brand names ?
fancy names and marketing is not everything
I don't know
but I think there are very few good brands
maybe hybrid combos is what you want
but I don't have that much experience
but I do think I know one thing
guitar and bassguitar are very different beasts
but if you really want/need a more fancy speaker, think big array design with smaller woofers
with acoustci guitar and female voices, I think even a carefully chosen 8" might the perfect choise, in multiples
its just not very cost effective
fancy names and marketing is not everything
I don't know
but I think there are very few good brands
maybe hybrid combos is what you want
but I don't have that much experience
but I do think I know one thing
guitar and bassguitar are very different beasts
but if you really want/need a more fancy speaker, think big array design with smaller woofers
with acoustci guitar and female voices, I think even a carefully chosen 8" might the perfect choise, in multiples
its just not very cost effective
Agree. It also depends a lot on the musician him/herself.
That being said, almost every bass cabinet or amp on the market fails to reproduce the low end frequency range of a bass guitar.
my immediate thought is that we are thinking of different kinds of bass
synth bass, a 'machine'
and bass playing, a musician
what makes sub bass impressive is mostly 'machine bass'
a jazz musician is at the opposite end of this
rock bass can be close
pop bass could be both, a machine, a musician, or both
that was the short version
but we could ask ourselves whether all we want is to be impressed by a thunderous bass
or whether we should better enjoy a good musician playing bass
synth bass, a 'machine'
and bass playing, a musician
what makes sub bass impressive is mostly 'machine bass'
a jazz musician is at the opposite end of this
rock bass can be close
pop bass could be both, a machine, a musician, or both
that was the short version
but we could ask ourselves whether all we want is to be impressed by a thunderous bass
or whether we should better enjoy a good musician playing bass
You also have to decide whether you want to get some bright ROTOSOUND round-wound high-nickel strings and play 'lead' rock or jazz-rock bass with wonderful treble like John Entwhistle, Jaco Pastorius, Greg Lake etc. or get some silk and then flat-wrapped smooth strings and oil them until all the treble is gone for more traditional walking bass lines. Fretless sounds better with more treble IMHO, and fingers are more expresive and have a greater range of treble or bass tones than picks. Dynamic range is much more than with recorded material.
If you want to do it all, IMHO use smaller speakers and add more until they couple up so you get enough bass. Then you can do it all. You can have plenty of treble or easily turn down the treble and get just the bass that's left. But admittedly small speakers aren't going to give you a LOT of bass and just one or two doesn't cut it.
On the other hand, if you have a really big driver you can't get good-sounding treble by turning down the bass. It just isn't there.
My brother is really into bi-amped bass with small drivers and one or two big 18's. But he likes low boom-boom bass with flat-wound strings and a pick. He's used reflex and horns etc. I prefer a double SVT with 16 10" drivers.
If you do use really large 18" drivers, or for the bass end of a bi-amp rig, they don't have good-sounding distortion modes so you run them clean anyway, so you can get a really big transistor amp or better yet a huge class-D or other swithcing-mode topology.
Another nice thing about multiple sturdy drivers in sealed cabinets is that you probably won't hurt them by driving them outside their ideal range. So you can get away with 4 10's and a 15 driven by the same signal and no crossover. It may not be ideal and might add to voice coil heat etc. but this is not hi-fi and for instruments sometimes different drivers overlapping in the same range don't make 'stereo imaging' or subtle phase shift problems; they fill each other's deficiencies and excite different more complex room modes so no one resonance dominates. It works OK. So whatever you build you can add onto later, and you can mix and match. The original SVT had two bottoms, one with 8 10's and the other with one big driver I think in a folded horn, driven from the same amp without any crossover. Quickly a lot of players preferred to use two of the 8-10 cabinets and got sufficient bass with 16 drivers. So if you build a small bottom with 2 10's or 2 12's you can always add on more of the same or a larger driver later to play bigger stages.
My first rig was a super-showman with 2 15" JBLs. It made some bass, but not much treble. It was OK for clean walking bass lines.
