Barefaced Big Baby 800W RMS: How?!

[Dood]

12 minutes ago, Dan Dare said:

I agree with Stevie and Bill. Could the answer be that these cabs can handle the output of a typical "800W" amp, because that amp is only actually capable of delivering a burst of that wattage at a narrowly defined frequency range and over a few milliseconds?  An amplifier that could deliver 800W RMS continuously over a wide range of frequencies would smoke them, but that doesn't happen in the real world because such a beast probably doesn't exist. As stated above, watts alone are pretty meaningless. Some manufacturers, such as Naim Audio (before you say it, I appreciate that they don't design kit for musicians), rate amplifiers on their ability to deliver current, rather than wattage. Would that be a more realistic measure?

Funnily enough, I wrote a really long post saying the same, but I lost the will halfway through. So, thank you!

 

edit: in the case of Barefaced, their website does specify suitable amplifier power output rather than some sort of mysterious marketing "absolute" speaker limit.

Edited February 28, 2020 by Dood

[chyc]

8 hours ago, paulbuzz said:

Admittedly this is different to the way in which most cabinet manufacturers talk about the specs of their products, but there is a reason for this: the reason is that the traditional/usual practice of quoting a single "rated power handling" figure for a speaker cabinet is unsatisfactory and misleading for a number of reasons.

I'd accept that. However I would say that after they've made the case that wattage is misleading, Barefaced have not given the numbers that could give a clearer representation of their cabinet (an on-axis SPL or x-max for example). Instead, they've overloaded XXXW rms with their own meaning.

Surely I can't be the only one to have tripped up on that? Their definition isn't on the same website , and I appreciate the posts that have given the link to that as I'd missed it.

I still cannot fathom in my head why a bigger box can allow for 200W extra power from the amp though.

 

 

[MacDaddy]

14 hours ago, Beedster said:

snip ***

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not sure that the numbers in question make a whole lot of difference in the real world. My 30w B-15 shouldn’t have been able to fill a decent sized room with about 150 people but did, while my 300w PJB rig should have been able to do so without missing a beat but failed miserably (same room).

*** snip

My 100w Peavey Vypyr VIP 3 combo, can quite happily cope at decent sized and larger pub gigs - despite opinions of experts to the contrary. 

My old 500w PJB rig (The Dalek, to any former Bass World members) had to be miked. Probably as the cabs were 16ohm.

[paulbuzz]

I think their point is that there just isn't any simple number that can give an unambiguous and definitive representation of the power handling of a given cab, so instead they have chosen to restrict themselves to an (admittedly vague) suggestion of what size of amp is likely to make a suitable match for their cabs.

As to why the cab with the same bass driver, but in a bigger box with an added mid/high driver should be more suitable for a more powerful amp, I haven't got an answer. (Though of course the practical difference between 600W and 800W amps is minimal anyway; certainly less than the difference between identically rated amps from various different manufacturers. )  

If I seem to be coming over as something of a Barefaced apologist here, I should perhaps make clear that I've never owned, played through, or even heard one of their cabs!  😁

[chris_b]

1 hour ago, chyc said:

I still cannot fathom in my head why a bigger box can allow for 200W extra power from the amp though.

If you really have to know the numbers you'll have to build your own cab.

As a Barefaced user I don't need maths to tell me what I like about these cabs. I'll believe my ears rather than determining my sound by looking at a sheet of numbers.

[bertbass]

Barefaced don't use standard Eminence speakers anymore.  As the company has grown, Alex is now in the position of being able to design the speaker parameters that he requires and Eminence make for him and anyone who has a 3rd generation Barefaced cab can confirm that that approach has worked well.

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

2 hours ago, Dan Dare said:

Could the answer be that these cabs can handle the output of a typical "800W" amp, because that amp is only actually capable of delivering a burst of that wattage at a narrowly defined frequency range and over a few milliseconds? 

The answer is that chances are you'll never run that 800w amp at more than -3dB from maximum, and that puts you at 400w. A more likely -10dB puts you at 80w.

