With all respect no you don't get it: monitor ( not hifi loudspeaker) blown because someone ( not me ) used an 1kw pa amp for nearfields with it without warning into a commercial room, another one because i was stupid enough to not move my *** from my chair during a session and we had miscommunication with an assistant.
But hey if you never had a stupid accident during your career that is fine i applaud and i'm jaleous it never been my case, i do things and some of them are stupid or just doesn't ended well thanks to other factors.
But hey i'll still do as i've done until now, doing things i should not destroying hifi systems everywhere i go. Like most cheap bedroom producers do or have done allaround for years.
Gibson EB-0 Bass is DEADLY.
WAY too muddy, zero harmonics (using fresh Rotosound strings and a pick helps it cut through) so classic way to use it in the old days was to overdrive a tube head (SS would be unbearable), the "Jack Bruce sound".
I custom made quite a few Bass amps for them, also for an EB-2, same thing, but always included some way to generate harmonics, or they would be "impressive when alone, disappearing within he Band"
Now EB-3 is a completely different beast, that little bridge pickup saves the day.
As of compression, in principle it´s "always" needed.
Tube amps played loud compress on their own, now on SS ones ... gosh!!!
FWIW ALL of my Bass amps (over 9000 of them so far since 1969) include compression/limiting, period.
Some customers ask: "sure this one includes it? Where´s the knob/switch/Led?"
Simple: "it´s always ON, and there is no way to defeat it"
If you use no way of dynamic range control, Bass is either unheard with the band (happens very often even today) or it´s Fuzz City.
Cheap Fuzz I might add.
Last Saturday a concert was held commemorating 50 years of a great Argentine Rock record called "The Bible", by seminal Argentine Rock band Vox Dei
Symphonic Rock, here accompanied by a full Symphonic Orchestra and the (surviving 🙁 ) who´s who of Argentine Rock
They called me and INSISTED: "we want/need at least I Fahey Amplifier on stage, like in the old days.
So I had to make another one, It was a great honour for me:
WAY too muddy, zero harmonics (using fresh Rotosound strings and a pick helps it cut through) so classic way to use it in the old days was to overdrive a tube head (SS would be unbearable), the "Jack Bruce sound".
I custom made quite a few Bass amps for them, also for an EB-2, same thing, but always included some way to generate harmonics, or they would be "impressive when alone, disappearing within he Band"
Now EB-3 is a completely different beast, that little bridge pickup saves the day.
As of compression, in principle it´s "always" needed.
Tube amps played loud compress on their own, now on SS ones ... gosh!!!
FWIW ALL of my Bass amps (over 9000 of them so far since 1969) include compression/limiting, period.
Some customers ask: "sure this one includes it? Where´s the knob/switch/Led?"
Simple: "it´s always ON, and there is no way to defeat it"
If you use no way of dynamic range control, Bass is either unheard with the band (happens very often even today) or it´s Fuzz City.
Cheap Fuzz I might add.
Last Saturday a concert was held commemorating 50 years of a great Argentine Rock record called "The Bible", by seminal Argentine Rock band Vox Dei
Symphonic Rock, here accompanied by a full Symphonic Orchestra and the (surviving 🙁 ) who´s who of Argentine Rock
They called me and INSISTED: "we want/need at least I Fahey Amplifier on stage, like in the old days.
So I had to make another one, It was a great honour for me:
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Original setup would have been a 250+250W head driving 2 of 4 x 12" Bass cabinets; now since this was a single night use, I supplied a current 300W Bass head (my bread and butter product) plus a single 4 x 12" cabinet (modern standard is single 4 x 10" or even compact 2 x 10" for portability), I HATE 15" speakers, but hey, we had to approach original 1969 looks onstage.
The beast closeup:
Sorry for the fuzzy unsaturated phone picture.
The beast closeup:
Sorry for the fuzzy unsaturated phone picture.
Thanks for the above guys, i think conclusively i will tell him to use the right gear for the job 👍
I've certainly heard more than one band that suffered from the "bass too quiet to hear" problem. Others where the bass notes didn't sustain long enough for songs with slow tempos, a problem that can also be fixed with a little bit of compression on the bass.
IMO bass compression should be applied with a light touch, so that it works with music that has some reasonable dynamic range. Too much compression takes away a lot of life from the bass, and only works well if the rest of the band is playing dance music with very little dynamic range.
At home, for small jams, and on my home recordings, I often use a little ART Tube MP/C ( https://artproaudio.com/product/tube-mp-c/ ). It is an inexpensive little unit that is very well built, and includes an optical compressor that works quite well for bass guitar.
I usually set the levels on my guitar and the MP/C so that I get no more than 3-4 dB of bass compression on peaks. But I'm not playing on stage in a high-adrenaline situation, where I can see how more compression might be a good idea.
