Phil Starr

I've had this message a few times, it is worth checking the units when entering the values. the default values are often not the same as the units used on the manufacturers spec sheets using m instead of mm for example. Clicking on the units lets you scroll through them to get a match. I also sometimes get WINisd 'losing' the box tuning when I'm recalculating. Going back and starting again usually clears that fault which may be down to operator error

Gigging on NYE and recovering today. I had a Quick Look at the Faital 6FE200 and it looks like a nice little speaker. I’ll report back on alternatives to the Fane when I get some time

Stick with it, once you get it working properly it is a revelation. Getting studio quality sound in your ears with a mix which is individual to you is just so good for your playing. Feels odd at first but you soon get adjusted and it becomes normal. The music itself becomes a bigger part of the performance once you can hear everything. You'll be much tighter as a band once you adjust. I'd never go back

£150 is a good budget. There is a choice of aluminium stands by K&M within your price bracket. I’m still using my cheap starter stands but the K&M mic stands I have are great.

It's not surprising that different manufacturers design things so their own brand tops work best with their own brand subs. There's no cash disincentive to do things this way as they hope you will stick to their brand for all your speaker needs. From a design point of view you can only optimise for a particular combination of top and sub as there are small but significant differences between speakers that might determine the ideal crossover point and filter slope for any given combination. In most cases you can make a sub work with any top but it's nice to think manufacturers wouldn't release a line of speakers without squeezing the best out of a combination. Putting the HPF part of the crossover into the tops makes a lot of sense for Alto. It's the tops that are most likely to blow speakers if you get the crossover wrong and nowadays all the speaker protection circuitry is combined with the crossover in the DSP. Relying on what is in someone else's sub does increase the chance of something going wrong over having all the protection built in. Another combination you might come across is the active sub with the power amps for passive tops built into the sub. A lot of the stick systems use this arrangement and I think Turbosound are offering 2+1 systems with conventional passive tops with all the power amps built into the sub.

Apologies to @cbd and @Mediocre Polymath One person getting different results from mine in Winisd is unfortunate two looks like carelessness. In this case mine. I've just checked the current Fane 6-100 on Fane's website and the specs are entirely different from mine. Fane have clearly changed the cone and suspension and I think the voice coil since I built my cab. It is effectively a different speaker. I'm going to have to have another look at this design and maybe find another driver to recommend.

Obviously the amp would be 'enough' to push the speaker into over excursion and knowing the power you were sending to the speaker is impossible unless you actually measured it. Settings like a '1/4 power' aren't really a reliable guide. However 'started distorting, crackling and cutting out' unless you were cranking it up further and further doesn't sound normal and may have been a faulty driver. WINisd will tell you the excursion and maximum power limits and which frequencies are likely to cause problems

8kHz is quite high, there is a chance it'll be good enough for what you need. There is another alternative which is again less than ideal but may be worth a try. You can use a piezo tweeter without a crossover and they naturally come in at very high frequences, IMO they don't sound great and I stopped using them after a few unsuccessful attempts to get the sound I wanted. I've got boxes of the damn things so you'd be welcome to a couple gratis if you want. You could wire them up with no cab at all and then fit them straight into your cab if you liked them.

If you want to go ahead with this I think I would start by building just one of the House Jam cabs as it is designed. Maybe moving the mounting of the speaker from it's central position to allow for the addition of a small horn. That way you have a usable bass cab and a tiny system for lighter gigs using the Warwick Gnome. You can then try it for keys and judge whether the lack of treble is an issue or not. As designed you are only missing the final octave of human hearing from this cab, it might sound OK, it might not. If it is good then go for a second cab and you can get stereo and a useful extra 6db of sound output. With the Gnome you'll get the full 200W ouput potential through 4ohms if you use both cabs. Adding a tweeter is slightly problematic, you really need a crossover. What you could do is adapt the tweeter and crossover from @stevie's lockdown 10" design. It has a crossover with just three components which we wired with a connecting block so no soldering. It won't be perfect and youd probably need to increase the value of the resistor a little to match the smaller 6" driver but this simple solution sounds great with the 10" speaker and it might work here too.

