my amp that broke, I've never said that Markbass make unreliable gear. I dropped the amp off a stack (well someone else knocked the stack over) and I was unlucky. What I question is the business practices involved and the attitude to consumers along with the environmental implications. I'd make a comparison with car manufacturers. They've been trying to create a situation where you have to go to a main dealer for everything. New models come out with special tools needed for even basic maintenance and the diagnostic software is only made available to licenced outlets who have to pay huge fees to get properly updated. Parts only come in major assemblies and aren't repairable at component level. Certain models now are only 'sold' through lease schemes. Within this there is an attempt to create a monopoly situation where the manufacturer has total control of their product and the consumer no rights. Their policies also mean they control end of life. If they control the cost of parts and repairs then they control the point where the cost of repair is greater than the used value of a car makes it uneconomic to repair. The same thing is happening with mobile phones, security updates for most Android phones are generally only for two years according to a recent 'Which' survey, coincident with the end of the contract periods for most people. Apple do a little better. We all know the printer ink scam, buy a printer for £50 but get locked into a model where the profit comes entirely from the sale of inks with extensive measures to make the provision and use of third party inks difficult. The environmental costs of a throwaway model for consumer goods are extraordinary. Just the manufacture of a mobile phone creates over 80kg of CO2 according to 'New Scientist' plus the cost of mining for the various rare earth and other metals used in their manufacture. I can't believe much less is involved in an amp (class D or otherwise) The EU is currently legislating to make repairability a duty for manufacturers but in the end it is our attitude to this which will make a difference.