Open backed (dipole) cabinet for bass guitar

[tinitus]

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

[tinitus]

btw, its my humble opinion that up to 90% of the sound 'quality' comes from proper instrument setup and trim
without that even the best amp and speaker will sound like crap
cheap or expencive instruments, its still the same 'issue'

[tinitus]

Erik, considering you are a Beyma 'associate', they have some interesting coaxials

12XC30 and SM212 looks like perfect mates, and closed box design

might be a hammer

[454Casull]

You know, what's the difference between a good loudspeaker that plays flat down to 40 Hz and a good bass cab?

(BSC notwithstanding)

[StigErik]

I guess what I should have is a good loudspeaker, flat to 40 Hz....

I have an idea, will let you know how it works out.

[StigErik]

Originally Posted by tinitus

btw, its my humble opinion that up to 90% of the sound 'quality' comes from proper instrument setup and trim
without that even the best amp and speaker will sound like crap
cheap or expencive instruments, its still the same 'issue'

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.

[tinitus]

there aint much fun to play down there

[tinitus]

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

[cyclecamper]

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.

[cyclecamper]

correction: I mean 4 isobaric'd 12" drivers in each bottom.