400W Cabs with 900W amp!

[chris_b]

51 minutes ago, tauzero said:

 

By that reckoning I think I'd need a stack of all the cabs I've ever owned to cope with my 900W amp, which I happily use with a 100W cab.

 

As Bill says, any amp will be OK with any cab, as long as you are listening for the distress signals, but as a lot of people won't know what they are, my advice is be safe and don't risk it.

 

In my loudest band I gig a 700 watt amp into 1400watts of cabs (2 x 112) and have never come close to having problems, with the cabs or the sound.

[lemmywinks]

27 minutes ago, Japhet said:

I'd recommend using a High Pass Filter. Lower and inaudible frequencies gobble up the amps power and make the drivers in your cab flap about. Using a HPF cuts out those damaging frequencies and allows your amp to only produce the stuff you can actually hear. I've found that using a Micro Thumpinator enables me to get masses of volume out of a little Fender Rumble 100, easily enough for smaller pub gigs without blowing it to bits.

 

I think a lot of amps now have some form of HPF built in, some more agressive than others. The Thumpinator operates at around 30hz or something like that and I'd be surprised if many modern heads aren't filtering somewhere around there already.

Edited July 3 by lemmywinks

[agedhorse]

18 hours ago, Alan Wilkes said:

There is a thread going around where you can have a ratio of 2 watts amp to 1 watt cab and they 'll be fine. I was also in a live music course in stroud and the guy running it said virtually the same, speaker will put up with a lot more than the specs, meaning i suppose the speaker will be running at full efficiency.

Depends on how long you want the driver to last, how good your judgement is and how lucky you are. I wouldn't recommend it because I see the results of players who think they have better judgement and restraint than they really do. It's even worse when you don't have enough rig for the gig. This leads to poor decisions out of necessity.

 

IF you are careful and respect the limits of the drivers, you might be ok (until you aren't), many players who think they can hear the driver reach its limits but in testing really can't (and miss by a wide margin because some drivers are very benign sounding when overdriven).