stevie

I was involved professionally in the cable business for a few years and can confirm that Neutrik plugs are the business. I wouldn't contemplate anything else. If I needed a new cable, that would be the first thing I'd look for.

Nice review.

Indeed. The 112SL might actually be 99.9dB at one particular frequency, but definitely not over the entire frequency range. Also, defining the sensitivity to a tenth of a dB reeks of 'specmanship'.

You really do need to take manufacturers' specs with a large pinch of salt. They exaggerate a lot. A figure for sensitivity is meaningless unless you know how it has been calculated. Ideally, that means a frequency response curve measured under standard conditions – the kind of thing pro speaker system manufacturers provide. Anybody can make a bass cab that has high sensitivity in the midrange, but unless the LF can keep up, it will sound unbalanced. Anything between 94dB and 97dB is a reasonable figure for a medium sized 12" cab. 99dB is almost certainly not an honest figure. Doesn't the MB have a larger cabinet? If so, it might be marginally more sensitive at low frequencies (where it counts) than the Aguilar, but not much.

With these cabs made from aluminium and carbon fibre, special attention has to be given to preventing resonance. The original carbon-fibre hi-fi speakers I remember had heavily damped and curved GF panels because of this.

It's likely to be an open circuit somewhere along the line. Check the wiring from the output through to the midrange drivers. A multimeter would help.

That's the only explanation I can think of, and it might make sense for open-backed cabs.

As has capacitor burn-in and cable burn-in. The hi-fi market is full of marketing myths.

The kiss of death.

I have some Sennheiser 650s (retail £300) headphones and some 580s. You really have to concentrate hard to hear any difference. You can pick up a second-hand pair of 580s for about £70 on eBay, although they sometimes go for a lot more. If you like, you can replace the foam parts for just a few pounds by buying the copies from China.

Is that the best you could do, @Jus Lukin?😀

In fact, if you use enough braces, you could build a cab from paper. 🥴

I don't have the SM212 but I have another 12" Beyma driver. It looks like they all take the same spade terminals, which are 6.3mm. You could always get your ruler out to check.

Agreed. The constant directivity horns that most cabs use nowadays all need to be equalised - so there has to be some form of equalisation going on for the HF at least. What the people at RCF might be getting at is that they're not using DSP to iron out problems with the drivers. In other words, the drivers they're using are capable of producing a flat response without too much eq. That's certainly possible.

We measured the impedance. If you haven't got that facility, the rice-on-the-cone method works too. The tuning was meant to be 50Hz.

I seem to recall that I measured your cab, Phil, and found the tuning spot-on.

I guess that shows that it might be possible. But at a price.

This has no doubt been discussed in the past, but is there some software that would allow a band to practice remotely via the internet? I seem to remember that there were problems with time delays. What's the current state of the art?

I've had a few different parametric eq devices in my bass rig and have found never found them useful. Theoretically, they offer the best way of tailoring your sound to fix problems with your equipment or with the room, but in practice I've found that they offer too many options. As long as the frequencies are correctly specified, a broader based five-band tone control works for me. Even then, I find I only ever need to use the low bass and lower-mid bass controls in live situations.

Likewise.

Answering my own question: "With the HF control at max you hear everything upwards of ~3kHz coming from the tweeter. Turn the HF control down and the crossover point gradually shifts upwards so more of your tone comes from the 12” driver, giving a wide variety of sonic options." From the Barefaced manual. Still doesn't make it a "variable crossover". Unless someone can provide a circuit diagram or a photo of the crossover, or explain how a variable crossover can be implemented passively at a reasonable cost, I'll stick with my original assumption. Those who believe in magic are welcome to do so.

What are you basing this on, Pete?

Are you going to reveal this inside knowledge?

It is indeed a crossover, mcnach, but it's very unlikely to be a variable crossover, which is what the reviewer that Dave quoted earlier is describing. Everybody and their dog uses an L-pad on their bass cabs. When an L-pad is used, the crossover frequency does move slightly by dint of the fact that the level of the HF is being raised and lowered. But that's perfectly normal.