Phil Starr

There are a lot of manufacturers claims that seem to defy the laws of physics. There's also very little new under the sun when it comes to speaker design. There were a lot of designs in the 60's and 70's which claimed to be hybrid resonators, resonating at more than one frequency. That's the earliest mention I know of the term but I haven't had a chance to look at the Barefaced design in detail so I can't really comment. As to books there's a couple I like: The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook by Vance Dickason is great but can be expensive unless you find an early version secondhand. The other I like but it's a bit technical is High Performance Loudspeakers by Martin Colloms. It'll be fine if you have A Level Physics or Maths. I hope they are both still in print Most of the actual design work is done by software nowadays. Most of us amateurs use WinISD which is a bit of freeware. It helps if you know a bit of theory when you are driving the software but it works pretty well if you follow the recipes.

I use a pair of RCF Art 310's with my duo, everything goes through them direct and they are absolutely fine. I use one of them alone for most rehearsals, I've had no problem with volume even with a drummer. I'd probably use the pair if we ever needed them at a gig but our drummer is stupidly loud at times.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes everyone. I not keen on fuss at home but on the plus side I did get a nice pair of closed back AKG headphones for practice and recordings. I'll miss the gaffa taped Sennheisers I've used for years but these are great

That'd be great, I'll pm you later. Hopefully I'll see you at the bass bash later this year

Thanks, can you pm me to get them across

Thanks to you and @Hellzero we are aware of the problems of compression but remember the recording will be just part of what we do. the advantage of our own recordings is we will know that they've been recorded with no fx or eq. Thanks to @stevie we can measure the frequency response of all our designs. We do road testing with our bands in normal times and we all play through the cabs when they are in development. The missing bit under lockdown is getting the cabs out to other players and then being able to give people who are interested a decent recording to listen to so that they can make their own assessment of the tonal qualities of the cab. Hearing other people play even from a recording adds a lot of extra information.

I think this shows all the signs of an immature market. The chipsets are pretty standard but the boards are either populated with substandard components or fiercely expensive. Meanwhile mid price manufacturers are increasingly producing perfectly acceptable amps at good prices with the chipsets available. Behringer/Bugera/Sampson/Wharfedale/ TC and all the badged OEM stuff from Thomann and the like. Unfortunately nobody seems to be making the mid priced reliable boards you'd expect with serviceable but well priced components. @Chienmortbb and I have been talking about the Wharfedale Wharfedale PSX112 350W Active PA Speaker - Andertons Music Co. it's rated as 250W and 100W for the tweeter (within the sort of parameters of the TDA chips John referred to above). The interesting thing is the the price; £114 for an active speaker! The whole package is cheaper than just a plate amp or even just the bare boards we are talking about. Have no doubts, Wharfedale are huge, not the Yorkshire company of old but a Hong Kong/Chinese owner of a whole load of older brands including Quad and Audiolab. Nonetheless if i could get a 250W plate amp or even a bare board for £114 with a power supply I'd take your arm off, the fact that is has a pre amp and all the connectors makes it an extraordinary bargain. I have a Wharfedale Titan here which seems to be a predecessor of this speaker. I think i might have to dissect it.

thanks to all of you, I'll respond properly tomorrow. today is my birthday and I've a three line whip to enjoy myself and not go on Bass Chat. How does that work?

Hi Steve, I've looked at those, well some of them anyway plus some of the YouTubers especially the ones who teach the bass courses. The big problem is that they are often not clean recordings and usually you have little idea of what eq/effects have been applied. There are also copyright problems. I'm thinking that a lot of Basschatters have home studio equipment and probably already have clean recordings of themselves playing bass.

As many of you know I've been building speakers and sharing the designs on BassChat, many more to come I hope. My problem is that I'm not the worlds best bass player and me giving a cab a work out is about as testing as if I went in the ring with Anthony Joshua. Pre Covid I took the cab to people I knew could play and then I also got a good chance to listen. What I need is a few good recordings (at least CD quality) of bass played fingerstyle, with a pick and slap which I can cut down to 10-30 second clips. They'd need to be recorded straight from the bass with no eq or fx and clean of any other sounds, just bass. Ultimately I'll use anything longer for the speaker development process and the clips to demonstrate the speakers. I suppose that if I put the test track up here we could also put up recordings of everyone's bass rigs with a dedicated BassChat test track So if you are stuck at home bored but with decent recording facilities I'd love to start putting this together. All donations gratefully received

You are asking for a splitter. Many DI boxes will do that for you, even something as simple as this.

