Phil Starr

What do you use your PA for? Is it just or mainly vocals or are you putting more through it. Specifically kick drum, bass and keys which is more demanding? Also how loud is your band? That makes a huge difference as to your options. For anyone buying new nowadays I'd say the practical solution is pretty much always active speakers, quick and simple to set up and with DSP almost impossible to destroy in normal use, even the cheap stuff is reliable. With built in class D amps they can be pretty light too. Unless you really cut corners they are probably going to sound better than your Samsons, which you are happy with anyway. I've got the Behringer iNuke whic I think is the NX3000 in a really ugly case, same electronics. From memory it is 250W a side into 8 ohms 350W a side into 4ohms and 700W+ bridged. The same amp as is in the Bugera Veyron I suspect. Anyway it's a perfectly decent amp and not far off my Peavey IPR1600 amps

Without going into the maths the bigger the box the more bass you get from any given speaker. This isn't just offset by the additional problem of transporting something big and heavy; the 'wrong' sized box brings problems withgettinga flat response. Typically an over large box gives a droop in the bass response and is difficult to make flat, a too small from ideal cab will have a much higher resonance and less deep bassbut will give some bass boost around this raised resonant frequency. This happens with all cone speakers and in both reflex (ported) cabs and sealed cabs though the details differ. These are the calculated bass responses of a 10" bass driver in a 40l cab (blue) 20l cab (green) and a 5l cab (red). The medium sized cab in green gives the flattest response and a practical size. The red cab is way too small and -3db (the lower dotted line ) is 150Hz ish way to high to be useful. The large cab in blue has the response gradually falling from 500Hz and clearly isn't flat but crosses the -3db line way lower than the smaller cabs. Generally speaking cheap speakers with weaker magnets work better in huge boxes. A lot of old cabs tend to be large because speaker magnets in the day were weaker and powerful magnet systems were extremely expensive. Cheaper manufacture and better manetic materials have allowed box sizes to be reduced but big old boxes can still be fun and have a sound of their own.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/126768403062?var=0&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=710-53481-19255-0&campid=5338590836&toolid=10044&customid=c440980d344e191873caff8e772fe903

That's interesting to see inside the cab. for a commercial cab it has a lot of bracing, It would be difficult to adjust the tuning for most people but the folded port isn't unusual in small cabs. No damping material in the cab though? I'll try and get the calcs done this weekend.

I've had a quick look and the cab is roughly 25-28 litres and my guess is tuned to 50Hz. If you want to measure the internal dimensions of the cab and the port dimensions I can check that for you. That is typical for a 10" cab so probably a range of speakers will fit and work OK. I can do a quick check and identify any complete mis-matches with the drivers suggested if you give me those dimensions

Yep those are the ones, I had some 12's Mine had aluminium voice coils and the aluminium wire corroded creating a dry joint leading to speaker failure. Your BN10-300 is a much better speaker and quite expensive hence recommending the Pulse 10. I've used both. You can get all the specs for these speakers so if you want to fit anything like these we can do the calculations and you can potentially tweak the cab to match the speaker

I had some failures of that generation of Eminence drivers (which hasn't been true of the current range, I'm not knocking Eminence generally) I think they are from the late 70's early 80's so too long in the tooth to buy as a replacement

The Celestion Pulse 10 Ashdown recommended is a great little speaker, it's the driver we recommended in the BassChat 110T @stevie designed a couple of years back.

How are the Ayras? Have you played bass through them yet?

