Phil Starr

This looks really interesting, for those who haven't clicked on the link: It's going to be a paid for service run by a not-for-profit organisation and based on work by Stanford University in the States. The prices aren't clear yet. Basically they are cutting the latency with an external box which cuts the latency to 1mS and replaces your sound card. Then there will be cloudhosting managing the connections. There are a few other tweeks like adding in an unbalanced connector for your mic and wiring everything direct. The boxes aren't available yet but will be managed by a Raspberry Pi and another board. you can buy a kit of parts from Amazon but they only have 16 sets. Looks like you can buy the kit for £150-200 or use their information to build your own. You'll also have to pay for the stuff they are doing in the cloud. There are so many details on their site I may have missed something.

Question about interfaces, I notice that Behringer (and presumably everyone else) do a 2 way interface which is £37 and one which is £59. 16bit 24kHz and 24bit 192kHz. obviously the quality is going to be better with the faster sampling rate but latency? Secondly a lot of small mixers have USB outputs including one I have here. Will they work as well or again is latency going to be more of a problem?

I'm very analogue I'm afraid

Just looked at JamKazam it's got to be worth a try, and there's a free version, with restrictions but at least a way of trying it. Not yet 9.00 and I've learned something new

In terms of rehearsing together I don't think any of the platforms are going to work because of the time delay (latency). Even a few thousandths of a second sounds weird but coincidentally we were experimenting on Zoom two nights ago. Trying a few songs and sharing screens, the time delay on Dakota was 2 beats or about 1 sec. I'm sure faster connections and better hardware could reduce that but there's no way you are ever going to be able to lock in with other band members. I think the only thing you can really hope for is recording your parts separately and sending the files across to play along with. I'm hoping there is something I've missed and that there are ideas of things that can make practice more interesting and stimulating and I'll follow the thread but I'm not hoping for much

Not too worried about the resale but wondering about how much work is needed. It's been stored for years and they don't even have an amp so it means going up with an amp and two 9V batteries I now know. Plus my other half will kill me You are tempting me though, sounds good too on the You tube review I found and yes Japanese Matsumoku 1985.

Thanks @Happy Jack, I'm not sure about this one it's been knocked about and one of the controls is broken and it's a little way away. I'm hoping someone will see this and say what it's worth. Nowadays I only remember the distant past

@Happy Jack did you ever get to play this bass? I've just seen one going cheap which needs some tlc. Basically I want to ask all the questions you asked all those years ago basically is it worth some time and money. What would be a good price now?

Good luck with the recovery, there will come a time when a nice relaxing project will be just the thing . You might find it fun to do some internet research whilst you are laid up. I've designed stuff for someone in Australia before and sourcing drive units was an issue. A lot of the stuff available here wasn't available over there at the time and the exchange rate was appalling. That's bound to have changed in the last ten years but we did find an Australian manufacturer and some lovely drivers.

I quite like carpet felt but it is heavy. You'll find most pillows and Duvets are packed with polyester wadding which is also sold for speakers. Don't let it cover the ports.

Oh forgot to say the only 4cm tube I have to hand is the liner of a toilet roll, I'm sure you have them at home ? if not you might find a round shampoo bottle the right size. Cardboard is quite a good material for a port if it is thick enough. you can stiffen it up with papier mache, (soak newspaper in watered down glue and wrap it round the outside).

OK I'd go for two tubes 6.5cm long which will give you a little bass lift at 120 Hz. Not real bass but it will make things sound just a touch punchier/warmer. That speaker actually models just a little better in your cab than mine

I do like a happy ending, and yes good video too. If you measure up the inside of the cab and the diameter of those holes I'm happy to do the calculations for you, I may even have some port tubing the right size I can post. Hope you feel better soon.

Now corrected I meant to refer the excursion, I got called away halfway through posting, sorry

You've got your advice and I think you realised this anyway from the way you asked the question. Yes you can damage your speakers with an amp even within the specified power rating of the speakers and the enemy is extreme equalisation/fx. There are two ways to break a speaker and they are interrelated. you can do it one way or the other or a little of both. The enemies are overheating the coil and moving the coil and cone past their mechanical limits. The graph below shows the movement of the cone of the same speaker with the red plot at 1/4 of the power of the green plot. You can see tht the excursin rises as the frequency goes down but at 50 Hz the port takes over and the cone movement reduces right down. The horizontal red line is the excursion limit of 6.5mm. You can see that at full power the cab goes outside it's limits between 55 and 90Hz and again below 45Hz. If you put a bottom E at full power with an octaver (41Hz/2 or 20Hz) it would force the cone to travel through a 6cm round trip which would hammer it against the back of the magnet 20 times a second. Not good. So for these frequencies (where the curve goes above the red line) the power handling is limited by the excursion. For the rest of the time the limit is the thermal limit. So there you are the power to any speaker is less than the rated thermal limit at certain frequencies, genrally lower frequencies but there's almost always that dip just above the port frequency too. If you use just 3db of bass boost you will halve the power handling and an octaver is even worse. A decent HPF will pretty much help any reflex(ported) speaker cab by removing that huge spike in excursion below the tuning point.

