Phil Starr

Bad luck. Like the others it sounds like it could be a power supply issue if the screen lit up for long enough to reset. Try batteries. One possibility is the input jack, that's what switches the thing on and off. It's probably working by the sleeve on the plug shorting the ring and sleeve connections internally, though there could be a switch. Try a bit of switch cleaner on your jack lead and maybe give it a wipe. I'd avoid spraying inside too much so you might clean the socket with a bit of switch cleaner on the plug and a wiggle in and out. Other than that it could be something simple internally but a repairer is going to want a fixed charge to open it up to look and that won't be much less than a new one. Good Luck

Funnily enough I just decided to revisit this after some good reviews from the Southwest Bass Bash. The 'extension cab' was built to match the original combo internally it measures 304x250x150mm which is 10l plus space for the driver and the port is 50mm internal dia and 55mm long. No guarantees it'll work as well with another driver but it's a fun project. I'm intending writing this up as a proper project over the next few weeks

They've already indicated this is a possibility. I'll get back to them when I 've taken it a bit further and I've got a bit more to show them.

reserved

reserved

reserved

reserved

UNDER DEVELOPMENT Hi All, as most of you will know a few of us here have been developing a series of cab designs on a similar line to creative commons. Free for anyone to use, share or add to so long as it is done on a not for profit basis. So far we have developed a 1x12 Basschat Mk1, a smaller easy build version of the 1x12, a very high quality lightweight FRFR 112T currently described as the Mk3 (the mk 2 was withdrawn when the drive units ceased to be manufactured) and a low cost 110T. I've also built a 1x6 'House Jam Combo' in the build diaries along with a 6" House Jam home practice speaker, a lightweight 2x10 and a 1x15 not yet published but which I'm happy to share. I'm sure there will be more to come so that we will have a fairly comprehensive set of designs. The problem has been that with the passage of time (we started in 2014) the designs have gradually become lost in the thousands of topics posted on BC and a lot of the original illustrations/photo's have been lost when file sharing sites went down or became subscription only. My aim is to make sure you can get all the links to the original designs from one place and to go back and retrieve as much information as I can to aid anyone who wants to build these designs. I'd also like to achieve a little standardisation to keep the design threads as short as possible but with plenty of helpful practical hints. At the moment most of the designs are long rambling threads going on for many pages. I'll link to those threads to start with but replace them with links to the edited designs as I get time to do them. I'm going to reserve a few replies so i can easily edit this thread please don't comment for the next 10-15 mins Basschat 12 Mk1 single 12" driver, 350W, 122db, 14kg easy to build 1x12" Mk1 112 Basschat 'Easybuild Cab' Smaller version of the Mk1 with a tailored bass response to match difficult acoustic spaces (pokey pubs ) this has a video of a live build (in under an hour!) at the Southwest Bass Bash Easy 12" cab build Basschat Mk3 lightweight 12" neo driver with neo horn very high quality FRFR design. FRFR 112T Basschat 110T Easybuild Lockdown project. A lightweight 'easybuild' 1x10 with a good quality horn. The crossover has only three components and requires no soldering. Basschat easy-build 110T House Jam Combo/speaker A remarkably competent and loud 1x6 perfect for home practice and semi acoustic work. This is a build diary with minimal design details but I'll look to write this up as a design as soon as possible A House Jam Speaker

I do wonder if we shouldn't boycott MarkBass stuff until they sort out their customer support. The idea of paying out a fairly substantial sum just to be told your amp is uneconomic to repair is just not a great way to treat customers. I'm another facing a £200+ repair bill for a complete board change for what is probably a simple component failure. I'm fairly competent with electronics but the idea of taking on switch mode gear and surface mounted components is fairly daunting particularly without a circuit diagram to work from. I don't know if the rest of Europe is better served but I'm certain that if MarkBass cared about their customers they could negotiate a better deal than that currently offered by Real Electronics. It is possible that with a fair proportion of bassists signed up to Basschat we might have enough muscle to gain better support from MarkBass in the UK. @MoJoKe is this something you could raise with MarkBass?

Hi I'm also getting a feel for your level of competence and you don't need very much support from me, just someone to bounce ideas off and maybe help with a few decisions. As you see I came up with a 55l 'solution' as a bit of a sweet spot with a -3db point of 70Hz. Doesn't look like Peavey did get it wrong Don't worry about the triangular port, they aren't wrong but we can do better and we'll recalculate for whatever cab you decide to build anyway. I wouldn't say the Scorpion 'benefits' from a smaller cab. If you go back to my first post you can see what changing cab size does to the response on the graph. It is however remarkably tolerant of different cab sizes. Anyway all you have read ties in pretty much with what WinISD is telling me. I'll have a look later at what effect differing panel materials will have on the weight of the cab but it looks like you are accepting a 50-60litre cab as a good compromise. It'll give you plenty of output in the 80-160Hz range and enough below 80Hz not to be disappointing. If you like the showman sound then it's going to fine for your needs. Before you build let the software do the experimenting for you, you don't need to build multiple cabs nowadays. I think most of your decisions are made.