Well I blame you for all the spending on things I 'need' Al, why shouldn't I blame you for other peoples thoughts 🤣😂🥰

Combining this with the pic you sent of the PA set up at your recent gig makes the problem pretty clear. That's a sizable PA which could easily produce sounds well over 130db and is way too close to the musicians. If we take a median 33db of isolation that means you are still getting probably 100db sound levels getting past the in-ears. given you want the sound level from the in-ears to be audible over the spill then that's way over what is safe. We also know, and you allude to this that the isolation is frequency dependent and that low frequencies pass more easily and on top of that are radiating 360deg from the bass bins. Truly we risk drowning in the low frequency backwash. Even worse if the sound engineers are mboosting the lowest frequencies. I don't think you can do anything other than blame the PA for this. Pulling out the IEM's and replacing them with ear plugs isn't going to change the isolation either. You are still stuck with 33db of frequency dependent isolation Moving the subs away from the stage, considering cardioid subs and using judicious eq and HPF would be more to the point.

I think all this comes down is that you can eff up any system. No good having the perfect system if the fleshy bit between the ears isn’t working. Im never one to tell anyone that they have it all wrong. If the music sounds good and the audience are having a good time then there’s not much wrong. In years of mixing however I can say you can’t give all the musicians what they each want using backline only or even with floor monitors. Anything you do in one corner spills over the whole stage. You can’t have a p***ing area in a swimming pool for the same reason. Only in ears let’s you give everyone more me. on a personal note thanks for sorting my sound. A SansAmp gives me a little magic to feed into the PA.

Still not time to actually play with WINisd and I'm looking at a few drivers at the moment but the 6FE200 is looking favourite at the moment and possibly better than the original Fane. I have to say I'm impressed generally with some of the offerings from Faital at the moment. The price is wicked

I've had this message a few times, it is worth checking the units when entering the values. the default values are often not the same as the units used on the manufacturers spec sheets using m instead of mm for example. Clicking on the units lets you scroll through them to get a match. I also sometimes get WINisd 'losing' the box tuning when I'm recalculating. Going back and starting again usually clears that fault which may be down to operator error

Gigging on NYE and recovering today. I had a Quick Look at the Faital 6FE200 and it looks like a nice little speaker. I’ll report back on alternatives to the Fane when I get some time

Stick with it, once you get it working properly it is a revelation. Getting studio quality sound in your ears with a mix which is individual to you is just so good for your playing. Feels odd at first but you soon get adjusted and it becomes normal. The music itself becomes a bigger part of the performance once you can hear everything. You'll be much tighter as a band once you adjust. I'd never go back

£150 is a good budget. There is a choice of aluminium stands by K&M within your price bracket. I’m still using my cheap starter stands but the K&M mic stands I have are great.

It's not surprising that different manufacturers design things so their own brand tops work best with their own brand subs. There's no cash disincentive to do things this way as they hope you will stick to their brand for all your speaker needs. From a design point of view you can only optimise for a particular combination of top and sub as there are small but significant differences between speakers that might determine the ideal crossover point and filter slope for any given combination. In most cases you can make a sub work with any top but it's nice to think manufacturers wouldn't release a line of speakers without squeezing the best out of a combination. Putting the HPF part of the crossover into the tops makes a lot of sense for Alto. It's the tops that are most likely to blow speakers if you get the crossover wrong and nowadays all the speaker protection circuitry is combined with the crossover in the DSP. Relying on what is in someone else's sub does increase the chance of something going wrong over having all the protection built in. Another combination you might come across is the active sub with the power amps for passive tops built into the sub. A lot of the stick systems use this arrangement and I think Turbosound are offering 2+1 systems with conventional passive tops with all the power amps built into the sub.

Apologies to @cbd and @Mediocre Polymath One person getting different results from mine in Winisd is unfortunate two looks like carelessness. In this case mine. I've just checked the current Fane 6-100 on Fane's website and the specs are entirely different from mine. Fane have clearly changed the cone and suspension and I think the voice coil since I built my cab. It is effectively a different speaker. I'm going to have to have another look at this design and maybe find another driver to recommend.

