stevie

Subscribed (as they say).

Mine have been on my bass for about 5 years and I don't feel the need to change them.

I've got a BB1100S, which I picked up secondhand for £150 from eBay - a few years ago now. The neck is the nicest thing about it, a bit thinner than a Jazz I think, and very easy to play. I've changed all the parts on it, the most important upgrade being a set of Hipshot lightweight tuners, which fixed the head droop nicely and brought the weight down a fair bit. I've tried more expensive basses, some a lot more expensive, but don't think I've played anything I like better. It does a great Precision sound. The only thing I haven't swapped out is the preamp which, as far as I can tell, is perfectly transparent. The three-band eq is great for on-stage tweaking, and I rarely have to touch the amp during a gig. I used to have a very early JV Precision as well, which is not probably worth around a grand now, but I sold it and kept the Yammy.

Sorry guys, you're just wrong. I've run the figures for the Celestion 10 through a simulation program and you'll find the curve below. So that we have some kind of yardstick for comparison purposes, I've also simulated the Eminence Kappalite 3012LF. For those reading this thread who aren't familiar with the Kappalite, it is considered by many to be one of the best woofers of its kind, used in the Fearful range of boxes as well as the Barefaced Big Baby and the AudioKinesis Thunderchild. You won't find it in many mainstream commercial cabinets as it was designed purely as a woofer and needs a midrange driver to work properly. Nobody has complained that this driver does not go low enough. Ever. Its published Fs is 37Hz, although I measured even lower, at 34.5Hz. So, how does the Celestion BL10 with its Fs of 73Hz fare against the big, bad, fat Eminence woofer? [IMG]http://i61.tinypic.com/24ls8xk.jpg[/IMG] Well, there's not a lot in it. Between 40 and 50Hz they are neck and neck. The Eminence has about 3dB more output between 60 and 100Hz, which will be noticeable although not staggeringly so. Bear in mind that the Eminence is a 12" driver in a cabinet 50 percent bigger than the Celestion's. At high power the Eminence wins, but add another Celestion 10 and the balance moves strongly towards the Celestion. By no stretch of the imagination could this speaker be described as lacking output below 100Hz. The Beyma looks interesting. With its cast chassis and slightly lower price, it looks like better value than the Celestion. It won't go lower than the Celestion though, and it probably won't handle as much power. Still, if I were in the market, I might be tempted to go with Phil's suggestion. Anyway, let me make the point that there is a bit more to Thiele and Small than drawing diagrams with WinISD.

You can't make any kind of judgement on a speaker on the basis of a single T/S parameter. That's a nicely specified driver for bass guitar, as you would expect from Celestion.

It's a very nice driver - works best in multiples of 2. If you've got a good price you won't be disappointed.

This does seem to be a British thing. I remember when Japanese were buying Sony, the Germans were buying Braun – we were buying Amstrad. In defence of Barefaced, I think many people are prepared to forgive their shortcomings because they are so lightweight.

Why would the Manchester Bass Lounge know any more than the members who have already commented?

It must be the UK. It's the only country where people defend poor quality. I believe some people actually paid good money for Reliant Robins and Austin Metros - but at least they were cheap. The only way Alex is going to improve his product and stay in business is if he receives and accepts valid criticism.

Nice work! My only criticism would be that the backplate (and plastic jacks) don't match the quality of the rest of it.

Sounds like you're in luck, flyfisher. Have a look at the 8-inch drivers on the Blue Aran site. This one: http://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=PAUE8200N&browsemode=manufacturer is very nice if you want to go for the lightweight option. Good price too, and it takes a lot of hammer. I could lend you one to try if we can sort the logistics out.

I can't find any specs for the speakers anywhere. As it's a complete system, it's very likely that they are 4 ohms as you suspect, which makes it difficult to replace the driver with something equivalent. You could always take a driver out and check - just in case. The impedance will be marked on the driver. If it is 8 ohms, there are plenty of relatively inexpensive drivers available from companies like P.Audio.

That's a lot of money for a pair of 8" drivers. You could buy a superior, modern neo 8" driver for less than that, but the 4-ohm impedance is problematic. A recone would probably cost half as much as a replacement driver and may be your best bet. Ask the reconer to tell you what caused the damage. They will be able to tell when they have removed the old cone/coil.

Nice to see a company taking ownership of what they make. It's all too rare nowadays.

