Phil Starr

Hi, I don't think 9mm is a good idea unless you love complex woodwork as such thin walls with a big cabinet will need a lot of bracing. There are available plans on the Eminence website and there is a probably a small ported cab design there. Go for that, it will have the best power handling and be the lightest cab. If I get time today I'll have a quick look at running the Kappa through the design software and suggest a cab for you that matches your speaker.

I'm a sucker for accents, Lyrics too and Emmylou Harris's harmonies in this which come one minute in a bit different but this gets me every time You'll Never Be The Sun, Dolores Keane with Emmylou Harris (1993) - YouTube

Hi @Nicko this is a separate issue I guess. The first thing is that people who have the first part of the two part jab are still just as likely as anyone else to be 'spreaders' and I think that is reflected in government advice. There was an interesting interview yesterday with one of the behavioural scientists on the SAGE committee. Spitting tacks as it happens. I'm no expert but one of the danger points is going to be when the rates start falling and people relax. Clearly seeing what others do is one of the major cultural drivers. My son teaches in japan where it is normal for anyone with a sniffle to mask up and they simply masked up without needing to be told when this started. They also have a strong touch taboo so their epidemic has been really delayed. I've noticed since the second lockdown that more people are wearing their masks in the streets and that makes us less self conscious in joining in. Seeing people who have been vaccinated relaxing is bound to affect all those around them, even if relaxing is found to be a perfectly sensible thing to do for them. We truly are all in this together, we need a government plan which we all share and invest in and which makes good scientific sense as far as our knowledge allows. Survey after survey shows 3/4 of the population in favour of more caution with only 25% likely to be pandemic/vaccine deniers. We are pretty divided on this so not many don't knows. There's an irony in those who call on Churchillian metaphors being the ones supporting those who aren't all in it together.

Of course it does, but it is extremely rare for that to happen. The only virus I can think of is HIV which we know attacks the immune system, it's an immunovirus. At a very simple level if people recover from the virus it means their immune systems can stop the virus replicating. If we have a vaccine that works, and we have several then again it works via stimulating our immune system. Viruses work by taking over our cells and printing out billions of copies. It's those copies present in massive numbers in our breath that spread respiratory viruses so if they aren't replicating they won't be present in vast numbers and you've cut the chances of infection. We know a lot about Corona viruses because we've seen them before, two of them cause common colds including probably the one that probably caused the Flu pandemic of 1889 1889–1890 pandemic - Wikipedia. It's possible that the current coronavirus is different in some way from all the other coronaviruses but there is no evidence that points in that direction and the possibility of a problem is only that. When we have little or no data it makes sense to keep an open mind and remain vigilant but it isn't rational to believe we have the whole of our biology wrong and not go where the 99.5% probability points us. If you've reduced the virus in our respiratory tract by millions to one it is a bit obtuse to think you wont reduce transmission.

