Dronny Posted February 25, 2011 Share Posted February 25, 2011 My band has a few gigs coming up and we think we need a little bit of PA support for the kick-drum (but probably not for my bass). We have a PA with 2 active speakers, but no sub. We do have a spare PA-style power-amp, and I have a spare bass cab (a Hartke 4x10). We were wondering if we could use those 2 to give the PA a bit of extra "bottom"... but I'm unclear on whether the bass cab would be any use for this... Anyone got any thoughts? cheers Dave. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
icastle Posted February 25, 2011 Share Posted February 25, 2011 [quote name='Dronny' post='1140938' date='Feb 25 2011, 10:48 AM']My band has a few gigs coming up and we think we need a little bit of PA support for the kick-drum (but probably not for my bass). We have a PA with 2 active speakers, but no sub. We do have a spare PA-style power-amp, and I have a spare bass cab (a Hartke 4x10). We were wondering if we could use those 2 to give the PA a bit of extra "bottom"... but I'm unclear on whether the bass cab would be any use for this...[/quote] It's not really ideal. A proper sub usually has a large speaker, capable of reproducing low frequencies. Your 4x10 (and horn?) was designed as a full range cab. A proper sub usually has a crossover to ensure that only low frequencies are passed to the speaker. Your 4x10 doesn't have one of these. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Starr Posted February 25, 2011 Share Posted February 25, 2011 the question is not whether the sound will be better than using 'proper' subs, it won't, but will it be better than just your PA on its own. Without knowing all about the band ,the venues and the PA none of us mcan say. icastle is right, without a crossover all the signal can go through the PA speakers, so the speaker won't be acting as a sub. If you drive the amp off the mixer everything will go through it and the PA speakers so vocals will be distorted by the bass speaker. At the same time the kick will either overload the PA and cause problems or it won't and you didn't need the 4x10 anyway. The alternative is to use the 4x10 as a kind of drum monitor/backline. We tried putting kick through my bass amp just once, funnily enough it made timing an issue because it was hard for me to hear my 'leading edges' over the kick. If you run the 4x10 as just a drum speaker it won't affect the bass amp or the PA though so that isn't an issue. It might sound OK or not. Try it out at practice though first. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Fitzmaurice Posted February 25, 2011 Share Posted February 25, 2011 [quote name='Dronny' post='1140938' date='Feb 25 2011, 05:48 AM']I'm unclear on whether the bass cab would be any use for this...[/quote]It will not, as it probably goes no lower than what the PA tops do. True subwoofers go at least an octave lower than bass cabs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dronny Posted February 25, 2011 Author Share Posted February 25, 2011 Cool, thanks everyone for your opinions so far, it tends to back up what I suspected (and the other band members who probably know much more about this than me), but I thought it was worth asking the question anyway. I guess the answer over is "no" overall. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LawrenceH Posted February 25, 2011 Share Posted February 25, 2011 I'm with Phil, give it a go. Yes, a true horn-loaded or bandpass sub will have a lot more bass than a typical 4x10 bass cab, but in the real-world I've used a pair of 1x12" bass cabs as emergency makeshift subs in the past exactly for kick reinforcement and they did a very useful job of fattening the sound up. And in my very first band we used to just chuck a mic in the kick drum and run it through the spare channel on a trace V-type through a 4x12 combo and it was phat city. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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