stevie

I think you'll find the Barefaced power handling figure is not an "RMS" figure.

I'm sure Bill would send you replacement plans if you ask nicely. He must have a record of your purchase. Just sayin'.

I have an empty cabinet for an Ashdown ABM combo that I don't need. No grille, speakers or amp, but complete with handles, feet, corners (will need repainting) and what looks like a piezo tweeter. The tolex is in pretty good nick. Made from birch ply throughout. Could be useful for cannibalising or for giving a MAG combo a nice birch ply cab. Must be collected from Dorchester, Dorset, as I don't have the time to pack it up.

Allow me to join the dots for you, Jack. Is that all right for you? To your next point, I'll copy and past a bit from Wikipedia to save time, if you don't mind. "Appeal to tradition (also known as argumentum ad antiquitatem) is an argument in which a thesis is deemed correct on the basis that it is correlated with some past or present tradition. The appeal takes the form of "this is right because we've always done it this way". An appeal to tradition essentially makes two assumptions that are not necessarily true: 1. The old way of thinking was proven correct when introduced, i.e. since the old way of thinking was prevalent, it was necessarily correct. In reality, this may be false — the tradition might be entirely based on incorrect grounds. 2. The past justifications for the tradition are still valid at present. In reality, the circumstances may have changed; this assumption may also therefore be untrue." So there ya go, Jack. Happy, Jack? Just for fun, you might like to look up Logical Fallacies on the internet and count how many there are in this thread. There is one particular claim on here that manages to combine two fallacies in one sentence. Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to discover who said it. Good luck!

Yes, that's a great resource.

Have a look at TommyK's post in Effects For Sale on here. I've no experience of the Joyo compressor he's selling, but the brand is quite well thought of and well priced. There are plenty of reviews. It's not quite bargain basement though. Just as an aside, my limited experience of compressors (including the Boss LMB-3) is that the mid-price bracket brings audible performance benefits.

OK - that makes perfect sense. Thanks for the explanation.

But any amp can do a scooped mids sound. I'm puzzled because people keep talking about the "Trace sound". I had a Trace 300W head for a while and, although it was nice, it didn't seem to have a sound that was different to any other good quality amp. I could have been missing something obvious, of course.

It's standard practice in the world of marketing. Think supermarket "own brands". The problem, as you point out, is that the supplier then has to convince the consumer that they should pay more for the "brand name" product, which in many cases is exactly the same. However, the "Duncan Designed" spinoff brand allows the manufacturer to grab himself a piece of the much bigger OEM market, albeit at a lower margin, without diluting the image of his premium brand.

So exactly what is this old Trace sound of which you speak?

Actually, my comment was tongue-in-cheek, BigRed. It's a logical fallacy that something must work in the future if it worked in the past.

There is so much marketing bull surrounding replacement pickups that it's hard to tell what's true and what isn't. A couple of years ago, there was a link on here to a small bass manufacturer's website where they demonstrated around 10 different P-bass pickups on the same bass. Even though the price differences were great, the differences in sound were marginal. It was basically impossible to tell the cheapest Chinese copy from the most expensive hand-wound-by-dwarfs-and-aged-in-whiskey-in-California models. I suppose it's hardly surprising when you consider that this is fairly primitive technology that is very easy to copy. So I'm not surprised that there is disagreement on this topic (expectation bias and all that). On the other hand, I have certainly heard some pickups that provided an overall "more desirable" sound than stock models and I know the differences were not a product of my imagination. I'm currently playing an Ibanez SR500 with Asian-built Bartolini's. I wouldn't mind upgrading the pickups if I could be confident that I would actually get an improvement, but the views on the internet about upgrading are as inconsistent as the those in this thread about the Duncans. It's very frustrating. I would also mention that I've heard replacement pickups that were worse than the originals, and that generally includes most so-called "hot", overwound pickups.

That's very generous of you.

That is a work of art. A pointless work of art IMO, but still a thing of wonder.

And as we all know, if something has worked well in the past it is bound to work well today. It's only logical, in'it?

I wish I'd thought of that bass line.

I'm familiar with Duncan pickups but not with the Duncan-designed versions. However, I would posit that if the Duncan-designed really are inferior to the Santa Barbara equivalent, then either Seymour deliberately designed an inferior product to stick his name on, or the Chinese (or Taiwanese) are not technologically advanced enough to produce a pickup as good as the US versions. I really think the marketing department had a hand in this. A simple test would reveal all. Has anyone actually done a proper comparison of the two?

Considering that the Chinese make most of the products we buy nowadays, why not a Chinese brand?

And here's a link to the bass part as a pdf: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q47xf1kg9i56weg/Queen - Somebody To Love-bass.pdf?dl=0

Here's a link to the midi. I'm assuming you have the software (?) https://www.dropbox.com/s/0rx5uzegbdgsdgy/Queen - Somebody To Love.MID?dl=0

I can recommend the BMS 15N620, which works well in smallish cabs like the Trace combo. I have one in an Eden cab and it sounds amazing. Very low distortion, clear, crisp, punchy with a very sweet, extended midrange. It needs an internal volume of at least 70 litres - so I'd suggest you measure the internal volume first. It's a bit pricey at £200, but well worth it. It's a genuine 500 watts. Made in Europe. It weighs 3.7kg, which is relatively light for what it offers. The equivalent ceramic model weighs in at 9kg. So you are saving quite a bit of weight.

I've got it on midi. It's in A flat (the original key I suspect), but I can transpose it if you prefer. I could also extract the bass part, but not until tomorrow.

I've nothing against critical comments about products - in fact it doesn't happen enough - but if you're going to slag a product off like that you really need to explain yourself.

I'm using a small ported cab with a P.Audio 8" driver, which sounds really nice. It's here: <http://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=PAUE8200N&browsemode=category>. It's neo - so you're paying a (very) slight premium - but it's very light, takes up less room than a ceramic 8" , and won't be fazed by being in an open-backed cabinet as long as you don't go mad with the volume.

You are Michael Gove and I claim my five pounds!