I can't hear the sound of the Behringers fans over the sound of those in the Peavey Minimax Mind you I can't hear much of anything once our drummer starts shed building.

@Chienmortbb knows much more than I do, I'm a bit analogue class D and switch mode supplies scare the hell out of me.The problem with a lot of this stuff is price. That EV plate amp is £200 and the ICE Power amps are around that just for the board. There are a limited number of chipsets that are widely used and you can buy Chinese made boards for peanuts, but by and large the ancillary components aren't up to spec and they won't be reliable. the suspicion is also there that if they are using substandard components that there will be little or no quality control. John is currently looking for some of the longer established Chinese companies products. The Behringer NX3000 uses the same amp module as the Bugera Veyron as far as I can tell, though the Veyron uses it in bridge mode for more power. I'm using the predecessor iNuke for speaker development at the moment but I've never had a problem with the Behringer PA amps. Pulling apart Behringer stuff it is quite nicely made, very nice considering the price. I 've been wondering about seeing how easy it would be to just rip out the innards of one and install it into a cab. Or looking for a Behringer with blown speakers but a working plate amp.

It's a good example, and she did that right from the start pretty much, her first performance on Jools Holland was an acoustic version. Jessie J - Price Tag (Live on Jools Holland 2010) - YouTube she was called in at the last minute without a band and the rapper on the recorded version. Lucky for us really as the rap on the recording would have sounded really odd with a bunch of pensioners and a West Country accent. We copied the audience participation bit she used instead of the rap and did very nicely with the song for years.

We've been looking into a powered version with John @Chienmortbb doing all the work on amps, I'm sure he'll be along soon. One option I've been trying is using a Behringer PA amp with the DSP as a crossover. that saves you the cost of the crossover too and you can tailor the response with HPF on the bass driver and dynamic limiting for speaker protection. I've toyed with the idea of building the amp straight into the cab. In any case the zlx amp is split between a class D bass amp and a smaller powered class AB for the tweeter with a crossover built in. It won't work with the passive crossover in the BC design. The Inconvenient Truth about your Electro-Voice ZLX-12P & ZLX15P amplifier - YouTube

If you are an originals band I think you really don't have to worry, you'll be playing to a completely different sort of audience to a covers band. The choice is your own, keep to the spirit of the original or make it your own. The only thing is to take it seriously and play it the best you can with the line up you have. Audiences respond to enthusiasm, confidence and commitment as much as anything. Have fun with them.

To be fair most of the original bands aren't going to match their own songs playing live either. Some of the tribute bands are outstanding, but that is a different skill altogether.

Hi Everyone, I hope you've now got pretty much everything you need to get building. It would be great if someone could use the instructions I've just put up and get back with questions. It's hard to know how much detail to put in and I'm bound to have missed a lot. When we've had a couple of builds and I've got the drawings back from RichardH I'll go on and put up a tidier version as a completely separate thread. All comments and suggestions welcome and though I don't promise to answer everything you tell me it will all be read and taken seriously. Don't worry about the previous three posts, I've dragged some of Stevie's pictures down to be added to when I get the cab back. I'll add some text too but later.

These are the measurements Stevie made with the crossover sorted. the bottom graph is the one to look at. It's very flat across the frequency range with the dip showing where the crossover sits, around 2.3kHz. That dip is normal for most crossovers.

Ok this is the crossover circuit. You can ignore the 1W power amp and I have no idea why there is an exclamation mark in the tweeter. We've kept the crossover as simple as possible, just a high pass filter to stop the bass reaching the tweeter. the Pulse bass driver rolls off naturally above 2kHz and the components are chosen so that the tweeter takes over at that point. they've been carefully chosen to match the two Celestion units we've used. Other drivers will roll off at different frequencies and at different rates and may be louder or quieter than the pair we chose so if you go and swap things it will almost certainly not work as well. Keeping to just three components keeps the cost down and you don't even need to solder the crossover together. The speakers can also be connected without solder if you use crimp connectors. The wires are going out of the port because at this stage Stevie was still designing the crossover so it started life outside the box to enable modifications to be made without removing the baffle every time. Notice the blob of red on the wires. Speakers have a plus end and minus and must be connected the right way round. They will be marked with either a plus sign or a red blob on the speaker. The plus is connected to the tip of a jack or the +1 on a Speakon.

Nothing new under the sun is there John? It's so similar in concept to my House Jam Combo and your After Eight. Sounds like mine too a little.