If you are prepared to use another speaker to get a more room friendly size this is a 102 driver in a 30l cab compared with your scorpion in an 80l cab. I've pretty carefully matched the frequency resonse down to 50hz so the bass response is going to sound very similar. The scorpion with it's much larger surface area is going to be noticeably louder though . So over to you. New (or used but smaller) driver or if not how much are you prepared to compromise the bass response to get a cab that works for you?

OK Green and purple you've already seen. Green is your current response with an 80l cab and purple is what your Scorpion would look like in a 30l cab. I wouldn't like to see that much bass missing and It wouldn't give anything like the bass in the video clip. I think Red is a distinct possibility. It's in a 55l cab retuned to give a slight peak at just over 100Hz to warm up the sound and -3db is at 70 Hz so all your second harmonics will be there. I think this will sound great in your living room where deep bass can be just a bit of a nuisance. It was the best compromise I could find that would keep that second harmonic (80Hz -160) rich enough to sound good. The old school sound you like from guitar speakers lacked a lot of deep bass which they compensated for with rolling off the upper frequencies with the tone control on the bass. No guarantees but you might well be able to achieve the sound you want this way. Is 55l small enough for domestic harmony as well?

Hi, I've been chilling out after entertaining friends for a couple of days and thought I'd revisit your design. Without exact measurements for your cab I'm thinking it isn't much smaller than 80l. Fiddling around with different sized cabs I think you have a couple of fairly simple choices. The first is that if you keep the Scorpion then it works well in a cab of 60-80l. Any reduction in size loses a bit of bass. Your choice is: to go for a really small cab like the easy build 30l cab and just accept it isn't going to have good bass output but that's something you can live with. Small size is more important than sound. build a cab similar in size to the Peavey cab but reduced by housing the amp elsewhere. this keeps the sound you have and you could shave a little bit off the size and be OK Go for a middle option of a roughly 50l cab which loses your bass but keeps good reproduction of the upper bass/second harmonics. There is another option you can consider, if what you want is a living room friendly cab then buy a different speaker that suits the 30l cab. I can give you more or less the same response of your current speaker with a 10" driver. It just won't be as loud but it will be in a smaller cab. I'll put up a couple of graphs from winISD to show you how this looks.

Welcome to Basschat This is my practice set up too, I use a Zoom B1ON which has been updated and is now the B1-Four Zoom B1 FOUR Bass Multi-Effects Pedal at Gear4music It has many amp emulations and bass effects, metronome and drum machine, an input for audio devices so you can play along and a decent headphone amp all for £65. A lot of people here use the same set up of Zoom+Headphones. I find the drum machine particularly useful for tightening up my playing and learning tricky pieces. You can play it slowly and speed it up gradually but mainly it sounds great and that makes me want to practice. Some things are just 'right' and this is one of them. I'm not a big fan of practice amps, it's quite hard to make a tiny speaker sound really good for bass and 'proper' bass amps can always be turned down. There are things like the Phil Jones amps but they are really proper gear miniaturised and are really quite pricey. If you want to save space and money and also have a great sound go for the Zoom.

It's true, you were more interested in the bass and I noticed how enthusiastically you were adjusting the bass boost, I was seriously concerned for my little sixer as the level was already quite high. It actually coped fine.

One more, this is a Celestion G12 guitar speaker in the 30l box which I built for my guitarist. this is a more typical old school response, more like what is in your video.

OK this is your Peavey in a 30l cab, again compared with it in a 60l ported cab. As you can see it is creating a small peak and pushing the -3db point upwards. My concern though is that you are 7db down at 80Hz. that 80-160Hz is essential to a bassist IMO as it covers the second harmonic for the whole bottom octave of a 4 string. The old guitar cabs often had a strong hump in that area. having said that the roll off of the 15 in a small box is gradual and you could safely apply quite a bit of bass boost with a speaker this size in a home environment. I've never built a speaker with that sort of response so It's an educated guess as to what it would sound like

I'm loving the finger joints and the way he's formed the corners in a contrasting wood, lovely attention to detail. The 'easy build' is really just the adoption of reinforced butt joints and drainpipe ports. I build a lot of cabs and can't stop experimenting so a quick build with no clamping suits me. With the easy-build carcass you can also just screw the back and baffle in place so they can be removed if you are still in the development stage and need to change things. You do get a bit of panel damping from the battens and the extra weight is minimal.

Thanks guys, as I said I spent most of my time behind the desk so didn't really get to hear much until we started playing with the Greenboy so yours are the definitive views. Stevie deserves pretty much all the credit for the MkIII as he did all the development work. John and I were very much the supporters egging him on.