No, I have tried it as a vocal monitor at rehearsal and it does a great job. The problem with keys is they potentially have more deep bass than a bass guitar and they will have harmonic content all the way to the top of human hearing. This thing will only do 80-8kHz. However they might be better than the little built in speakers most Keyboards use. 25W will be fine in terms of power handling and take you loud enough for your jazz combo but you might need to add a tweeter. It might be acceptable though for piano and a Rhodes sound. the only certain way is to try it. Maybe someone here has built one and lives near you. Where do you live?

OK, start with a design spec, what you need and what would be desirable. I started wanting a simple single speaker design with a flattish extended upper response to cover up to 8kHz and a decent off axis HF. I could tolerate a peak in response at 3kHz or above but it needed to be well damped (broad and flat) rather than a sharp peak. Most important was that I was prepared to sacrifice a drop in bass response below 80Hz but I needed the 2nd harmonic octave 80-160Hz to be ruler flat, desirable was that the roll off below 80 Hz was fairly smooth. Desirable also was high efficiency, My aim wa s to be able to play along with other people up to but short of a full drumkit. This was to play at home with friends but I was also looking for something that might work at an open mic. My target was 110db or better. The 80-160Hz thing was absolutely crucial though. This speaker was to test a theory I'd held for a long time, that a rich rendition of the second harmonic was 90% subjectively of what we hear as 'bass' Time to select a driver. I knew I probably wanted a 6" cab from instinct, anything smaller was likely to lack efficiency and an 8" driver was going to need a bigger cab but I included a search of smaller and bigger speakers. Never trust intuition The first thing I'll look at is the frequency response graph. This is really going to define the sound of the speaker as it determines which harmonics we are going to hear. Particularly in the 6" size there are quite a few specialist mid-range drivers which won't handle bass and a few dedicated bass drivers with thicker heavier cones What I also know is that the size of a cab, at least in the Goldilocks region is defined by two factors Qts and Vas. Qts (Q for the whole speaker) is related to how much control the speakers magnet, electrical characteristics plus the mechanical components have over the cone movement. Knowing Q also gives me some idea of the probable. bass response. Low Q means tight control of the cone movement and bass being restricted, high Q means the cone movement is less well controlled and you will get a bass boost towards the bottom end of the frequency range. For a flat response I need Q to be in the range 0.3 to 0.6 and 0.4 is the Goldilocks point.Vas is a weird concoction of parameters but is the volume of air with the same mechanical characteristics as the speaker. My eventual cab size is going to be close to Vas so anything too big or small is out, With Qts I'm halfway to knowing the frequency response and with both Q and Vas I can work out the cab size in my head. So now I'm looking for a speaker that will do 80-8khz, reach 110db ideally with a modest amp and do all that in a cab of around 10l and I spend a couple of hours looking at every major brand available in the UK offerings of 6" drivers simply eliminating any that don't fit this spec. Mainly that involves looking at everything Lean Audio and Blue Aran offer. It's surprising how few drivers fit that sort of brief. The majority sacrifice efficiency for bass response or don't have the extended upper response that I wanted. I ended with a short list of around 10, none of them perfect and I then put those into Winisd to model them with a bit more accuracy and see how far I could stretch the design to make them do what I wanted. At this point I knew I'd have to compromise and the datea was going to tell me exactly what the compromises would be. Essentially that was mainly swapping efficiency for bass response only one speaker was going to be loud enough, all of the others would give more bass than the Fane but would compromise the top end response with their heavier cones and longer coils. I was going to have to sacrifice something like 3db or be fairly smart about the cab design to get the Fane to behave down to 80Hz. At this point I've got the best three drivers up on screenand I'm running two models of each. One is the Winisd recommendation and the other is the one I'm trying different cab sizes and tunings with. Eventually I've just got the FAne left and the issue is the Fane's resonant frequency of 111Hz which is too high. I know I can get a bit more bass by putting it in a cab which is a bit bigger than the Winisd suggested size but if I make it too big then it will quickly cease to be flat around 80Hz I also know I can shape the response down below 111Hz by careful tuning of the cab. I ended up with a 10l cab and 87Hz tuning and acheived my design spec. The cost was a unusually big reduction in power handling between 90-200Hz due to over-excursion. The Fane sacrifices excursion for efficiency so I was expecting that. At this point I was expecting to use the cab with a 20W amp so that was fine. the cab as designed will start distorting at about 20-30W mainly by compressing the bass but will operate safely up to 50W or maybe a smidgin more. I use mine nowadays with a 130W Gnome but roll off the bass control by 3dB on the Gnome if I'm running it flat out. Putting it on a floor back against a rear wall more than resores that 3db of roll off. 50W is enough to give the 110db I wanted from the cab. So there you go, in designing this cab I looked at maybe 100 drivers, shortlisted and modelled 10 and worked in detail on three or four before ending up with what is a simple but remarkable little cab. It sounds long winded but I've done this so many times I can pretty much hear the final cab in my head just from a set of figures, shortlisting took a couple of hours and modelling the cabs a couple of evenings. During Covid and lockdown it was good fun especially when I plugged in a proper big amp for the first time and turned it up to see just how far this thing could be pushed

