Phil Starr

This is where it gets interesting. This shows the maximum output the speakers can make. All of them have a dip centred around 80Hz. This is normal and is due to excursion limits. The speaker has to move further for low frequencies and below 50Hz none of them can manage the excursion. At 60Hz the port is making most of the sound and the speaker movement is damped by the port so they can all do their thing. At low levels over-excursion just manifests itself as distortion, at high levels it can destroy the speaker or lead to the coil overheating and reduced output or power compression. Over excursion reduces the power handling of the speaker. The Kappa comes out best with only a tiny dip which would be inaudible, The Deltalites have a significant dip of over 6db and the power handling before distortion drops to 60W. The dips in the other two aren't anything I would worry about but the Kappa is definitely going to give the tightest sound in this box. The Beyma is the strange one as it is 6db louder at 40Hz than the others in this box. I don't think a 40Hz output is musically useful in a bass speaker. our hearing down there isn't very good but it can excite room resonances and muffle the bass. In a band setting I prefer those frequencies to be left to the drums with the bass filling the gap between kick and the other instruments. If I'm mixing and the desk allows it I'll filter the bass at 50hz and my ideal sound is flat between 80-160Hz. If I'm designing a small speaker I do design in that extra warmth a mid-bass hump gives to compensate for the lack of bottom end. In listening tests most bassists however seem to like the warm bloom in their sound. It's a bit marmite though, you love it or hate it. At this point then it's a matter of taste. For me at this budget point I'd go for the Kappa, The UK prices for Eminence speakers has recently improved so they are competitive again. I like a tight articulate bass sound and would roll off the bass at the lowest frequencies anyway. However it is a matter of taste not right or wrong. The other thing is that of these speakers all but the SM212 have a midrange peak that livens up the sound of a single driver, effectively the Delta and the Faital have a mid-scoop, the result of that low hump in the bass and the mid peak. They sound like a bass speaker. The SM212 has a flat but extended mid/top and sounds more neutral. I gigged with it for years and you just have to eq differently but I've moved on to cabs with horns and I'm happier with that. So you have lots of options but the first choice is nice warm old school or tight and articulate bass.

Mixing speakers is a bit of a lottery. No speaker is truly flat and the character or timbre is a result of all the lumps and bumps in the response. With two speakers the peaks won't line up and the combination will create a completely different set of highs and lows. You'll lose the character of both speakers. On top of that you'd have to match sensitivity and speakers have to be matched to the box so you'd need two boxes.

OK this is the frequency plot for 4 speakers. The Kappalite used by Barefaced (red) Beyma Sm212 (blue) Deltalite (purple) and the Faital 320 (green) all in the same cabinet 50litres. You know what the Deltalite's sound like so that gives you a starting point. They have a peak around 120Hz of about 2db which is colouring the bass and the bass rolls off slowly from there. The Beyma has a similar peak slightly les high than the Delta's but has the highest output at 40Hz of all the speakers. The FAital has the highest peak of all, around 3db and the highest output between 50-100Hz. the interesting one is the Kappalite with the most powerful magnet it has the flattest response down to 70Hz and then rolls off more quickly that the other speakers. Remember this is just the bass response up to 200Hz so not the whole picture. Remember these are all in the same box, they can all be put in different boxes, the beyma would love a larger box and the Kappa would be better in a smaller box, or i can tune the boxes differently and shape the curves a little. Despite this I think it is fair to say the Beyma is going to have the deepest bass and the Kappa is going to be the most honest speaker with all the rest tending towards warm sounding.