Then I got a Marshall full stack with a rack-mount power amp and 8 12's. It was painfuly loud and sensitive to the touch because the speakers were very efficient. The low-power efficient light-cone treble speakers and EL-whatever tubes had a unique distortion. But it was not very flexible. It made only two sounds, a sensitive biting clean and an unforgiving assaulting dirty. Better for guitar. Some guys sounded good with it very dirty, I didn't.
I saw Jaco with Weather Report using an SVT head thru 2 SVT-like sealed bottoms with Hartke 10's. That changed my views.
My last rig was 4 of the mini-SVT sealed bottoms called SVT HE-806 with 4 Peavey 6L6 tube power amps. Each countertop-height bottom had 8 6.5" poly-cone drivers with relatively heavy cones, in sealed cabinets. The cabinet tilted back onto two wheels like a hand-truck dolly, yet fit thru a doorway without turning it sideways. I'd call that an ideal practical size. Fit in the back seat of most cars. The real SVT had to got thru a doorway sideways instead, and one needed a big station wagon and two needed a truck. The only problem with the mini-svt was a strap-type handle, each really needed a good solid bar handle like one of those stainless handicapped bars mounted in some commercial bathrooms. With a total of 32 voice coils in all 4 cabinets, they were nearly indestrucetible. They had a lot of the sound of 10's in the bigger SVT bottoms (I never used the small compression horns they also had). Admittedly there was not much really low bass unless I used all 4 cabinets. But driven hard the speaker distortion was very SVT sounding and power amp distortion was very classic bassman sounding. Great treble clean for fretless or an Ampeg electric upright. Small units easy to move, 1 for practice or add more to play out. But they failed in the market place because 4 10's could outperform 8 6.5" drivers in the same box with more output and better efficiency and similar range. Now stackable boxes with 2 10's each are popular. Adding a switching-mode amp diving an isobaric box with a larger driver is a new trend.
Now I have 4 small cabinets with 8 12" drivers isobaric'd in each. So each cabinet sounds like a dual-12" bottom but is half the size and less efficient. Great for practice. To play out, I would take more. Remains to be seen how it works out, as I sold the travis bean after a layoff and don't have a bass at the moment. I should pick up SOME bass now that I'm working again.
If you want to do it all, IMHO use smaller speakers and add more until they couple up so you get enough bass. Then you can do it all. You can have plenty of treble or easily turn down the treble and get just the bass that's left. But admittedly small speakers aren't going to give you a LOT of bass and just one or two doesn't cut it.
On the other hand, if you have a really big driver you can't get good-sounding treble by turning down the bass. It just isn't there.
My brother is really into bi-amped bass with small drivers and one or two big 18's. But he likes low boom-boom bass with flat-wound strings and a pick. He's used reflex and horns etc. I prefer a double SVT with 16 10" drivers.
If you do use really large 18" drivers, or for the bass end of a bi-amp rig, they don't have good-sounding distortion modes so you run them clean anyway, so you can get a really big transistor amp or better yet a huge class-D or other swithcing-mode topology.
Another nice thing about multiple sturdy drivers in sealed cabinets is that you probably won't hurt them by driving them outside their ideal range. So you can get away with 4 10's and a 15 driven by the same signal and no crossover. It may not be ideal and might add to voice coil heat etc. but this is not hi-fi and for instruments sometimes different drivers overlapping in the same range don't make 'stereo imaging' or subtle phase shift problems; they fill each other's deficiencies and excite different more complex room modes so no one resonance dominates. It works OK. So whatever you build you can add onto later, and you can mix and match. The original SVT had two bottoms, one with 8 10's and the other with one big driver I think in a folded horn, driven from the same amp without any crossover. Quickly a lot of players preferred to use two of the 8-10 cabinets and got sufficient bass with 16 drivers. So if you build a small bottom with 2 10's or 2 12's you can always add on more of the same or a larger driver later to play bigger stages.
My first rig was a super-showman with 2 15" JBLs. It made some bass, but not much treble. It was OK for clean walking bass lines.