All cone loudspeakers flex at high frequencies and adding a second whizzer cone to boost the highs was a common trick back in the 70's when a lot of PA speakers lacked horns and a crossover. There are still a few manufacturers making "full range" 12" drivers such as this The use of Aluminium in speaker cones has a long history, as @stevie has said and the characteristics are well known: stiffer than most fibre cones, poor damping of cone resonance and very pronounced breakup modes at high power and frequencies. Often aluminum was used with other materials to damp the resonances or to further stiffen the cone to get pistonic movement. There was even a craze for DIYers to add aluminium foil to their hi fi speakers at one point For pulp cones there is a lot of careful mixing of different plant fibres to get the right mixture of stiffness and self damping of resonance so people who design the drive units can to an extent control the way the cone behaves under breakup. I can remember one speaker that used banana fibres in the mix. I can't believe the people who came up with Hartke's signature gimmick weren't aware of this, or of it's marketing potential. Given the involvement of Larry Hartke I'd imagine a lot of this would simply be him asking for a 'bit more of a brighter tone' and then picking something that sounded good to him after a few iterations. They wouldn't have been looking for a flat response, just something that sounded good and would sell well. I quite liked my Hartke

you'd have to buy the ears I'm not sure if they would still be available, maybe look for one which is already rack mounted or has the ears

Yes it's all about tuning a whle set of frequency dependent factors, some of them characteristic of the driver and others of the box itself. Obviously you cant really change the characteristics of the driver other than by going for a different one. Basically you have control of the volume of the box and in a ported enclosure the resonance of the cab. Essentially the volume of the cab affects the bass response, a large volume giving more bass with a lower roll off point but with a drooping response, a small cab raises the roll off point and can give a significant boost in output around the cut off point which is at a higher frequency. That boost can become unpleasant and you can have a cab which is too big or too small. There's a Goldilocks size for each speaker and an area within which you can fiddle around a bit and optimise the output to your design spec or just your taste. With a ported cab you aim to extend the flat area of the output by getting the port tuned just below the point where the speaker's output us falling and the cone is starting to flap around outside it's safe excursion limits. At the tuning point the cab resonates on it's own (sort of) and 180deg out of phase with the cone which started the resonance. That means the air in the cab is moving the 'wrong' way and creates enough pressure on the speaker cone to stop it moving, What you hear is all coming out of the port. The Goldilocks point for the cab is where it is 'maximally flat' the flattest response possible. WINIsd goes for those first (They are called things like QB3, BB4, SBB4 and C4) and they can be calculated simply just knowing two parameters Qts and Vas. The clever bit of programs like WINIsd is that you can go off piste, They can calculate exactly how far the cone can move at every frequency and work out the frequency response, power handling, excursion and so on for pretty much any design changes you make. That's brilliant because it's so quick if like me you've ever had to do the calculations by hand. If you are interested I can go through the process that helped me come up with the original House Jam cab to Illustrate one approach to designing a cab and choosing the right driver to go in it.

Another factor with a capacitor is that the whole design of this cab with the very high tuning of 87Hz was to get the flattest response possible down to below 80 Hz. As you can see with your own WINIsd plot it's hard to get a flat response low down with other tunings. All cab design is a matter of compromise and this one was done by compromising on power handling and the speaker being almost unloaded below 70Hz in part mitigted by it's intended use with a Gnome/Elf/BAM style amp which has a bit of HPF going on. I'm a bit prejudiced against a simple in line capacitor. In the olden days when I built amps I found a few that really didn't lke a capacitative load. In addition the capacitor produces a phase shift. @stevie is more expert than I but I instinctively wouldn't want that happening at the port tuning frequency. Being lazy I haven't looked at any calculations though

Even the 68mm port is a bit on the small side. 75mm would be better. I use drainpipe because it's easy to get hold of and you can get hole saws to cut a 68mm hole. It's part of the easy build philosophy behind my BassChat designs and I think I mentioned this somewhere in the text. We did specify the Blue Aran ports early on but availability was so patchy people were pausing their builds so I went back to drainpipe. The micro amps are 130W into 8 ohms.