[quote name='6v6' timestamp='1412242726' post='2567012'] Interesting update! FWIW in my build I made the fixed shelf tuned to ~50Hz, and later I added a removable extension which moves it down to ~42Hz tuning. It's fair to say the difference is subtle, but audible, and since I fitted the shelf extension I'm getting occasional ugly sounds on hitting the low notes (only a 4 string but I'm running a 300w LM3 into one speaker) - it's interesting that you note port noise, I've not checked my plots but perhaps that explains it. [/quote] My guess is that your'e hitting xmax at 70/80Hz. If you look at Phil's excursion diagrams above you'll see that dropping the tuning to 40Hz reduces the power handling of the system quite a lot between 50 and 80Hz. If the problem didn't occur when your system was tuned to 50Hz, it's not likely to be noise, because lowering the tuning to 40Hz will move the turbulent noise from the ports down out of harm's way.

If I weren't expecting the builders to come in and demolish our internal chimneys tomorrow, I would have a go, but I'm going to be a bit tied up for the next few days. Apart from that, I don't have a 5-string. I don't think it would be that complicated to do. You'd have to play pink noise through a hi-fi system or a bass amp and use a RATA to equalise it until it's flat between 30Hz and 200Hz. Then play your B and measure what you get on your RATA. That should represent the input the speaker receives for each frequency band. Perhaps somebody on here could give it a go...... It's well known that the energy of the bass guitar is concentrated in the first two harmonics rather than in the fundamental, and that applies to plenty of other instruments too. The second graph tks.se posted shows that the fundamental accounts for just 2% of the total energy of the note, which strikes me as rather low, unless an unequalised speaker system was used for the measurements.

I think most people will assume that it's straight from the bass because that's the only data that makes any sense, but the measurements shown are of SPL. So we need a bit more information on what was measured.

Why don't you try it and see?

[quote name='tks.se' timestamp='1412160565' post='2566219'] When playing a low B, most of the tone consists of harmonics to the fundamental. Here's the result of playing a low B and running the signal through a spectrum analyser: [/quote] What exactly was being measured here? Was the loudspeaker eq'd to be flat to 30Hz?

[quote name='LukeFRC' timestamp='1411939880' post='2564215'] I'm willing to bet that the average ABS PA cab will be better engineered than the average Bass cab (note the second average there ) properly done I don't see how it would be worse. if you look at this they take a RCF HD12a apart.... not that ABS stuff has a fair bit of bracing there.... also a cab I would love to try sticking electric bass through [/quote] Just to agree with Discreet here, check out this video at around 1 minute in. It tells you all you need to know about that speaker, and plastic cabs in general. If you don't know what I'm talking about, google 'knuckle rap test'. The ideal way to use this kind of cab for bass guitar is to put it on top of a 'proper' bass cab with an electronic crossover. Like a normal PA, in fact. On its own it will sound like bass in a plastic bucket. IMO, of course.

That's not too far from Dorch - so I'll try to come too.

If you're going to continue to use these as monitors, your only solution is to replace the damaged driver with an identical one. Anything else will change the sound. Unless you can find out who makes the driver (it's unlikely to be M-Audio) you are stuck and an original spare part is your only answer. I'd guess it's a Chinese special, but you'll need to examine it to find out more.

Funkle, it seems I missed your post. in answer to your question, I use the RTA section of Liberty Instrument's Praxis measurement software. It used to be available separately as a download but I now see that you have to download the whole program. I expect it's still available on the web somewhere. However, there are plenty of other free RTAs. I use a Creative EMU (0202, I think) connected to a netbook. I happen to have a very expensive calibrated mic but a cheapo would do nearly as well, as most of the benefits of expensive measurement mics are at the HF end. I try to measure about 4 or 5 metres from the cab, as less than that fails to capture what the room is doing. You have to be quick though - people don't particularly like the sound of pink noise. Apart from that, mic position doesn't seem to be critical for this particular purpose, although you do need to move it about a bit to make sure you're not stuck in a null. I currently have two Behringer parametric eqs and they make superb bass preamps. Because they have balanced/unbalanced ins and outs, you can plug directly into your bass amp, although they have enough output to drive a power amp on its own. I bought the second one for backup but have never needed it - so I will be selling it soon. As the measurement process is a bit of a faff - not to mention having to tote the extra equipment - I only do it nowadays when I know I'll have plenty of time to spare.