TRADED Audiokinesis Hathor £699

[Matte_black]

Hello... the time has come to let go this amazing cab. I owned it for one year, give or take, but only used it at low volumes to test instruments.

It was originally built for the Kalium Strings booth at the 2016 NAMM by Duke Lejeune (Audiokinesis USA) and has been designed to go ultra-low (down flat to 23hz or so). http://www.audiokinesis.com - these cabs are all the rage on Talkbass... and for a reason!

It's more or less the same dimensions of the SWR Big Ben, maybe a bit taller, but it's not heavy. It contains an €850 BMS woofer and 4 Faital 3" mids. Also there are two switches on the back: one shuts the mids down for subwoofer use, the other one changes the response of the mids (two positions). It's absolutely the best cab I've ever played thru, but it's just wasted as my gigging days are long gone and I never used it outside my house. It's 800w/4ohm.

Completely stock, finished with Duratex, I think. A cab like this probably costs 2K new, I paid €545 to have it shipped from the USA plus customs duties... go figure!

I'll take a loss but want to free some space from unused items, so priced it at £699 plus shipping. If it's too expensive, we can eventually find a solution like splitting the UPS fees, we'll see.

I still have the box I got it in. Not interested in trades, sorry... gotta make some room in my house, I have too many cabs/basses and they spend their time collecting dust. 

As you can guess, it's one of the best cabs money can buy if you're into low frequencies, extended range basses or effects that need supermassive lows.

 

Edited November 13, 2018 by Matte_black

[silverfoxnik]

Wow !! 

And an amazing looking bass too...

GLWTS

[Matte_black]

LOL the Smurf bass was made using jigs bought in the USA more than 10 years ago. Unfortunately I used them without checking the measurements or the tuners placement and... well, the guy who placed them there must be blind. I always strive to a perfect strings path, so should plug and re-drill for bigger tuners (they'll basically erase the error) but never had much desire to do it. 

[Matte_black]

Forgot to add that due to the unique nature of the beast, I might be open to trades for basses or amps as they would be easier to sell, even locally.

[Oldman]

Just as a matter of interest, how heavy is the cab? I looked on the site and it doesn’t list this particular cab, maybe it does and I missed it 😱

Thanks

[Owen]

Oh wow!

Irrational GAS attack and those are becoming few and far between.

[Matte_black]

It's a one-off prototype, due to the high cost of the woofer and the purpose it was built for. I should check but it's probably around 25kg. I moved it pretty easily by myself, and I actually placed it over my SWR BigBen! Found the specs, they say "36"x22"x18", weighs less than 60 pounds".

 

Edited June 6, 2018 by Matte_black

[Oldman]

7 hours ago, Matte_black said:

It's a one-off prototype, due to the high cost of the woofer and the purpose it was built for. I should check but it's probably around 25kg. I moved it pretty easily by myself, and I actually placed it over my SWR BigBen! Found the specs, they say "36"x22"x18", weighs less than 60 pounds".

 

Thanks.......... 

[Matte_black]

You're welcome. I know it won't be easy to sell but if I find the right buyer... it's the ultimate enclosure for ERB / Sub bass use.

[Matte_black]

Can eventually trade with something I'd use more often LOL.

[Hellzero]

What kind of trades are you looking at ?

Do you have the exact specs like the frequency response, efficiency, ... ?

[Hellzero]

Some answers :

The second big experimental bass cab is in response to luthier Skip Fantry's "Quake" bass, manufactured and sold under his KnuckleHead brand.  Skip routinely ventures where many fear to tread, and has gone public with basses tuned as low as G#00... which has a fundamental of about 13 Hz.  

I think this type of instrument would be called a "sub-contra bass".  It is not meant to be used as, or in place of, a normally-tuned bass guitar.  It is a different class of instrument, and from what I understand its role is more atmospheric than rhythmic.  When brought into the mix, it changes the whole feel of the room... assuming it is played through a cab that can do its part.

Fortunately, for electric bass, we don't have to reproduce the fundamental at anything approaching full power.  In fact, we can leave it out altogether, and the ear/brain system can fill in the missing fundamental from the overtone structure.  Given how expensive it is to reproduce infrasonic tones at high power, our target is the first overtone.  In the case of G#00, that first overtone is at 26 Hz.

The cab you see here is roughly -8 dB at 26 Hz:



Now -8 dB is not very impressive, but this cab is designed to take EQ.  And lots of it.  The woofer is rated at 1500 watts AES and 3000 watts "music program", and in this application, I think we can look to that 3 kilowatt figure as an indication of what its thermal power handling is.

To keep the thermal power handling up as high as we can reasonably get it, the cabinet is designed with ports both above and below the woofer's magnet, to facilitate chimney-effect cooling.  There are four ports, two in each side, staggered because they reach almost all the way across to the far side.  This geometry also has the beneficial side-effect of maintaining a symmetrical airload on the back of the cone, and was inspired by Eminence engineer Jerry McNutt:



Thermal power handling is only part of the story; mechanical power handling is almost always the limiting factor.  And that's a good thing!  We want our bass cabs to fartout and warn us that they are in trouble before the voice coil gets too hot and the magic smoke escapes!

The woofer used in this cab is a high-end prosound subwoofer, with a claimed linear excursion (based on voice coil overhang according to the manufacturer, which is a rather conservative yardstick) of twenty-two millimeters.  That's a lot for a bass cab.  The bad news is, we do have to be careful because the voice coil can overheat and the magic smoke escape before we get fartout.

With suitable EQ (which includes a protective high-pass filter to prevent over-excursion from the low fundamental, which is well below the tuning frequency), and a three kilowatt amp, this cab can theoretically deliver flat to 26 Hz at 122 dB, and would be 3 dB down at 20 Hz.   That's not bad for a seventy-pound bass cab.  

Above the region covered by the woofer, we have four little 3" cone mids in a cross-firing array.  The mids are in an open-format Hathor-style chamber, which gives a less boxy sound, improves the ability to hear the overtones from normally shadowed locations like right next to or virtually on top of the cab, and cooling is improved relative to shoehorning the little mids into a small sealed sub-enclosure.  

On the back of the cab are two switches.  The top switch up = mids at their loudest; top switch down = mids matching up better with the woofer; and bottom switch down = mids off altogether.  

Once again, if this cab becomes part of my line-up, it will be a special-order item and will not come cheap.  The woofer is a special-order-only unit from Europe that has a three-month lead time.