Quote

they rate amplifiers on their ability to deliver current, rather than wattage. Would that be a more realistic measure?

What engineers consider is voltage swing. Watts don't cause a voice coil and cone to vibrate, volts do. An amp's current limit determines how low an impedance load it can drive.

My 100w Peavey Vypyr VIP 3 combo, can quite happily cope at decent sized and larger pub gigs - despite opinions of experts to the contrary.

That just proves that they're not experts.

Quote

Alex is now in the position of being able to design the speaker parameters that he requires and Eminence make for him

Eminence builds OEM drivers to spec with off the shelf parts. It's like a Chinese restaurant menu. Choose a frame and motor from column A, a voice coil from Column B, a cone from Column C, a dust cover from Column D, and so forth. With the number of parts at their disposal the number of possible permutations is almost endless. The minimum number of drivers you must order to get your own OEM is fifty.

 

Edited February 28, 2020 by Bill Fitzmaurice

[chyc]

20 minutes ago, chris_b said:

If you really have to know the numbers you'll have to build your own cab.

As a Barefaced user I don't need maths to tell me what I like about these cabs. I'll believe my ears rather than determining my sound by looking at a sheet of numbers.

I don't want to know the numbers. I want to make some kind of comparative evaluation using data online, prior to committing. If there were a shop nearby I could visit to compare cabinet X from Barefaced with cabinet A from manufacturer B with cabinet C from manufacturer D then I would do that.

I was looking at various cabinets and Barefaced stood out as having specs that no other manufacturer can touch, so much so that I asked the question here. From this thread is looks like

1. These specs are meaningless from any manufacturer (not just Barefaced) without bounding by other parameters
2. Barefaced define things differently to any other manufacturer

Now if BF genuinely think that these numbers are a better reflection of a cabinet's capabilities I cannot argue with that as I'm not the expert. I may take issue with the fact that BF claim the measuring of watts is an inaccurate measure, then redefine the meaning of cabinet rating so that their wattage rating is higher than others' definition. I may then take further issue with how difficult it is to find that definition (it's on a different website).

The take-home for me is that

• Numbers don't matter, you need to try the cab
• Barefaced numbers, if not misleading, would have misled me had I not asked here
• People seem to like their cabinets

On  the first point, I would perhaps use a dreaded car analogy. If a car can do 0-60mph in 3 seconds you can probably safely infer it will have a high top speed rather than a top speed of 80mph. However, you should not buy a car based on its spec alone, you need to try it.

Carrying on with the car analogy, I'd be a bit miffed if a car manufacturer quoted their 0-60mph as X seconds while burying in their small print that this was measured on a downhill as down-ramps to motorways are commonly when you need the better acceleration.

However, if they sound great, they sound great. I guess I'll never know as the first point is a good one, and I'm a little bit miffed (rightly or wrongly) at feeling misled on the second.

 

[Muzz]

Barefaced offer a try before you buy/returns policy, so if you're serious, that's the first point taken care of...I'm not aware of any other manufacturers that do this.

Trying cabs in shops is never a fantastic gauge of how they'll work for you.

Edited February 28, 2020 by Muzz

[chyc]

1 minute ago, Muzz said:

Barefaced offer a try before you buy/returns policy, so if you're serious, that's the first point taken care of...I'm not aware of any other manufacturers that do this.

That's a good point in their favour. As I understand it you pay the full amount up-front and on return you pay the return postage though.

As a point of information DB Bass offers this too.

[jrixn1]

Presumably you've already seen now, but they also claim "Power: 600 RMS" for their 1x12".

[chyc]

14 minutes ago, jrixn1 said:

Presumably you've already seen now, but they also claim "Power: 600 RMS" for their 1x12".

Yeah, that's high, if not 800W high. However there are certainly numbers on there that are raising my eyebrows in the same way that Barefaced's did. 30kHz upper frequency limit?! That'll be some nice string detail in the mix

Yeah yeah I now know that the number is meaningless. Doubly so since only cats and dogs would appreciate the subtleties going on up there.

