Amps, what do we need?

[grandad]

5 hours ago, la bam said:

If an amp had a built in tuner, and maybe a one knob compressor, itd be a winner in my book.

Which is why I'm happy with my TCE BH250.

[BassmanPaul]

With the accuracy of clip on tuners such as the Snark I see no point in adding one to an amp.

I find such threads as this a tad bizarre. There are not many guitar players who would plug right into a PA and go for it. All I have met want their favourite amplifier on stage with them. 

Output impedance at 0.5Ω won't happen. It takes too much design investment to do so. To get the same power levels into the other impedances would require a bulky transformer to match the amp into the various loads. Look how many in today's market work into 4Ω at the lowest.

It;'s all well and good each of us making a feature list of what we want from out amplifiers. Manufacturers need to sell a decent number of identical units to make a profit. Your wish list would be very different than mine. No-one can produce 'Swiss Army knife' amp that will suit every player out there.

Keep safe and healthy.

Edited May 4, 2020 by BassmanPaul

[NancyJohnson]

2 hours ago, BassmanPaul said:

I find such threads as this a tad bizarre.

Subject matter does meander off and back onto subject.  I think we're a little more loose than the folks on Talkbass.

[BigRedX]

14 hours ago, BassmanPaul said:

I find such threads as this a tad bizarre. There are not many guitar players who would plug right into a PA and go for it. All I have met want their favourite amplifier on stage with them. 

Yes put they all have their amps mic'd up so every component in their signal chain is used to produce both the on-stage and FoH sound. 

When was the last time you saw a bass cab mic'd up and knew for sure that the mic was solely responsible for the FoH bass sound. For most bassists at best they are going to get a post-EQ DI feed to the PA which means that from a tone PoV the power amp and the cabs contribute nothing to what the audience hears.

That's why I have dispensed with my big, heavy and expensive bass rig and replaced it with a Helix (and an FRFR as a personal monitor). That way I know that all the components of my carefully crafted bass sounds are being supplied to FoH.

[Jack]

17 hours ago, fretmeister said:

Built in wireless will never happen.

Too expensive to deal with different countries legal frequency ranges when the main purpose of the product is not as a wireless.

There was a lot of people suggesting it for the Helix and the L6 developers took their time to explain why it wouldn't work and the unit price would go up massively for something that many people just didn't want or had units they preferred for their location.

 

I get the economics argument as it will obviously drive the price up but not that it's too difficult. For one, most dedicated wireless units are standard across the different countries now, and for two Line 6 already do it.

[itu]

2.4 GHz is an ISM band and works round the world. One example of this frequency includes Bluetooth and its versions.

@BassmanPaul: I was talking about -5 ohm impedance, where some player believes s/he could get unlimited amount of watts, no matter how realistic that was. Watt is not the unit for loudness, although it is faintly related to the end result. We have all seen questions like: "Can I put twenty 4 ohm cabs to my amp output to get millions of watts out of it?"

 

[Jack]

1 hour ago, itu said:

@BassmanPaulWe have all seen questions like: "Can I put twenty 4 ohm cabs to my amp output to get millions of watts out of it?"

 

 

That's clearly a ridiculous question. You can have eight 4R cabs for 8000 watts though. :D

Edited May 5, 2020 by Jack

[BassmanPaul]

I can connect all four of my 4Ω Acme B2 cabinets to my Class D power amp and get all 2KW that the amp is capable of. The lil' tube pre-amp I designed to drive it is icing on the cake!