The MP/C is an excellent little Swiss Army Knife tool for audio, with all the right features to make it really versatile: adjustable input gain, high input Z, LED input level monitoring, a switchable optical compressor with adjustable threshold level, fast and slow time constants and compressor or limiter modes, LED monitoring of the amount of compression, separate output level control with its on output level LED monitoring, Line/Instrument output level switch on the back, and a 12AX7 tube stage you can overdrive very slightly to add a subtle amount of "colour" if you want. It even has a switchable input high-pass filter, and an output phase reverse switch.
It is a lot of good stuff contained in a compact and durable little product that I bought for $100 (USD). I see that, as with most things during this pandemic, prices have now shot up to $156 USD ( https://www.sweetwater.com/store/de...e-mp-c-tube-preamp-opto-compressor-limiter-di )
Even at the current price, I don't know of any comparable product that comes close to having the same quality and features, until you spend three to five times as much money.
Here is an old 2013 review of the ART Tube MP/C: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/art-tube-mpc
-Gnobuddy
I take it this was a speaker designed for Hi-Fi, not musical instrument use?
A couple of decades ago I was given free 12" subwoofer driver. I bought my first bass guitar (a $100 Squire P-bass) not long after, but didn't have a bass amp, so the light bulb went off.
I worked out the (large) cab volume needed to get a 40 Hz f3 out of that woofer, bought a full 8x4 sheet of MDF, built the cab, slapped in the woofer, drove it with a Hi-Fi receiver...and quickly found out that the soft speaker suspension and low f3 resulted in lots of cone movement, very little SPL, and a very dull tone. A major disappointment on all fronts.
I stopped while I was still ahead, so the woofer was undamaged, and went on to other projects.
-Gnobuddy
I'm pretty sure it wasnt designed for musical instrument use. It also had these giant excursions as I recall. The EB-0 pickup is known for its low frequency response and straight into the power amp...well, there was nothing to block those unnecessarily low frequencies from going right through. I bought a real bass amp after that, a Yamaha B100-115. I think there was a Traynor in between, which I added a second set of output tubes to. In about the same style as cement half A to half B.
Screams of home use woofer, never ever to be used on its own but with mid/high drivers and a crossover.
Some misguided customers have bought only my heads to save somemoney, not the suggested matching cabinet, and plugged them into homemade cabinets with a car subwoofer.
"Sounds good" at home alone; absolutely disappears when trying to match a drummer, even in a garage rehearsal situation.
40 years of doing it and I've never damaged a driver yet, but that's at home practicing, not on stage with an acoustic kit etc.
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No, it just doesn't have any HF response worth speaking about. It's a fairly conventional overwound sidewinder. Horrible, horrible things.
It’s fine if you’re not playing it loud. If the decibel level is low enough not to generate complaints from neighbors in an apartment complex the speakers will survive. It could easily go the other way - where a girl with an elecrtoacoustic and a mike totally DESTROYED a pair of Pioneer 3 ways in a couple of hours. Fire and smoke.
Keep in mind, the OP was talking about playing loudly enough for small gigs. And this is what brought out all the cautions.
I'm curious:
1) What sort of tweeter(s), if any, are in the speakers you're playing musical instruments through?
2) What specific musical instruments do you play through these speakers?
3) What sort of loudness do you practice at, roughly speaking? Comparable to a normal TV volume? Quieter? Louder?
AFAIK, it's high-quality dome tweeters that are most vulnerable. These are designed to have the lightest practical moving mass, to provide good transient response. They have a strong magnet, for the same reason. They have a short voice coil, because a tweeter only has to ever deal with very small excursions.
The light voice coil also means very little thermal mass to soak up any momentary power overloads, so it is very easy to overheat and burn out the voice coil winding.
That combination is what makes good quality tweeters so vulnerable to musical instrument signals.
If you play an instrument that produces strong transients (like electric guitar), the rapid transient response and short voice coil of the tweeter mean a single loud transient can blast the voice coil entirely out of the gap, permanently damaging the driver.
If you play an instrument that produces strong sustained high frequency signals (like a synthesizer or keyboard), the tweeter voice coil usually overheats and burns out, rather than blasting out of its gap and experiencing mechanical failure.
But if SPL is kept low, and there is no tweeter, it's a different story entirely. I made a solid-state guitar amplifier as a gift for a friend a few years ago. He plays electro-acoustic guitars, some with piezo pickups, one with a magnetic pickup. I had very little money at the time, so I used a pair of roughly 6" speakers that I pulled out of a pair of thrift-store boombox speakers. I limited the voltage gain of the preamp I designed for the amp, so that it was impossible to overdrive the amplifier if you had a guitar plugged straight into it (my friend does not use pedals). I ended up rolling off the deep bass to help control speaker cone excursion at low frequencies.
That amp is still going strong several years later. The combination of factors - no tweeter, bass rolloff, no overdriven signals, limited SPL - prevents damage to those boombox woofers.
Later, I built something similar (but cruder) for myself to use at home. I used another pair of thrift-store boombox speakers, glued the two boxes together using a biscuit-cutter to reinforce the joint, and hooked it up to a small class-D power amplifier board and a Joyo American Sound guitar amp simulator pedal. I used this intermittently at home, and it held up fine. I even played electric guitar (not electroacoustic) through it, and it held up just fine at the low SPLs I use.