That would work to give you the deep bass but you'd be a bit limited by the power handling of the compression driver of the horn and you'd have to consider how the crossover would work. It would handle the crossover to one bass driver only. You could wire it that way but then the mids from the second driver would interfere with the output from the horn. None of this would be a disaster necessarily and it's something many people have tried with other speakers and been happy with. You were right in assuming you could just put two speakers in a double sized box btw though you/I would have to recalculate the port size. To be fair a couple of us in the design team were looking to try running a mk2 (tweetered) on top of a Mk1 including me so I obviously didn't think it daft. The bass you get from two SM212's is extraordinary but they are a bit dark without any tweeter. 'Beat' was only something I used because the Deltalites are a nice speaker and 'only' cost £134 at the moment comparable with the £139 for the Faital 320 which we used in the Mk 3. There's no point in spending £500 unless you get an advantage over spending £268 on the Delta's. Of course 'advantage' is another subjective word. So I guess what I'm trying to find out is what you expect to gain. The Beyma SM212 has been discontinued despite my contacting Beyma directly but Blue Aran bought up their remaining stock and they still have a few left. The SM212 does have an advantage in low power handling/excursion over anything else at that price but if you wanted to go that route you'd need to buy them before BA sell out. Are you in a rush? I'm not going to have much time this week but I'll offer you a few options as soon as I have time to model them.

OK That's helpful, I'd identified the Deltalites as a possibility So are you looking to beat the SWR or just for something different? £250 per driver is a top price for a 12 so you'd have a wide choice

OK that's a good starting point, I'm guessing lightweight is not an issue then Those Carlsbro's probably have high efficiency as they have short throw speakers and of course lots of them. You won't get that out of a 2x12 and modern drivers without going for something with short voice coils and restricted power handling as a result. So what sort of an amp would you be going for? Am I designing for a 100W valve amp or a 5-800W classD? (I'm picturing a 500W class A/B from the 19" spec) How are you going to use the speaker? All purpose gigging speaker, with or without PA support, All the bass coming from the backline with John Bonham and Keith Moon doubling up on drums? What sort of tone are you after is another issue too. Finally the big one. What's the budget?

Hi, I've been wondering about adding to the designs and publishing them here. I thought a 2x10 or a 15 would be next though we did briefly discuss a simple build 1x12T along the lines of our 110T. The biggest problem is not the design but because all our speakers are built then proper testing and measurement is followed by extensive gigging before we recommend them. It's the testing and development that takes the time. Maybe we could do something different and design a 2x12 for you and ask you to document the build. We could then get proper drawings done and others could copy the build. That is assuming you just want a straight 12 with no horn and crossover which we couldn't do without testing and measurement. Would you be up for that?

This is one of the clearest and most concise summaries I've seen. I suspect I might be quoting this for a while. Interestingly the Bugera has been a subject of much debate and as a result has been repeatedly measured at around 720W depending upon the distortion levels you want to measure it at. That's entirely consistent with the figure of 705W RMS calculated above. There's a genuine dilemma for amp designers and manufacturers. You can design an amp to score well in the standard tests at 1/8 ratings or beef up the power supply, heat sinking and a few components and deliver a more rugged amp that will deliver in a wider range of conditions. In my book that makes it a better amp and likely to prove more reliable to boot but it is then marketed against amps that look better on paper. On the upside such manufacturers should build a better reputation long term. For me I'd prefer a regulated market where only standardised figures are allowed to be quoted in advertisements and penalties are imposed upon companies who deliberately mislead. Even this 'simple' explanation @agedhorsehas offered is not easy for a non technical musician to follow. I'd like us as a society to encourage the good guys and discourage sharp practice. Think VW and emissions.

Welcome to BassChat. You've probably had to wait a bit for an answer because neither of those things are really bass equipment so nobody here will be very familiar with them. Neither am I but to me these look like domestic kit for people who just want to go camping and make a bit more noise or recharge batteries. Eye wateringly expensive too. The battery pack is no match for an ordinary leisure battery which will typically carry four times that charge and cost about a third (admittedly they will be much heavier). The Soundboks speaker is just another bluetooth speaker. Admittedly a 10" speaker is unusual. I sincerely doubt that it will create 121db sound levels at 40Hz even despite it's extraordinary price. You don't want bluetooth when playing bass anyway as it has a time delay (latency) which would make playing along with anyone else tricky. The problem is that bass is power hungry so portable speakers are bass light and batteries area a bulky way of providing power so power is limited and portable amps tend to be power light. Roland make battery powered PA amps in their Cube series and other people have used battery powered PA amps. The other approach is to look for something to run your normal rig from, something called an inverter that converts battery power to mains voltage. This isn't simple because not every amp will work with every inverter. Someone will come along and link you to the relevant threads about portable bass amps. Because there is so little choice in the market a few of us have looked at DIY approaches and there is a thread where someone built a compact battery powered combo and I've designed a mini bass speaker here which a few other people have built too. House Jam Micro Cab - Amps and Cabs - Basschat