There's an old much longer thread on this, but then there are older longer threads on just about everything. It gives new people a go, it is a lot more personal and what the hell? It's still lockdown and talking s**t with friends is something we all do in normal times. Also it reminds me of times past when I was in a gigging band..... It all depends is the only answer. As has been said already if your drummer doesn't hit the same patterns then you probably shouldn't play the same bass line. to a lesser extent that's true of all the rest of the band. I don't know why most bands play in the original keys most of the time if it isn't the singers best key, but there you go. You learn a lot by dissecting music and note for note playing pushes you to places you might not otherwise go. It's a good thing to be able to play note for note even if you don't ever need to in live performance. The second thing if you are in multiple bands or a really busy band with an ever changing set list then you are going to be under time pressure to get a song working. If you can play the chord changes and the rhythm then the rest of the band can get on with their own parts and the song goes in the set. Once you've played it a few times the song becomes yours and in my experience starts to drift as each band member adds a little flavouring of their own. Hopefully what works stays in and what doesn't gets quietly forgotten. I'm often surprised going back to originals by how much our versions differ. However one of my real bugbears is people not learning the song. If you are in a covers band most of your audience want you to play the songs they know and love, in the main they want enough of the feel of the song to go on loving it. I've no problem at all with people who completely re-make the song but it bugs me when the usual reason for not making any attempt is actually laziness but justified as artistic integrity. You are in a covers band, you are an entertainer playing forty year old songs, take it seriously but get over yourself or go and write your own songs.

I've pushed the baffle in place whilst i wait for all the glue to dry and I've gone over again with a damp sponge to remove excess glue. At this poing it's just a waiting game for the glue to dry. The instructions on the glue will tell you how long to wait/ Now to deal with the speaker and port cutouts. Measure twice and cut once. This is the photo I sent Stevie, I'd positioned the horn and port centrally to keep the structure strong but acoustically it is better to have the horn as close as possible to the bass speaker so you'll see we ended up moving it in the later pic. Here you go, the cut outs for the smaller holes were done with a jig-saw. there's some discussion about blades earlier in the thread. I used a thin blade to cut the round port hole and then used it for the horn cut out which was wrong, It's hard to cut a straight hole with a thin blade and you can see it isn't as straight as I'd like. Fortunately the horn has a lip that will cover the wobbly cut. I've also rounded off the cabinet edges (I'll add more on finishing later) So this is the final cab before fitting the speakers. It's had a single coat of Tuff Cab paint, which I strongly recommend. It's genuinely tough as well as Tuff and easy to apply, You can get a professional textured finish with the special rollers or a linen like effect with ordinary rollers.

Don't stop at this point, go on and fix the other side and then the top. I assembled the whole cab in about 30 mins including the photos. You can be confident because if you make a mistake you can remove the screws and even wipe off the glue, though usually it just a matter of slackening the screws off a turn and tapping the panels into place if they aren't perfectly lined up. Once you reach this stage check all the panels are actually lined up or you will have a lot of sanding to do later. At this stage the cab is already pretty strong and stable and you can see in the pics that it is good and square without any clamping. Now you can fit the last of the battens in place, Doing these four last makes sense as you have plenty of space to get to them. You can see that the batten in the picture below is a tiny bit short and there is a small gap on the left hand side, that will be sealed up with a bit of decorators filler later. Again you can see a nice full line of glue squeezed out showing that that joint will be airtight. Finally either glue the back panel in place , you can either continue with the screws or just glue it in and put some weights on the panel with the cab face down, so long as you squeeze glue out all round the joint you'll have an airtight seal. At this point you have a cab.

I like to dry assemble things before I glue them. I've made hundreds of cabs over the years but I still make stupid mistakes measuring once and cutting twice. If it's your first time then seeing exactly how things fit is a real confidence boost. If you look below you can see how the battens on the base leave a little square for the vertical batten to fit into. Now you've come to glueing up. This construction technique is what makes this an easy build. If the panels are cut accurately and you have good right angles on the battens then the cab will be square. You really can't go wrong. Using screws with the glue means you don't have to clamp either. A single screwdriver is all you need. Any woodworking glue will do but white PVA is my favourite. It is stronger than wood, you can clean it up with a damp cloth, it's the cheapest and best of all it takes an hour to set, so if you make a mistake you could theoretically take the whole cab apart and start again. OK, I have a leak in my shed roof apparently, hence the wet wood and the move to the kitchen. The photo above shows how the technique works. You can seethe glue lines where the screws have pulled the wood together and squeezed out the glue. If you get a nice straight line like this you've used enough glue so the cab will be airtight. Because you are screwing from the inside the screws can be left in place and there is no filling to do. The nice square pse batten is holding everything in place with good 90 degree angles whilst the glue dries. the less gluey lines have been wiped once, but need another wipe.