On to the 'shootout' which was a bit curtailed because I wasn't sure I was doing it until the day before. My usual partners in crime Stevie and Chienmortbb(John) were swamped at work and moving house respectively so i was on my own. I forgot John normally brings the sheets to hide the speakers so it wasn't a blind test. The advantage of this is that not having to hide things meant we could move things in and out and try more speakers. The set up was a WAV recording into my RCF mixer and then fed through 4 Aux channels into two Peavey IPR 1600 PA amps. I used a RCF ART10 as a reference speaker, everything was set flat and I adjusted the volumes of each channel so that the levels were the same on a C-weighted noise meter. We were peaking at around 98db so it was pretty loud. We started off with the BC110T design, The BC Mk3 12" speaker that Stevie designed and I think around 20 people built, A MarkBass NYC 121 and a Genz Benz Focus 112. The first thing to note was the 'reference speaker' the RCF ART310 it was a useful reference because i know it to be a pretty honest speaker but for bass it was just too bassy, it's designed to be on a pole of course and on the floor the reinforcement meant the bass was just a bit over the top, I'll need to rethink that for next time and maybe put the reference speaker on a pole. However it might be a consideration if you are thinking of going the FRFR route with a PA speaker. First up then was the BC110T Basschat easy-build lockdown cab project - Amps and Cabs - Basschat TBH there wasn't a lot of comment about this speaker. The sound was a lot more usable than the reference and the general feeling was it was a giggable option. For a speaker that would cost £150 to build and given the company it was in that was probably a good result. Next was the big brother The BC 12" Mk III Stevie’s 12” FRFR Cab Build Thread (Basschat Cab v3) - Amps and Cabs - Basschat containing a Faital Neo driver and a high quality Celestion Neo tweeter. We'd previously tried the Mk2 version against the Barefaced Big Baby and it was preferred by some people. As an improved version the MkIII is a serious speaker. The reception for this was great, immediately liked with at least one person wanting to get on and build one and there was a general concensus that everyone would be happy to gig this speaker. Third was the Genz Benz Focus, I was quite impressed with this, all the speakers so far were FRFR bass speakers designed to be uncoloured and I was behind the speakers, it sounded very like the BC12 from there, so much so that I went out front to have a listen. this is a great honest speaker, a bit of tizz from the tweeter and the concensus was that the BC MkIII was better but if you ever get offered one used it's really worth a look. The final speaker in the test proper was the MarkBass NYC. An interesting speaker because at the last bass bash it had been the 'Marmite' speaker. 40% had put it no 1 and 60% last. The comments here were all of the nature "it sounds like a bass is meant to sound" "it will probably sit well in the mix" No-one here preferred the sound to the other speakers though to be fair it's a decent mid price option. There were some comments that it would work well with Mark Bass amps. that was it as far as the 'shootout' element was concerned. I can't give an opinion as i was stuck behind the tables operating the gear most of the time. If anybody there wants to comment that would be great. there was a clear winner, the BC MkIII. I missed a real opportunity because @Stub Mandrelhad brought his GRBass cab and we had a couple of BF cabs in the main room. However Jim had his Greenboy 115 and we swapped that in for the MB. I didn't have time to match the volumes with the meter so it may have been louder than the others as i relied on ear to set the levels. It was a seriously impressive sound which I did manage to hear against the MkIII. There's a real slam about this speaker with the use of the dedicated 15" bass driver and the midrange was nicely detailed pulling out some details I didn't hear in the other speakers. It is a sizeable speaker though. As a no compromise speaker I haven't heard better yet. the feeling in the room was that if the BC MKII was like listening to your bass through decent headphones then the Greenboy was more like being in the recording studio with the big studio monitors. So that's it, the method would have worked well and If i'd had time to try a range of speakers and organised the ones I Wanted earlier it would have been more informative, maybe next year.

As above ignore the 1000W claims they are nonsense. Probably not Mackies if you are contemplating new, they have had some reliability problems since they moved production and tehy aren't state of the art anymore. I prefer the sound of RCF to Yamaha they have their crossovers and DSP better sorted and probably use better drivers. The difference isn't huge though, both sound good and both have excellent reliability.

Just spotted this and there's another thread somewhere where i went through the same decision. I've opted for the RCF M18. It sounds great and is so easy to use. the software is completely intuitive and the Router just works. I absolutely love it and can't see me regretting the decision to go this route. Nothing is ever more than 2 clicks away, the home screen is always available with a single click, The faders are twice the size of the Behringer ones on screen and adjustment when playing is made easier in that a single tap on the faders gives you a 1db adjustment. The learning curve is really short, Half an hour to set up my duo (2mics 2instruments, a single monitor channel) then with my 4piece band I set up a mix in advance with 3mics 2, instruments, 3 drum mics and four monitor channels. all channels were labelled and both FOH and monitors were given a rough mix. That took 10 mins. When we rehearsed the mix only needed the minimum of tweaking, you have meters on everything and I just set it up as I would with the old analogue mixer. the point being is that it really is that easy. My requirements were specific. I wanted something for a live band no bigger than a 5 piece. It needed to work first time, every time and be really simple so I could operate it without having to stop playing. For me I didn't need extra wires and boxes to sort out a design flaw with the router or obscure workflow patterns which would need to be recalled in my analogue brain mid song. With the RCF you have fewer options (but way more than any analogue desk I've used) you can only record the stereo mix and the software is flawless. It's a machine for live music. If I want to record 18 channels I'd be happy to go and buy the Behringer but I can't ever see me using it for live work over the RCF unless i join a much bigger band. The Soundcraft looks interesting too but I do like gear where everything just works and someone has thought it all through.