Obviously the amp would be 'enough' to push the speaker into over excursion and knowing the power you were sending to the speaker is impossible unless you actually measured it. Settings like a '1/4 power' aren't really a reliable guide. However 'started distorting, crackling and cutting out' unless you were cranking it up further and further doesn't sound normal and may have been a faulty driver. WINisd will tell you the excursion and maximum power limits and which frequencies are likely to cause problems

8kHz is quite high, there is a chance it'll be good enough for what you need. There is another alternative which is again less than ideal but may be worth a try. You can use a piezo tweeter without a crossover and they naturally come in at very high frequences, IMO they don't sound great and I stopped using them after a few unsuccessful attempts to get the sound I wanted. I've got boxes of the damn things so you'd be welcome to a couple gratis if you want. You could wire them up with no cab at all and then fit them straight into your cab if you liked them.

If you want to go ahead with this I think I would start by building just one of the House Jam cabs as it is designed. Maybe moving the mounting of the speaker from it's central position to allow for the addition of a small horn. That way you have a usable bass cab and a tiny system for lighter gigs using the Warwick Gnome. You can then try it for keys and judge whether the lack of treble is an issue or not. As designed you are only missing the final octave of human hearing from this cab, it might sound OK, it might not. If it is good then go for a second cab and you can get stereo and a useful extra 6db of sound output. With the Gnome you'll get the full 200W ouput potential through 4ohms if you use both cabs. Adding a tweeter is slightly problematic, you really need a crossover. What you could do is adapt the tweeter and crossover from @stevie's lockdown 10" design. It has a crossover with just three components which we wired with a connecting block so no soldering. It won't be perfect and youd probably need to increase the value of the resistor a little to match the smaller 6" driver but this simple solution sounds great with the 10" speaker and it might work here too.

No, I have tried it as a vocal monitor at rehearsal and it does a great job. The problem with keys is they potentially have more deep bass than a bass guitar and they will have harmonic content all the way to the top of human hearing. This thing will only do 80-8kHz. However they might be better than the little built in speakers most Keyboards use. 25W will be fine in terms of power handling and take you loud enough for your jazz combo but you might need to add a tweeter. It might be acceptable though for piano and a Rhodes sound. the only certain way is to try it. Maybe someone here has built one and lives near you. Where do you live?

