Mixing Cabs

[Owen]

On 21/08/2023 at 11:46, Chienmortbb said:

It broke the mixer? 
 

On a serious note, the only caveat I would add is that PA subs should be placed side by side not vertically and definitely not either side of the stage. 

What is the difference between side by side and one on top of the other? Sorry this is veering off topic, but ....yeah.

 

The internet tells me I could just whack them all along the back wall or along the front of the stage (https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/bass-place).

 

I know that if I were to put them in the corner at the back of the stage I would be getting additional sonic encouragement from the corner itself, but I could EQ that out. Given time to set up with some permanent EQ plumbed in, would that be so bad in a permanent install?

 

TIA

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

51 minutes ago, Owen said:

What is the difference between side by side and one on top of the other?

Where bass cabs are concerned refer to an earlier post: the radiating surface of the 4x10 is wider than that of the 1x15, so its midrange dispersion isn't wider than the 1x15, it's narrower. Placing cabs side by side makes the radiating surface wider, so horizontal dispersion is narrower, by half. Vertical stacking also gets drivers closer to your ear level, so you hear the mids and highs better on stage.

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The internet tells me I could just whack them all along the back wall or along the front of the stage (https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/bass-place).

That's subwoofer placement, not bass cab placement. Subs don't radiate midrange, so side by side and vertical gives the same result. 

Edited August 22, 2023 by Bill Fitzmaurice

[Chienmortbb]

41 minutes ago, Owen said:

What is the difference between side by side and one on top of the other? Sorry this is veering off topic, but ....yeah.

 

The internet tells me I could just whack them all along the back wall or along the front of the stage (https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/bass-place).

 

I know that if I were to put them in the corner at the back of the stage I would be getting additional sonic encouragement from the corner itself, but I could EQ that out. Given time to set up with some permanent EQ plumbed in, would that be so bad in a permanent install?

 

TIA

Actually it does not make much difference with subs. Th3 main thing is to keep the together or not too far apart. . If you place the subs on either side you get  comb filtering. So just by moving a metre or two either way you can be deafened by the subs of barely hear them. I learnt about the theory of this about a week before a concert. The subs were placed either side of the stage and every time the bassist dug in or the drummer hit the kick, everything else was obliterated. There is a good video on sub placement here. There is a little tech speak but the graphics do not lie.

 

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[Owen]

Thanks, I shall watch it tonight.

 

>every time the bassist dug in or the drummer hit the kick, everything else was obliterated

 

You say this like it is a bad thing?

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

It's what's caused me to walk out of the last two concerts I went to. 😒

[Owen]

I could not stop myself. I watched it, and another 2. They made a lot of sense. I will be moving our subs

 

Thanks both of you.

[Lfalex v1.1]

The whole thing is a conundrum, much of which can only be unraveled through experimentation, which is, at best, hit-and-miss.

 

Two completely dissimilar cabs will surely present the amp with a differing frequency response and modulus of impedance even if the nominal  impedance is the same. 

That said,  they might sound great stacked one way, but not another. 

 

And then there are manufacturers who mix drivers in the same cabinet (looks at schroeder 21012L in the corner)

How does that work if there's no crossover network (active or passive) and the drivers share an enclosure?

[Phil Starr]

17 hours ago, Lfalex v1.1 said:

And then there are manufacturers who mix drivers in the same cabinet (looks at schroeder 21012L in the corner)

How does that work?

 

 

How it works is that many bass cabs are definitely not designed to be flat response but are instead deliberately coloured. Any testing is primarily done by listening tests and it's possible to 'design' a successful guitar cab by luck, a bit of experience and lots of experimentation. They may have used dozens of drivers and a hundred combinations of speakers to hone their cab.

 

Before the early 70's when the mathematical models of speakers were developed this was how cabs were all designed. More cookery than science really. But, Stradivarius used much the same mixture of skill and happy accident to develop instruments that remain unsurpassed to today. It is ultimately music and sound

 

 

[BigRedX]

50 minutes ago, Phil Starr said:

Before the early 70's when the mathematical models of speakers were developed this was how cabs were all designed. More cookery than science really. But, Stradivarius used much the same mixture of skill and happy accident to develop instruments that remain unsurpassed to today. It is ultimately music and sound

 

But Stradivarius was essentially improving an instrument that had been around for hundreds of years.

 

Loudspeaker design is comparatively young and we're only just reaching the point where there are "giants" to "stand on the shoulders of".

[Chienmortbb]

Not sure Stradivarius is a good analogy. Making the best instrument that mimics a cat being strangled is a low bar

😂 

 

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[chyc]

29 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 

But Stradivarius was essentially improving an instrument that had been around for hundreds of years.

Stradivarius didn't have power tools so iterative improvements would have been slow.

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

3 hours ago, BigRedX said:

Loudspeaker design is comparatively young and we're only just reaching the point where there are "giants" to "stand on the shoulders of".

Not really. At least 90% of what we know about loudspeaker design today was quantified by Harry Olson in 'Elements of Acoustical Engineering', published in 1940. The only major omission was Thiele/Small parameters, which date to 1965. Olson's work was very well known by Hi-Fi and theatrical sound manufacturers. I doubt one in ten musical instrument speaker manufacturers are aware of his work even today. I'd be surprised if even one in a thousand bass players are aware of his work, even though where giants of loudspeaker design are concerned he stands head and shoulders above most.