Likewise, apologies for delay in response. My buddies at Essex Amp Repair appear to be having problems making contact with distributor / parts. Transpires that I need a replacement power module...... The problem in a nutshell. Mark Bass won't deal direct and support even the best repairers and the only place to get replacements is Real Electronics who have a monopoly.

That sounded pretty good Al, which bass cabs were you using? Actually it speaks well for the mids in those cabs, female vocals are what I tend to use to to audition cabs when I'm doing listening tests as anything nasty going on usually jumps out at you as a change in the voice if you use a recording you know. I use Western Highway by Maura O'Connell as a go to and I know Stevie uses Sade I use classical music to give speakers a proper run out. The lowest fundamental frequency of a female voice is 165-255 Hz so the improvement in the lower ranges of her voice isn't affected by any changes in the bottom two octaves of your cabs, that's about low mids and may just be about the tonal variations between two speakers or just about venue acoustics but anyway the mids worked well for her.

I think that is a sensible approach. Just to be completely fair I liked my MB Tube a lot and it was reliable until someone knocked it of the stack at an open mic. I've no evidence that their gear is any less reliable than most or than you would expect of any product sold in the thousands. My only issue is with their support.

That's encouraging that it could be something simple. The trouble is that you need to have confidence in it, do you have a backup plan for the gig? A DI box or multi fx pedal or anything else that could feed to the PA. If it's a hired PA they should be able to give you bass into your monitors.

Dare I say it again? Welcome to the club. Mark Bass have outsourced their after sales support to Real Electronics who don't really repair amps but will do board swaps. They are granted a monopoly by MB who don't support UK repairers with parts supplies or circuit diagrams. As a result Real offer a take it of leave it service. Their treatment of you by pointlessly replacing the pots and charging a substantial fee for a couple of hours work and a couple of quid in parts falls well below what you should expect of a competent repairer. As you agreed to the 'repair' it's hard for you to go to the small claims court, which of course they will be aware of. The answer is simple, don't buy Mark Bass until they fix this.

That's a good bit of kit.

That sounds frustrating OK you are running the Stagepas off a mixer which is good. I'm assuming they want to go down this route because they don't want to spend too much. Is that right? So the suggestion I'd personally make and keeping it simple is between two of these https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/234255493119 or a PA amp of roughly 300W/channel. The link is for some Laney 15" PA speakers who are selling off old stock through eBay. @Chienmortbbhas one he is evaluating so you could ask him, I've used one at rehearsal and it was good. Laney have a long history so are pretty much to be trusted. Not everything that comes out of China goes pop, it is the wild west though, ironically with few government controls and you have no idea who you are trading with when you go direct. I've had no problems with Behringer PA amps and I'd even happily buy a used one. Thomann give a 3 year guarantee on the T-amp. I'd stress the simplicity of going the active route in set up, they might even be able to offload the monitors and get something back to pay for the replacements. Good luck with your band members, it'd be much simpler if they took your advice and went for the Alto's and you'd look more professional with a line of matching monitors.