Then I got a Marshall full stack with a rack-mount power amp and 8 12's. It was painfuly loud and sensitive to the touch because the speakers were very efficient. The low-power efficient light-cone treble speakers and EL-whatever tubes had a unique distortion. But it was not very flexible. It made only two sounds, a sensitive biting clean and an unforgiving assaulting dirty. Better for guitar. Some guys sounded good with it very dirty, I didn't.
I saw Jaco with Weather Report using an SVT head thru 2 SVT-like sealed bottoms with Hartke 10's. That changed my views.
My last rig was 4 of the mini-SVT sealed bottoms called SVT HE-806 with 4 Peavey 6L6 tube power amps. Each countertop-height bottom had 8 6.5" poly-cone drivers with relatively heavy cones, in sealed cabinets. The cabinet tilted back onto two wheels like a hand-truck dolly, yet fit thru a doorway without turning it sideways. I'd call that an ideal practical size. Fit in the back seat of most cars. The real SVT had to got thru a doorway sideways instead, and one needed a big station wagon and two needed a truck. The only problem with the mini-svt was a strap-type handle, each really needed a good solid bar handle like one of those stainless handicapped bars mounted in some commercial bathrooms. With a total of 32 voice coils in all 4 cabinets, they were nearly indestrucetible. They had a lot of the sound of 10's in the bigger SVT bottoms (I never used the small compression horns they also had). Admittedly there was not much really low bass unless I used all 4 cabinets. But driven hard the speaker distortion was very SVT sounding and power amp distortion was very classic bassman sounding. Great treble clean for fretless or an Ampeg electric upright. Small units easy to move, 1 for practice or add more to play out. But they failed in the market place because 4 10's could outperform 8 6.5" drivers in the same box with more output and better efficiency and similar range. Now stackable boxes with 2 10's each are popular. Adding a switching-mode amp diving an isobaric box with a larger driver is a new trend.
Now I have 4 small cabinets with 8 12" drivers isobaric'd in each. So each cabinet sounds like a dual-12" bottom but is half the size and less efficient. Great for practice. To play out, I would take more. Remains to be seen how it works out, as I sold the travis bean after a layoff and don't have a bass at the moment. I should pick up SOME bass now that I'm working again.
Hi,
Typical pro cabs are only flat to 80Hz or so. For bottom E (44Hz) on a bass
typically plucked the 2nd (88Hz) is the loudest harmonic. You will find that
bass cabs flat to 40Hz end up being silly huge, use your bass tone control.
Practically the far higher consequent cabinet efficiency always wins out.
rgds, sreten.
Last edited:
If he goes sealed, an LT will work quite well as he does not need a lot of SPL.
Also, E1 is 41.2 Hz.
Haven't seen it mentioned yet, but these are all the rage at talkbass.
- Home
greenboy's fEARful downloads
Started as diy, but now there are select builders.
Although I'd rather have people practice at my place if I had that B&G/Beyma rig...
- Home
greenboy's fEARful downloads
Started as diy, but now there are select builders.
Although I'd rather have people practice at my place if I had that B&G/Beyma rig...
You don't really get open backed bass cabinets, they would be FAR too large to be practical - and pretty pointless.
The Fearless cabinets appear to be simply full range PA cabinets - sort of HiFi type speakers for PA.
many modern bass amps have a 'loudness' curcuit to enhance lows
I remember when this was introduced in hifi many years ago
it was a dream curcuit to most people
can't say I liked much myself
well, the point is, used in bass guitar amps it might still be practical to have
but as you go up into higher SPL, I'm also certain you might want to switch it off, or maybe even use low cut high pass filters instead
and not to forget the essential compressor curcuit
not that I really know how that works
is it important to knwo when designing speakers
I don't know
I remember when this was introduced in hifi many years ago
it was a dream curcuit to most people
can't say I liked much myself
well, the point is, used in bass guitar amps it might still be practical to have
but as you go up into higher SPL, I'm also certain you might want to switch it off, or maybe even use low cut high pass filters instead
and not to forget the essential compressor curcuit
not that I really know how that works
is it important to knwo when designing speakers
I don't know
Hi,
You can build a small bass amp flat to 40Hz and then most of the time
roll-off the bass electronically because the small driver cannot keep
up with the midrange levels produced in the bass. the compromises
made in typical commercial offerings are generally good ones.