I assume this is the new variant? It will make a difference. Assuming yesterdays figures are accurate the base r-rate for Covid is 3-3.5% so the new strain is up at around 5. With the measures in place the r-rate is 1.2-1.4 with doubling infections every 10 days approximately. This is with about 50% of the home counties infections already being new variant. I'd already assumed in my calculations that the r-rate over Christmas /New Year would go up to 2. The new variant will push this up over the next few weeks but the tier 4 changes and what amounts to a third lockdown in London will act in the opposite direction. Delaying the return of the schools and hopefully extended travel restrictions will delay the spread of new variant. Hopefully the new fear factor and shocking scenes from hospitals will boost compliance in the general population. It's really messy and only a fool would make firm predictions at the moment but I don't think the r-rate is going to go over 2 for long. that does mean doubling of infection every week however and deaths rising to 1500-2000 a day in Jan. I think at that point and with an end in view from vaccination (I'd also assumed that other vaccines will gain approval in the next few weeks) people would wake up and compliance will improve and the r-rate I expected to go back to 1.2-1.4 by the end of Jan, deaths remaining high for at least 28 days from then on. I also assumed with 1 in 95 of the population infected at any time during that period 15% of the population would have been infected at least. Add these to the inoculated and I think we'll reach the 50% point sometime in Mar. The point is that even if the basal r-rate moves up from 1.2 to 2.0 then 50% herd immunity will bring it back down by half once achieved. Once R is permanently below 1 then the doubling every few days becomes a regular halving of infection and there will be a decay curve as predictable as the exponential growth curve. I still think this is likely to happen some time in Mar or early April. At that moment it will still be grim, worse than now but if we are at 1000 deaths a day then if it is halving every 10 days then it will have reduced to 125 deaths a day a month later and double figures 10 days after that. Meantime we will have continued vaccination and the r-rate will drop further and the rate of infection will halve more quickly. Two months of holding R below 1 and we be down to death rates in single figures and even before this happens infection rates will fall to a level where track and trace can cope. The Prime Minister is being foolishly optimistic in expecting this to be over by Easter but I don't think I'm completely a Fool for predicting R below 1 by April 1 ( you see what I did there ) I'm a biologist, I expect viruses to mutate, usually they become more infectious and less deadly bu there are no guarantees. this has always been a race against time and mutation is one of the reasons we should have locked down sooner and harder. I'll stick with the end of May for now until more data comes in. Keep safe everyone.

Yes, the government advice bassfinger links to is mainly concerned with people thinking they are immune from the first injection when the reality is that a few of them may already have an infection, and the immunity isn't really well developed until you've had the second booster. As to being cautious, scientists will quite rightly only state those things for which they have experimental evidence, so they aren't going to commit to saying how long a novel vaccine will last or that no infection is possible from a vaccinated person. However you are only going to have huge numbers of viral particles in your body if it is actively replicating inside your body and if you have few to no viruses then you are extremely unlikely to spread the disease. If you are immune it is because the virus isn't being allowed to replicate in any numbers. There's a theoretical possibility of transmission but at very low levels approaching zero. If the vaccine is 90% efficient then 10% of the population can still be infected and infectious. It makes sense for infection control to assume that might be you who can still spread the disease which is why the advice is so cautious. In terms of society though most people who have the vaccine will be extremely unlikely to spread the virus. The probability is that sometime next year we will achieve sufficient herd immunity in the UK to permanently reduce the r-rate below 1 and shortly after to go back to something like normality. I'm neither an optimist of a pessimist so I think that Easter is unlikely but it will happen a couple of months after Easter even with the new variant. Though if the Government fail to put travel restrictions into place it could take longer. For me the big question is how many lives can we save between now and then? Do we have the collective will and the informed leadership to save potentially 100,000 lives? I have hope, polls are showing 75% of us want to have a well thought out plan to reduce infection and only 25% are in denial, we only need the government to back the majority. The 75% will comply and pressure/persuasion will convert some of the rest. Stay safe out there and look out for each other. That's kind of the BassChat way

I feel like I'm spoiling things but there's a fair amount of research on this and our sense of rhythm is cultural and largely learned. Other cultures and particularly folk music use wider ranges of time signatures. Even a lot of classical music has shifting time signatures. 4/4 comes from early experience and repeated listening as does a lot of the rest of our listening. To us there is something 'right' about songs with the four chords and returning to the key at the end of the song. One thing I've noticed is that with the demise of rock and blues from popular culture younger drummers struggle at First with the shuffle and 12/8 something no-one thought about in my generation. You can tell with my 40year old drummer he just isn't quite comfortable with triplets, they feel learned rather than natural.