 

Edited February 28, 2020 by chyc
Spelling

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

3 hours ago, chyc said:

Barefaced define things differently to any other manufacturer

BF defines things more accurately than other manufacturers. For instance,  using a range of suitability with respect to amp power, as opposed to a finite figure, is neither new nor unique. The hi-fi speaker industry has been doing that for as long as I can remember, which is probably longer than the average player here has been alive. I don't see anything Alex saying as being out of line. The only problem is that for the most part he's the only one saying it.  What people should asking isn't why BF offers the information that they do, but why the rest of the lot don't.

[machinehead]

3 hours ago, chyc said:

Now if BF genuinely think that these numbers are a better reflection of a cabinet's capabilities I cannot argue with that as I'm not the expert. I may take issue with the fact that BF claim the measuring of watts is an inaccurate measure, then redefine the meaning of cabinet rating so that their wattage rating is higher than others' definition. I may then take further issue with how difficult it is to find that definition (it's on a different website).

 

 

I've just read the BF website and it says:

"Recommended Amp Power

150-800W RMS" (That is for their BB2 cab.) Unless I haven't found it elsewhere on their website, Barefaced are not claiming the "cabinet rating" is 800W.  It's very clearly a recommendation for suitable amps.  If you follow the "cabinet rating" argument through you might argue that they rate their cabs as low as 150W. Frank.

Edited February 28, 2020 by machinehead
correction

[chyc]

24 minutes ago, machinehead said:

Unless I haven't found it elsewhere on their website, Barefaced are not claiming the "cabinet rating" is 800W.  It's very clearly a recommendation for suitable amps.  If you follow the "cabinet rating" argument through you might argue that they rate their cabs as low as 150W.

That's on the barefacedbass.com website right? Yeah that site makes it much clearer what they mean, even though it seems to be quite glitchy and giving me "The requested URL was not found on this server" errors all the time for the same pages; the site looks abandoned.

I was looking at barefacedaudio.com which has

Quote

 

Max Amp Power

800W RMS

 

I now know that "Max Amp Power" is not the same thing as the thermal limit of the driver, which is lower. Wasn't clear to me however given I've seen e.g. "watts is watts is watts" elsewhere in other threads.

 

[Cuzzie]

Max amp power sort of says the same thing as 150-800.

The best thing honestly Is to email Alex and he will respond, but specific questions will need to be asked and he gives good answers.

For example when asking him about pairing an amp with a higher wattage rating than was suggested on one of their One10s he was very helpful in making sure I didn’t rag it and used it safely.

[paulbuzz]

7 hours ago, chyc said:

I now know that "Max Amp Power" is not the same thing as the thermal limit of the driver, which is lower. Wasn't clear to me however given I've seen e.g. "watts is watts is watts" elsewhere in other threads.

And here's one of the major problems:

Most bass cab manufacturers rate their cabinets by simply quoting the thermal limit of the bass driver - ie how much power (in watts) it can take before the voice-coil is damaged by heat.

BUT: For most uses of most bass drivers in most bass cabinets, the effective usage is limited WAY before the thermal limit by the excursion limits of the driver - ie how far the cone can travel back and forth before bad things start happening. Because of this limit, in reality most bass cabs can't make use of anything like the power suggested by the manufacturer's given (thermal) power handling spec figure.

The excursion limits of any  particular driver are given by the driver specs Xmax and Xlim (in mm), but how much power (in watts) it will take for the driver to reach these limits varies depending on the cab design and the frequencies being reproduced.

All of this is sufficiently complicated that most cab manufacturers don't even attempt to explain about this stuff.

Barefaced, by contrast, have loads of information about this stuff on their site. They make a point of using drivers with high excursion limits, which means their cabs can go unusually loud before things start sounding bad. These high-spec drivers are one of the things you pay a premium price for.