First of all the usual, if that's where you want to be why start from there? You could waste a lot of time and money bodging things to get a couple of clapped out old monitors working on stage only to eventually find out that active monitors or in-ears would have been the solution all along You've made it clear that this is not the advice you want. First of all you say Trio, who plays what, and what do they want to hear that they can't hear with the current set up? Your Stagepas system doesn't seem to have an Aux bus so you can't all have different mixes so I assume you either want to hear the front of house mix or vocals only? Is your Alto not loud enough for you all to hear it? If all you want is a bit more volume and you insist on using the monitors you have then all you need is a stereo PA amp. I've never had problems from a Behringer amp and recently sold a 20 year old EP2400 for £100, I bought an iNuke for a similar price so maybe start looking for something similar. Thomann's own brand amp looks a good shout too https://www.thomann.de/gb/the_tamp_e800.htm

So you are tri-curious then It's an interesting proposition, there are fundamentally two reasons for splitting the frequency response of any speaker and two reasons why you don't do it if you don't have to. Producing lots of bass needs a big heavy cone both to push lots of air and to lower the resonant frequency of the speaker, high frequency reproducers need to move quickly so lighter is better. The other factor is dispersion, when the speaker diameter becomes larger than the wavelength it starts to beam the sound. The arguments against are cost and the problems associated with the crossovers, they are difficult to design well, almost impossible to make flat around the crossover point with the two drivers interfering with each other and of course also add weight and expense. Of course an electric bass is not a full range instrument, surprisingly there isn't usually much deep bass because of the positioning of the pickups and not much top end because the impedance of the pickups rises with frequency so depending upon the PUP will have little signal above 5-6kHz. The pickup itself is acting as a low pass filter. The tiny horns you see on most bass designs aren't doing much good, a lot of them only give an output above 4kHz especially those horrible piezo tweeters and few of them have a proper crossover. To really usefully smooth out the response and sort out the dispersion problems for bass you really need to crossover below 2,000Hz, the lower the better. This is where the mid range comes in. If you run something between say 500 and 5000Hz then you can use a dedicated bass driver with a really big heavy cone and a horn and driver ideal for the upper frequencies. In fact do you really need a tweeter for bass if 5000Hz is all you need to reach? There are a few options you could purchase, none of them cheap. The Fearless F115 has a 6" mid and is a nice design. It's just a design though there are some licenced builders and they come up used occasionally. Genzler sell a 12-3 with an array of mid /top drivers, really just a 2 way design and you could go FRFR with a PA cab like the RCF ART745 which has a massive 4" compression driver crossing over at 500Hz. I suppose you could also look for one of the older 15/6 or 12/6 designs. The reality is that a 3-way design properly done would be way more than twice the price of a single speaker design and more than a 2 way of comparable quality. I've heard the Fearless and it sounds fabulous but it isn't small and it ain't cheap. Good modern design makes a 2 way design possible that will come close to or exceed a 3 way design at a lower price unless you are really prepared to pay silly money. Of course 'better' is also a matter of taste.

I think in one of the other threads you said you hadn't even turned it on? If so that suggests to me that the fault has to be before the mains switch on the amp and something is shorting before the power even reaches the amp. Obviously it's better to get your money back from the seller and you don't want to invalidate anything by opening her up but tripping the RCD with the amp switched off......

I love it, a new variant. we will soon have an epidemic of tiny bass speakers. Interesting that you've found that this is a really revealing speaker, exactly what we've found with the Fane version. It's really great for practice I find, not obtrusive but there is no pretending about your technique so you start to correct it as you go. Go easy on your speaker, it's basically a hi-fi speaker with a roll surround and a heavier cone. The 'spider' that supports the coil will be more flexible too. All that tunes the speaker lower, traded off for a bit of reduced efficiency. It'll probably have quite good excursion too but it won't be as rugged as the Fane which was designed as a pro PA driver. The 35Hz claim is possibly true as a -10db figure. The 200W is almost certainly a 'peak' figure and inflated by 6db so treat it as a 50W speaker and it should be OK. Well done, it looks great and I hope you'll have lots of fun with it.