It's probably that those speakers would work well in the Basschat 1x12. We've modelled quite a few speakers now in the cab and it's as near an all purpose cab as you can get. No guarantees though, but if you can get Orange to cough up the specs or find out what drive units they used we could optimise the cabs As Bill has pointed out, and from your OP I think you know anyway, you are carrying a lot of speaker for very little advantage. Commercially it would probably make sense to sell the cab intact and buy new drive units. The SM212's we used are bout £85 at the moment, the Beyma 12CMV2 is about £65 and the Faital 320 neo speaker is about £120 so if you could get more than £250 for the Orange you'd have new drive units and no design work to do. Of course if you are driven by just curiosity and the thought of a project them for the cost of a bit of wood you can try out your theory and put the orange back together later as you suggest yourself. Knowing the speakers are Eminence makes it a bit easier, most of the eminence speakers will work in the BassChat designs.

@lownote12 this above is all true IMO. @agedhorse hence my comment about filtering bass, and what the player does about boosting bass. I did think about going into mechanical limits but wanted to keep it simple and stick to talking about how the ratings were made, so I kept comments to thermal limits which were quoted in the original post. I think this is a question simply asking 'is my speaker safe'. As we agree matching speaker ratings to amp ratings is a generally good rule of thumb for real world bassists.

This is correct and in all probability you will be safe. 'all probability' is a scientists answer of course. You will almost certainly be safe. The doubt comes because speakers and amps aren't rated in the same ways. Amps are essentially rated on how much electricity they can pour into your speakers. Speaker limits are measured by how much heat they can take before they burn out, a thermal limit. Heat and music aren't the same thing. the heat limits are measured with a continuous signal and the bass filtered. Music isn't continuous so the speaker has chances to cool down, that's why Barefaced and nearly everyone else give a music rating for their speakers twice the heat limit. They are assuming that most of us won't do anything stupid and most of the time won't blow our speakers. The second factor is that the test for speakers filters bass and bass players sometimes boost bass. The reality though is that if you use the rule of thumb that 200W into a 200W speaker is OK you are going to have to do something really silly to damage your speaker.

Hi Steve, is that Lynette at the Black Horse?

Whereabouts in Devon are you? I'll look forward to seeing you this summer

Putting a date on it is only a bit of fun, if it's the 2nd week in June or the last week of April the day will come. The fun is in thinking about how we will all respond and being ready for it. I'm as happy as anyone to compare and contrast what we should do with what we will do about Covid but really I want to do something more cheerful, what are you planning for when we get back to gigging? How has your band survived the interruption? Have you planned anything yet? Let's look upwards for a while I'll stick with my prediction for a while, I'm not predicting no disease just an r-rate consistently below one and this government still in power. Their instincts for prioritising the economy over health and safety and the need they have for good news. I'm not predicting the disease gone or the end of hygiene measures but the lifting of restrictions on gigging and public performance by the end of May. I'm not even saying it will be an entirely sensible decision. I'm also imagining January will be carnage and hope for more of a willingness to listen to evidence based policy on Covid as a response. It's always possible to go out and find somewhere where the vaccination or whatever isn't going well and reporters will have been scouring the country for an example of failure. I'm also factoring in the increased use of the more conventional and easier to handle vaccines like the Astra Zeneca/ Sputnik V and the Chinese ones (not in this country, but they have been mass vaccinating since June). In the week ending 2nd Dec 1.6million people were tested for Covid, the limits on vaccination are going to be the supply and manufacture of vaccine rather than the injection itself. You can all tell me later I got the date wrong

We had two open air gigs this summer, I'd run though the set a couple of times before but there were a couple of hairy moments saved only by a bit of muscle memory. The rest of the band were no better and it's when the singer goes for a verse instead of a chorus you realise how you need that extra bit of sharpness.