you've heard my bass playing, I'm saying nothing

I didn't save the data so this is from memory, which may of course be faulty. I agree with you about the potential 'better' performance from the red speaker. That's certainly a cleaner curve and showing 'better' damping of the hi-fi driver. Resonant frequency is lower as you would expect with a slightly heavier cone and a less stiff suspension. The sensitivity was very similar if I remember correctly, at the expense of lower excursion limits. I've met PeaTurgh and he says in this thread some of this stuff goes beyond him so I made the assumption what he wanted was a practical solution and a fun project rather than an extensive breakdown of options. I was concerned about the excessive excursion below 50Hz but wanted to show him the frequency plots so he could see the gains the hi-fi drive potentially offered for himself and ask about that if he wanted to and all of this is there in what I've said. I must admit I had reservations about recommending a £12 speaker with potential reliability issues against a speaker I had actually in a similar cab in my room in front of me. I pm'd him with a recording of my bass through the cab to see if he was happy with the sound I was getting. I'd deliberately tailored the response of my own cab and it wouldn't necessarily suit him. So yes, this was a recommendation based upon practicality. I quite like my little practice amp. the lack of bass means it doesn't annoy my neighbours, the 2db hump at 120hz gives it a gentle suggestion of bass and it sounds OK just plugged and played. Above that it's nice and clean, revealing enough to show up my every mistake which is what I need for practice. Unlike the cheap beginners amp it started out as it now sounds like a bass. The Monacor speaker would probably have sounded great with noticeable extra bass and probably survived quiet practice but i couldn't really recommend something that I thought might not be reliable long term.

I think the tweeter as an upgrade for the Mk1 would be a great idea. It would keep the concept of an easy build but get very close to the performance of the Mk2. I need to redesign the proportions of the Mk1 as it was proportioned to match the old 19" class AB amps people were still using then. It will be a simple job to leave space for a horn unit to be added later. If you could add a horn for between £50-100 I think people would go for it. Building a Mk1 with a horn would effectively reinstate the Mk2 as an affordable two way design with the Mk3 with the Neo/lightweight/top quality tweeter as the state of the art cab.

I've had a word with Ped and Kiwi and the answer is yes. It might take a while for us to get it together as it would make sense for us to put all the designs together in a single thread and just link to the rather extended original diaries.

Hope you love it, I'm quite loving the clarity I get out of mine. good for practice because it shows off your mistakes. Ouch!

here's the original one 1x12" Cab Design Diary - Amps and Cabs - Basschat this is the cutdown sized one Easy 12" cab build - Amps and Cabs - Basschat The only thread I can find so far for the two way design has lost the pictures 12" Cab Diary Continued - Amps and Cabs - Basschat but i'll keep looking unles @stevie or @Chienmortbbfinds it before me

It's really great to see that this design lives on. I still use a variant of the original design without a tweeter and it sounds huge when it needs to.

I had to look that up To be honest it looks too nice to mod in the way I did, though everything I've done is reversible. On the plus side a single EL84 should sound fine through a little speaker for this sort of use. The problem with mine is amp distortion when you push too hard, you can't really over-drive an amp this size without it sounding nasty. I reckon this little amp will sound sweet. I'd go for building something the same size and finish as your little epiphone, something it will sit on and look right. If you give me the measurements I can suggest a speaker that might work

I agree John, I wouldn't personally look past the TPA series at the moment and you can get ready wired boards for all sorts of applications, so you need to do little other than make a case for them. the other issue is heat dissipation which is so much less for class D.

about 9litres the same size as the cab I used though that was luck rather than judgement. I've been wondering about something similar, you can buy an amp based on the TPA3116D2 for around a fiver which will run on a car battery or the TDA2030 if you don't want Class D on eBay TDA2030A Mono 15W Audio Power Amplifier Board AC/DC 12V Assembled Nice UKO FG | eBay