OK, start with a design spec, what you need and what would be desirable. I started wanting a simple single speaker design with a flattish extended upper response to cover up to 8kHz and a decent off axis HF. I could tolerate a peak in response at 3kHz or above but it needed to be well damped (broad and flat) rather than a sharp peak. Most important was that I was prepared to sacrifice a drop in bass response below 80Hz but I needed the 2nd harmonic octave 80-160Hz to be ruler flat, desirable was that the roll off below 80 Hz was fairly smooth. Desirable also was high efficiency, My aim wa s to be able to play along with other people up to but short of a full drumkit. This was to play at home with friends but I was also looking for something that might work at an open mic. My target was 110db or better. The 80-160Hz thing was absolutely crucial though. This speaker was to test a theory I'd held for a long time, that a rich rendition of the second harmonic was 90% subjectively of what we hear as 'bass' Time to select a driver. I knew I probably wanted a 6" cab from instinct, anything smaller was likely to lack efficiency and an 8" driver was going to need a bigger cab but I included a search of smaller and bigger speakers. Never trust intuition The first thing I'll look at is the frequency response graph. This is really going to define the sound of the speaker as it determines which harmonics we are going to hear. Particularly in the 6" size there are quite a few specialist mid-range drivers which won't handle bass and a few dedicated bass drivers with thicker heavier cones What I also know is that the size of a cab, at least in the Goldilocks region is defined by two factors Qts and Vas. Qts (Q for the whole speaker) is related to how much control the speakers magnet, electrical characteristics plus the mechanical components have over the cone movement. Knowing Q also gives me some idea of the probable. bass response. Low Q means tight control of the cone movement and bass being restricted, high Q means the cone movement is less well controlled and you will get a bass boost towards the bottom end of the frequency range. For a flat response I need Q to be in the range 0.3 to 0.6 and 0.4 is the Goldilocks point.Vas is a weird concoction of parameters but is the volume of air with the same mechanical characteristics as the speaker. My eventual cab size is going to be close to Vas so anything too big or small is out, With Qts I'm halfway to knowing the frequency response and with both Q and Vas I can work out the cab size in my head. So now I'm looking for a speaker that will do 80-8khz, reach 110db ideally with a modest amp and do all that in a cab of around 10l and I spend a couple of hours looking at every major brand available in the UK offerings of 6" drivers simply eliminating any that don't fit this spec. Mainly that involves looking at everything Lean Audio and Blue Aran offer. It's surprising how few drivers fit that sort of brief. The majority sacrifice efficiency for bass response or don't have the extended upper response that I wanted. I ended with a short list of around 10, none of them perfect and I then put those into Winisd to model them with a bit more accuracy and see how far I could stretch the design to make them do what I wanted. At this point I knew I'd have to compromise and the datea was going to tell me exactly what the compromises would be. Essentially that was mainly swapping efficiency for bass response only one speaker was going to be loud enough, all of the others would give more bass than the Fane but would compromise the top end response with their heavier cones and longer coils. I was going to have to sacrifice something like 3db or be fairly smart about the cab design to get the Fane to behave down to 80Hz. At this point I've got the best three drivers up on screenand I'm running two models of each. One is the Winisd recommendation and the other is the one I'm trying different cab sizes and tunings with. Eventually I've just got the FAne left and the issue is the Fane's resonant frequency of 111Hz which is too high. I know I can get a bit more bass by putting it in a cab which is a bit bigger than the Winisd suggested size but if I make it too big then it will quickly cease to be flat around 80Hz I also know I can shape the response down below 111Hz by careful tuning of the cab. I ended up with a 10l cab and 87Hz tuning and acheived my design spec. The cost was a unusually big reduction in power handling between 90-200Hz due to over-excursion. The Fane sacrifices excursion for efficiency so I was expecting that. At this point I was expecting to use the cab with a 20W amp so that was fine. the cab as designed will start distorting at about 20-30W mainly by compressing the bass but will operate safely up to 50W or maybe a smidgin more. I use mine nowadays with a 130W Gnome but roll off the bass control by 3dB on the Gnome if I'm running it flat out. Putting it on a floor back against a rear wall more than resores that 3db of roll off. 50W is enough to give the 110db I wanted from the cab. So there you go, in designing this cab I looked at maybe 100 drivers, shortlisted and modelled 10 and worked in detail on three or four before ending up with what is a simple but remarkable little cab. It sounds long winded but I've done this so many times I can pretty much hear the final cab in my head just from a set of figures, shortlisting took a couple of hours and modelling the cabs a couple of evenings. During Covid and lockdown it was good fun especially when I plugged in a proper big amp for the first time and turned it up to see just how far this thing could be pushed

All cone loudspeakers flex at high frequencies and adding a second whizzer cone to boost the highs was a common trick back in the 70's when a lot of PA speakers lacked horns and a crossover. There are still a few manufacturers making "full range" 12" drivers such as this The use of Aluminium in speaker cones has a long history, as @stevie has said and the characteristics are well known: stiffer than most fibre cones, poor damping of cone resonance and very pronounced breakup modes at high power and frequencies. Often aluminum was used with other materials to damp the resonances or to further stiffen the cone to get pistonic movement. There was even a craze for DIYers to add aluminium foil to their hi fi speakers at one point For pulp cones there is a lot of careful mixing of different plant fibres to get the right mixture of stiffness and self damping of resonance so people who design the drive units can to an extent control the way the cone behaves under breakup. I can remember one speaker that used banana fibres in the mix. I can't believe the people who came up with Hartke's signature gimmick weren't aware of this, or of it's marketing potential. Given the involvement of Larry Hartke I'd imagine a lot of this would simply be him asking for a 'bit more of a brighter tone' and then picking something that sounded good to him after a few iterations. They wouldn't have been looking for a flat response, just something that sounded good and would sell well. I quite liked my Hartke