I'm going to stick my neck out here, and make a prediction. Sometime towards the end of May we will all start gigging again properly. Everyone is going to be so up for going out we are going to have a great time in the second half of next year. OK, of course I can't possibly know that, but in Jan when I saw the information from China I told my family there would be a pandemic. Then I anticipated the inevitable second peak after the pubs opened and the schools went back and I'm prepared to predict the blindingly obvious third peak and lockdown about 2-3 weeks into January, expect another lockdown. After that it's going to look a lot more cheerful, by the end of March the most vulnerable members of society will be vaccinated and a substantial number of others will also be immune by infection and vaccination. By this time I expect the other cheaper more stable vaccines will have kicked in too so supplies will be less of an issue. Even with 30% of the population vaccinated the r-rate will reduce by..... er 30%. Combined with the rather pathetic safety measures in place and people moving outside the r-rate will fall permanently below 1 and life will gradually return to normal for most of us. Anyway I got sidetracked. Sometime around May we will get back to gigging again What plans do you have? How has your band survived the last year? Are you bringing in new skills developed from spending more time at home or like me have you just got a little rusty?

you clearly don't have a teenage daughter.

You might need these too Earplugs Ultratec - Studiospares

The simplest thing would be to buy a DI box that would take an input from the speaker output on your amp. It would be a high impedance so would not affect the impedance the amp is 'seeing' but you should run it in parallel to a speaker as valve amps don't like high impedance on their own. You can then feed from the DI box to the slave amp. Just to be clear because you don't want anything to break. Plug your speaker into one of the sockets on the back of the DR103 then another lead into the second socket on the amp and run it to the DI box then a lead from the DI out to the slave amp. Check the DI box is switched to 'speaker' before switching the amp on. Check both amps are turned down before switchng on. Set your level on the 103 then turn the slave up to match that level. using this system should mean the eq you apply to the amp is reproduced in the slave. Something like this will do the job but there are lots of choices Studiospares Passive DI Box - Studiospares Alternatively you could play in stereo and split the signal before the amps but you will need either some sort of mixer or splitter between the bass and the amps.

Intermittent faults are the worst This above is what you have to do. You also have to clear your head of preconceptions. In this situation you just can't trust anything including all the checks you have already done and the idea that this is a single fault. There may well be more than one component faulty and they may be interacting with each other, or not. I can't tell you how many times I've gone through this to find it was something I checked right at the beginning or a brand new component I'd replaced and just assumed was good. It's probably worthwhile keeping a note of the combinations you try and what happens. Just one other thought the zoom G1 has a headphone output. if you put it in the middle of your chain you could check whether the fault was before or after the G1. good luck

Hi Tom, looks like the Phantom power is a bit of a red herring, the problem of describing someone else's fault remotely. if you read the AC instruction above you can see that as it is a dynamic mic you don't need phantom power. For a working SM58 it doesn't matter if it is on or off but if anything goes wrong whilst the mic is connected the phantom power might just blow the mic. safer to leave it off. If you have a working mi plug it in and get it going, then unplug the lead at the mic end and plug the new mic in it's place. If it still doesn't work then you have eliminated any lead which might have come with the new mic. remember we don't know what leads you are using. If this doesn't work and the mic doesn't work in another system then it's the mic. There are two possibilities in the mic, sometimes a lead has broken inside, there will be two running from the socket at the bottom of the mic up to the capsule the working part of the mic or the capsule itself needs replacing loads listed on eBay but make sure you get a genuine one. If you can't solder then you'll have to get someone else to have a look. Just a thought this is not a switched version of the SM58, if so suspect the switch too. In fact suspect it first

As above don't turn on the phantom power but if you have to to provide power for another mic then check your mic lead is wired correctly. If it is the mic should be protected from the phantom power but any mistakes in wiring your leads could cause the voltage to be applied across the mic coil. Also any sort of short even a temporary one can damage your mic so it is best to plug in leads before switching on the power and keep the volume turned down.

I was really impressed with the video editing. Looking forward to hearing what the ports do to the sound.

Funny you should ask. I've just bought an INuke DSP amp from @Kevsy71 to investigate just that. The DSP gives you a wide range of options about crossover frequency roll off, delay and so on as well as compression/limiting to protect the drivers. If it is successful it might be a good way to go active by building the amp into the cab for just over £220

That makes JackTrip look more interesting, at least you know the money is being put back into music. One of my band members suggested SonoBus SonoBus User Guide