These particular boombox speakers used cheap piezo disc tweeters - basically the same transducer you find in a musical greeting card, or any number of beeping electronic devices. The sound quality from them is atrocious, but they are dirt cheap, so boombox manufacturers used them frequently. And they have one other virtue: they are extremely durable. So they lived just fine in my quick and dirty guitar amp.
It's crossed my mind a few times that one of the little "full-range" drivers used in small computer speaker systems or small TVs might make a decent tweeter in a 2-way musical instrument speaker for low-SPL use. (Used with a larger speaker to handle the lower frequencies.)
Some of the little 2" or 40mm "full-range" speaker have a decent treble response that goes high enough for guitar or keyboards, and because they are designed to cope with bass down to 150 Hz, they are much beefier than a proper Hi-Fi dome tweeter. Add a crossover to keep frequencies below, say, 700 Hz out of them, and they will probably survive e-guitar use at home.
Drive the thing with something like the Flamma Preamp (guitar amp modelling pedal with built-in cab simulation), and it might sound pretty decent, as long as you only wanted apartment-friendly SPL levels.
I've been wanting something battery-powered that I can play an electric or electroacoustic guitar through outdoors in a park, fairly quietly, with a couple of microphone inputs for vocals. Reasonably flat frequency response over a wide enough range not to butcher male or female vocals. Built-in reverb would be nice.
I thought about hacking something together myself, then I stumbled across this interesting little bit of gear: https://www.amazon.ca/Coolmusic-Acoustic-Amplifier-Portable-Bluetooth/dp/B09DYKHNML/
It combines everything I was looking for, and throws in an extra instrument input, a 1/8" input jack, Bluetooth audio, 3-band EQ for the vocals, 2-band EQ for the instruments, built-in reverb, chorus, and delay, and a cute little wedge-monitor shape complete with a pole-mount socket and an attractive (to me, at any rate) aqua colour. Speakers are two 5" woofers, and two small cone tweeters (I'd guess 2" diameter).
Note that these are cone tweeters, not dome tweeters, and they look a fair bit more beefy than a good dome tweeter. That means the usual compromise: treble won't be as light or airy, but the speakers are more likely to survive musical instrument / live singing without turning up their toes and going to tweeter heaven.
There are a few poor-quality demos of this product on You Tube, some by people who can barely play a guitar or sing. I finally found one by a proficient musician, and the sound quality was decent, sufficiently so to make me go "Hmmm!":
I couldn't build the equivalent of this without spending considerably more money (have you priced plywood lately?), so we bought one. I've only had it a few days, but preliminary tests are quite positive. It does a surprisingly decent job with my wife's vocals once I tweaked the 3-band EQ, and e-guitar sounds decent played through a Danelectro Fish-n-Chips graphic EQ with a big notch at 800 Hz, and considerable treble boost above that. E-guitar sounds even better though a Flamma Preamp.
We have an upcoming outdoor jam at a nearby farm, and I plan to take the little BP40D along. Depending on the size of the group, I may use it as our only P.A. system, or as a foldback monitor. Battery power means no ground-loop issues when used in conjunction with a larger P.A.
Time will tell, but used carefully, with loudness set judiciously, I expect these little speakers will live a long and hearty life.
-Gnobuddy
The OP in his two posts in this thread didn't mention small gigs at all. Just because someone has a mixer in their system, doesn't mean it's a PA.
As for the rest of it, I have better things to do with my time than answer everything you wrote. I've been designing and building amps and speakers, including PA and BG for about 40y and haven't damaged anything, so I'm confident I can play my bass or guitars through my home system and it will survive fine, because it has.
Billy Sheehan seems to like the one thing it does great on his "wife" P bass. He plays just a "tad better" than I do, so he should know.
Not a Gibson mudbucker. It's a Dimarzio Model 1 which is wound about 60% the same as the Gibson, but it a side by side HB like a PAF, not a sidewinder.
There's not many other players that use a pickup right up near the bottom of a 20 fret neck, let alone a Gibson or clone.
Stop projecting. I simply told you I had no intention of taking the time to reply to all the points in your very long post. If that's too much for you to bear, tough.
Fact is you were wrong on your assumption about the OP.
If his bass has passive pickups, they won't sound very good into a board if the board has lower input impedance, say, under 300k. You need a preamp specifically designed for guitar/bass input.
Also, in terms of damage, some of the worst damage I've seen to speakers from a bass is someone plugging a bass into an open-backed cabinet intended for guitar use (e.g., Fender Blues Deville) and then cranking up the low end to compensate for the open back.
Also, in terms of damage, some of the worst damage I've seen to speakers from a bass is someone plugging a bass into an open-backed cabinet intended for guitar use (e.g., Fender Blues Deville) and then cranking up the low end to compensate for the open back.