But most manufacturers AND players don't want to have to get into a conversation about all this, so instead we tend to get stuck with unhelpful and misleading cab specs.

This kind of stuff is very much the area of expertise of Bill, Phil, Stevie and a few others on this site, so I'm sure they'll jump in if I've explained any of this wrong! 😁

Edited February 29, 2020 by paulbuzz

[T-Bay]

Without getting into the technicalities (because people like Bill do it so much better), what I would say is that I continually get comments about my compact and midget setup. Before a gig it’s usually along the lines of ‘where is the rest of it?’ Or ‘is that your rehearsal rig?’ And afterwards it’s ‘kin ell! How is something that small that loud?’. I run them from an Orange terror 1000w head. I don’t think I ever got the dial more than a third of the way around in a gig. I messed about around two thirds when we turned up early for a sound check for a small festival last year and our drummer could hear it a mile away on the access road. I know there is more to good sound than volume, but they also seem to have an amazingly flat response across the range. How do they do it? No idea, but I love them.

Edited February 28, 2020 by T-Bay
Typo

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

13 minutes ago, paulbuzz said:

All of this is sufficiently complicated that most cab manufacturers don't even attempt to explain about this stuff.

Most of those who write the ad copy and so forth don't explain it because they don't know what it means themselves. The larger the company the more likely that is, as the engineering and marketing departments tend to not be in the same building, if even the same country. If you've read anything Alex posted here in years past it's obvious that what's in his literature he either wrote or approved, so with BF you're getting it from the horse's mouth, as opposed to the other end.

[Al Krow]

19 minutes ago, T-Bay said:

Without getting into the technicalities (because people like Bill do it so much better), what I would say is that I continually get comments about my compact and super midget setup. Before a gig it’s usually along the lines of ‘where is the rest of it?’ Or ‘is that your rehearsal rig?’ And afterwards it’s ‘kin ell! How is something that small that loud?’. I run them from an Orange terror 1000w head. I don’t think I ever got the dial more than a third of the way around in a gig. I messed about around two thirds when we turned up early for a sound check for a small festival last year and our drummer could hear it a mile away on the access road. I know there is more to good sound than volume, but they also seem to have an amazingly flat response across the range. How do they do it? No idea, but I love them.

Sidetrack: my regret is that Orange have taken the fear out of Terror and now only do 500W at 4 ohm, heads. 

[T-Bay]

1 hour ago, Al Krow said:

Sidetrack: my regret is that Orange have taken the fear out of Terror and now only do 500W at 4 ohm, heads. 

The 1000w is probably over the top but makes it a lot more flexible, not sure what they have done to the new ones but they seem a bit more ‘tame’ than the originals. Not so much terror as mild nervousness.

[stevie]

4 hours ago, paulbuzz said:

This kind of stuff is very much the area of expertise of Bill, Phil, Stevie and a few others on this site, so I'm sure they'll jump in if I've explained any of this wrong! 😁

I'll jump in and say that's a very good explanation.

[LukeFRC]

On 28/02/2020 at 10:43, chyc said:

 

I still cannot fathom in my head why a bigger box can allow for 200W extra power from the amp though.

Excursion limit is different. 

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

A bigger box doesn't add to the power capacity. If anything it lowers it, as excursion is more in a larger box, not less. What a larger box does give is higher sensitivity and/or lower extension, which lessens the power required for a given output in the low end. It's the classic case of Hoffman's Iron Law at work. If you're a bass player and you don't know what that is,  you should. You deal with it every time you plug in.

[dave_bass5]

On 28/02/2020 at 13:56, Muzz said:

Barefaced offer a try before you buy/returns policy, so if you're serious, that's the first point taken care of...I'm not aware of any other manufacturers that do this.

Trying cabs in shops is never a fantastic gauge of how they'll work for you.

And that’s why we can buy on line and return the item  to most online shops. BF have to work within the distance selling regulations, they just make a ‘feature’ of it.