You almost certainly have a tone control which will roll off the bass by 12db or more. It would be easier to just use that as a starting point, not least because it costs you nothing and you can restore the system back to normal when that has finished. I don't want to speculate too much but anyone using the cab for the first time will sense the loss of the bottom frequencies and probably boost the bass on their amp or bass if it is active. We've all played with guitarists who swear blind that they haven't turned up even when you can see it on the meters. Bassists can be just as naughty The thing is that it is perfectly acceptable to use a big amp with a small speaker if you are aware of all the parameters. As the owner of everything you know the risks and will be careful accordingly. For a bassist just jamming with their mates and no knowledge of the gear involved you'll just go for it. Just swapping from a bridge pup to a neck pup could be enbough to put you in the red zone. At open mic nights I reckon I'd match my cabs to double the amp power for 'safety' as you have no idea what fx or playing style you will come across and some people are brutal with their equipment.

Just back from having impressions taken by Michelle at Snugs HQ. My lord it is hard to find, I thought we were rural. No phone signal either so it's hard to ring in. Michelle evenmtually hd to come out onto the road and flag me down on the way past. Anyway its a very simple procedure, a foam block is pushed into your ears and a two part resin injected which takes 3or 4 minutes to set. I sing a little so was asked to use a bite block, I think all it was doing was keeping my mouth open and still. The resin/gel sets with no heat, no real force is needed, not a suggestion of discomfort thoughout. it was all really a non event. 10 mins later I was saying goodbye. I get the moulds next year as Snugs are closed for Christmas I'm looking forward to trying these, the amount of sound that was blocked once the gloop was injected was impressive, probably years since I've been somewhere tht quiet, it promises well for the in-ears when I get the new moulds. I also discovered that I have particularly narrow ear canals but also rather high, like a letter box on it's side I guess, no wonder I couldn't get round plugs to seal. I let you all know when I get the final moulds back next year.

Sorry Al, I'm leading you astray again. On the plus side you'll be blown away by the sound per pound ratio. I still covet your new mixer though

That’s a tricky one. I think you have to decide that yourself. The speaker would handle bass and it has the full protection of the DSP which is probably common to all RCF stuff. A single speaker would be 6db down in volume though. I’d be mixing in stereo at home too so a single speaker wasn’t something I ever considered. I suppose £89 for a bass combo that sounds great is a bargain though. You could drive it off your mixer or something like a Zoom.

This was with my duo, two vocals, bass, guitar and a drumtrack going through a small desk into a pair of these. In my 'study' which is probably 3mx4m the volume was around our on-stage volume at gigs and loud enough that we had to amplify the acoustic guitar when we used it. The sound quality is stunning, certainly a match for hi-fi costing double and this is with the built in amps included.

The problem was probably excessive excursion. The cab is an awful lot safer with those sort of powers if you use an HPF at 50Hz or even higher. The output is very limited below 80Hz by design so there's no point letting anything through below that. The coil may have been smacking against the back of the magnet and if it over excurts (is that a word?) it loses the cooling effect of being in the magnetic gap. If i'm playing that loud I pretty much always put the cab right in a corner and roll off the bass which corner placing reinforces. I'm glad it's mended, the BAM will be a perfect match and does have some bass roll off built in which helps.

Btw they are also selling the RCF AYRA Pro5 studio monitors for £89. That's mad for decent studio monitors that will take bass at pretty high volumes (I've rehearsed with mine) and which sound not far short of my moderately expensive hi-fi

I'm so tempted at that price. Get ye behind me!

Ain't that the truth! The trouble is that they watch too many videos and copy the moves. It's quite fun watching some live video and picking out when you are listening to a recording or one of the backing singers. I've spotted Kylie's live videos where she has dropped the mic down to her knee and the vocal continues with no change in volume or timbre. Trying to persuade a singer to watch mic technique on genuinely live video seems to be like asking them to read War and Peace.