The people who make this stuff do know what they are doing,
and you can't beat classic stuff, especially if you buy it used.
Stuff does seem to be far better nowadays for the budget concious.
Big, budget ($350) and good : (not really a practice amp, smaller bands)
Fender Rumble 150 Bass Combo Amp, 150W - 1x15 vented (+tweeter)
Medium, budget ($280) and good : (good all rounder, small bands / acoustic)
Ampeg BA-112 Bass Combo Amp, 50W - 1x12 sealed
Small, budget ($200) and good : (practice / studio / acoustic)
Ibanez SW35 Bass Combo Amp, 35W, 1x10 sealed
All classic makes, all have the features you need, all have good bass
for what they, they all sound good apparently and are very flexible.
I'm sure there are others.
rgds, sreten.
You can build a small bass amp flat to 40Hz and then most of the time
roll-off the bass electronically because the small driver cannot keep
up with the midrange levels produced in the bass. the compromises
made in typical commercial offerings are generally good ones.
The people who make this stuff do know what they are doing,
and you can't beat classic stuff, especially if you buy it used.
Stuff does seem to be far better nowadays for the budget concious.
Big, budget ($350) and good : (not really a practice amp, smaller bands)
Fender Rumble 150 Bass Combo Amp, 150W - 1x15 vented (+tweeter)
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Medium, budget ($280) and good : (good all rounder, small bands / acoustic)
Ampeg BA-112 Bass Combo Amp, 50W - 1x12 sealed
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Small, budget ($200) and good : (practice / studio / acoustic)
Ibanez SW35 Bass Combo Amp, 35W, 1x10 sealed
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
All classic makes, all have the features you need, all have good bass
for what they, they all sound good apparently and are very flexible.
I'm sure there are others.
rgds, sreten.
Last edited:
You perhaps don't understand what it did?.
Loudness controls on HiFi increase the bass at low volume settings only, this is because the ear is less sensitive to bass at low levels.
At medium to high volume levels it had no effect at all, I don't think bass amps do anything similar?.
Doesn't affect the speaker as such - it's to protect the amp more than anything, and to even out the playing level.
Hi,
The near mandatory compression circuit is bass amplifers does a few things :
It mainly prevents amplifier hard clipping which just sounds 'orrible, so I guess
it woulf protect fitted tweeters. It doesn't really protect the amplifier. I does
allow the amplifier to be played at full volume, as you hit that point more gain
only changes the sound rather than making it any louder. the sesign of it ends
up being critical to the (good) sound you get driving the combo very hard.
That is about the limiter built around the power amp if one is fitted. Sometimes
a compressor is built into the preamp and this can smooth playing styles at any
volume levels and is generally more adjustable. Having had a combo with a fitted
compressor but no limiter I prefer a well designed limiter, optional compression.
Having had some ropey (budget) equipment over the years today
you do seem to have a better choice of properly featured equipment.
rgds, sreten.
The near mandatory compression circuit is bass amplifers does a few things :
It mainly prevents amplifier hard clipping which just sounds 'orrible, so I guess
it woulf protect fitted tweeters. It doesn't really protect the amplifier. I does
allow the amplifier to be played at full volume, as you hit that point more gain
only changes the sound rather than making it any louder. the sesign of it ends
up being critical to the (good) sound you get driving the combo very hard.
That is about the limiter built around the power amp if one is fitted. Sometimes
a compressor is built into the preamp and this can smooth playing styles at any
volume levels and is generally more adjustable. Having had a combo with a fitted
compressor but no limiter I prefer a well designed limiter, optional compression.
Having had some ropey (budget) equipment over the years today
you do seem to have a better choice of properly featured equipment.
rgds, sreten.
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