 

FWIW the violin first appeared circa 1530. Stradivarius started making his circa 1660.

[Phil Starr]

7 hours ago, Bill Fitzmaurice said:

 

FWIW the violin first appeared circa 1530. Stradivarius started making his circa 1660.

Thanks. Saved me looking it up

[dclaassen]

Really enjoying this discussion. I think it’s mostly academic for me because, after 50-plus years of playing …

1. It’s way more about the instrument than the amp ( unless either/both are crap) and playing tech

2. I like what I like with a produced sound, and have a good idea of how to get it, but can’t quantify the process

3. Live gigging tone is different than sitting at home alone tone.

4. Most of it is in our heads anyway. Bass players probably obsess over tone more than anyone.

5. Nobody else cares.

 

Submitted with both respect and ironic smirk.

[0175westwood29]

I’m guessing this picture might trigger many in here, I actually really dug the 215 610 combo…..normally I would only use a 215 but now actually sorting a 2nd 610 for this project ( it’s just me and drums) 

[BassmanPaul]

Carrying all that stuff round gig to gig is going to get tiresome eventually as you get older!!

 

 

[0175westwood29]

28 minutes ago, BassmanPaul said:

Carrying all that stuff round gig to gig is going to get tiresome eventually as you get older!!

 

 

genuinely not as bad as it looks everything on castors and the sounds makes up for it, also using the smaller head is helpful

[SimonK]

Sorry to dig this one up, but something written in another thread got me searching for discussions on mixing cabs as I've recently been using this combination:

 

...and combined they defintely sound "fuller" than individually. A bit of digging into old TE catalogues and around the interweb tells me that the top cab - 2103x - with both 2x5 and 2x10 drivers is voiced to work specifically with a 1x15 inch cab as here, albeit I'm mixing TE eras (I believe the top cab is early 90s and the bottom is late 90s based on no green fuzz & green fuzz). So I'm guessing this rig may be an exception to the don't mix drivers debate?

 

 

[BassmanPaul]

Two cabinets always sound better, fuller than just one.

 

[SimonK]

 

12 minutes ago, BassmanPaul said:

Two cabinets always sound better, fuller than just one.

 

 

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

36 minutes ago, BassmanPaul said:

Two cabinets always sound better, fuller than just one.

 

Unless grossly mis-matched that's true. As a for instance a 410 plus 115 will almost always sound better than either on its own. But a pair of identical 410s is better.

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A bit of digging into old TE catalogues and around the interweb tells me that the top cab - 2103x - with both 2x5 and 2x10 drivers is voiced to work specifically with a 1x15 inch cab

Maybe. If true the tens would be guitar drivers. But even then if not bi-amped with an electronic crossover the tens are seeing lows and the fifteen is seeing mids and highs that they shouldn't.

[SimonK]

I totally accept that with modern drivers two of the same cab will, on average, be better than mixing cabs, but the TE example I've posted strikes me as potentially an exception because here someone has actually sat down and designed three different sized speakers to work together?

 

Regarding the cross-over and bi-amped comment, I do agree when it comes to PA systems and wanting to split middle/high frequencies from low frequencies using cabs designed to produce very different frequency responses, thus making more efficient use of power amps. But my suspicion in lieu of finding any actual frequency response curves of these two cabs in particular, is that they probably overlap significantly certainly at higher and mid frequencies, the main difference probably being at the low end with (at a guess) the 15 inch going down to 30Hz and the 2103x probably only going down to maybe 100Hz. So efficiency would be less of an issue whereas sounding "fuller" and getting better dispersion may have been what the designers were trying to optimise in this particular case?

Edited February 22 by SimonK

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

1 hour ago, SimonK said:

I totally accept that with modern drivers two of the same cab will, on average, be better than mixing cabs, but the TE example I've posted strikes me as potentially an exception because here someone has actually sat down and designed three different sized speakers to work together?

Perhaps that's what was claimed, but I'd need to see proof before I believed it. I've seen too many examples where the sum total of the engineering involved in speakers supposedly designed to work together was to make the cabinet corners interlock. Having designed more than a few commercial cabs I know from personal experience that far too often the design priorities in order of importance are profit margin, looks, and coming in a distant third, sound quality. For instance, in that Trace 2103x the fives, and preferably the tens as well, should be placed vertically, not spread apart as they are. I take one look at that configuration and think 'comb filtering'. If they didn't get the driver placement right I wouldn't trust them to have gotten anything else right.

[SimonK]

With the reputation Trace had for being absolute top of the range I would hope they put more thought into it than that - they certainly marketed them well as I think they were a flagship product for most of the 90s:

[Downunderwonder]

Re the Trace rig I don't doubt that the mix'n'match combination sounds quite fine.

 

Most likely the tens are quite bass capable so rearranging everything into a strictly hifi 3 way setup would wind up hifi but wasteful and a lot less loud.

 

15 and tens sharing lows and mids in a two way with the 5's doing the highs all nicely aligned might sound pretty hifi and retain the loud.