Probably the best advice you have had

I think you can tell that for bands this is an immature technology; just by the sheer range of differing approaches. I was listening to an RCF demo on Monday and that one had four 10" drivers in the column plus horn and 15" subs. it sounded fabulous but was around £6k. This if you are going all the way from 2" drivers to 10" then you are having vastly different engineering decisions and results. I'm really attracted by some of the theoretical advantages of this sort of approach, @stevie and I were discussing a bass speaker design along these lines before Genzler brought out their version. One thing we haven't mentioned as an advantage is that you can cross over much lower than you have to with most compression drivers in the typical 12/15 plus horn PA cab. Human hearing is most sensitive in the 1-4kHz range so having a crossover away from the frequencies we are most discriminating in is a definite gain. I think where we are at these systems have great potential and they look good, save the need to lift a heavy speaker onto a pole, offer a simple set up and can offer superb sound in a convenient package. However the cheaper systems are struggling to get to high sound levels and pound for pound you still get higher sound levels out of a conventional two way speaker. I've looked at these really hard recently for my own use and was really tempted by the Evox but to get the sort of sound levels which would cover all our possible gigs that meant the Evox 12. I've gigged with a pair of Maui's and they sound good but can't be pushed. That's £3500 for a pair of Evox 12's. Thomann are offering the ART 710 plus 705subs as a package for £2500 and would have a similar performance. In the end I picked up a couple of used ART 745's which was my first choice before I started looking. I think it's fair to say that for like for like performance there's probably a 30%ish increased cost in going for the columns. I guess it still depends upon matching your kit to your needs.

The moral of the story is don't believe the store guys or You Tubers. There is nothing magic about these line source/column speakers They've been in existence since at least the 1930's and knowledge of them since pretty much the invention of the loudspeaker. It's part of the physics of sound that any sound producing object starts to beam the sound as the radiating diameter approaches the wavelength of the sound. Basically low sounds are omnidirectional and high sounds are beamed. That's one of the reasons why tweeters are little and why some purists don't like conventional 4x10's. Putting lots of tiny speakers in a long line means that they are collectively small in the horizontal direction and the mid's/ highs will disperse evenly around the room, and because there are lots of speakers they can be loud. In the vertical plane they cancel off axis and behave like a big speaker. The net effect is that they radiate a predictable flat but wide beam into the room. For most venues that's pretty ideal. Horns work differently but basically they can be shaped to funnel the sound in a predictable way and you have a lot of control of direction. there are long throw horns with a narrow beam and short throw horns and every shade in between. A typical PA speaker will have a 90x60 horn, fairly short throw and fairly wide angle horizontally but more restricted vertically, you don't want to waste sound bouncing off the ceiling. Beaming is a thing, but it isn't good or bad, just appropriate. If it's too narrow you will only hear a decent mix in line with the speaker, too wide and the sound disperses quickly and you get multiple pathways to your ears and muddled sound. If your mic is picking up the sound from the speakers it will always eventually feedback, the question is when. The early Bose systems just weren't very loud but their ads made a feature of being able to put the PA at the back. Like the 'drink 2l of water a day' some daft advertising campaigns just take off. Drink when you are thirsty guys! A wide flat dispersion and a smooth frequency response helps avoid feedback but keeping the speakers away from the mic helps more.

Yandles in Martock have stocked it. Might be worth a ring.

It's interesting isn't it about how people can get the sound so wrong. Especially in a world where you can get degrees in music technology as opposed to the world I started in where the blind led the blind. The first job of setting up a PA was to build the speakers! The thing is that whilst there is science or engineering and it is certainly useful to know your theory there is also skill and care involved. A couple of years ago in Hyde Park I heard the Killers, Elbow and Tears for Fears all using the same PA, Elbow sounded great, Tears for Fears out of this world and the Killers awful. Killed (sic) by the kick, distortion from the subs being overdriven, bass mud and the guitarist barely audible. This went on for the whole of the gig with no-one apparently noticing at the desk which must have had half a dozen people there. Meanwhile on a side stage a young band came on, no sound check. The young engineer (sorry John) in his very early 20's started with the overblown kick and one note bass but tamed it about 60secs into the first song. 5 mins later the sound was just glorious and he stopped twiddling and sat back to let the band do their thing pretty much. All this achieved with easing the sliders into position so that no-one would have noticed the gradual changes as he made them. He can't have been more than 23 but it was a total joy to watch/hear. I'm sure age/experience helps as does learning about sound systematically but you can't teach a good set of ears and an understanding of music, or a willingness to listen and an understanding of how musicians work.