Chienmortbb

My first Amp was a VOX AC30 Bass and I loved that amp until I changed the valves and then it sucked. I was an electronics apprentice at EMI and I later learned why. If you change the valves you have to set the bias to suit that particular valve. I later bought a Sound City 100 Watt head and cabinets (I think they were 4 x 12s but time dims the memory). Great amp that came to an abrupt end. A pint of beer was rested on my amp by the singer. With the vibrations it slowly crept across the amp finally depositing about 3/4 pint of directors bitter directly (pun intended) onto the four EL34s. Cold beer plus very hot valves = glass and beer everywhere. II ended up playing the rest of the gig with a 50W SS Pa Amp. So the moral of this story is that valve amps are mechanically fragile and need a great deal of love. In return they may sound great, they may sound bad but they will sound different to a transistor amp (don't get me going on ICs). I have to say that to date may favourite amp was my Trace BLX combo. Weird looking thing but sounded great. With an extension cab would outperform many 200 watt heads. Trace used MOSFETs as the output devices. ironically Peavey bought the Trace name and when I last heard were making them in the UK still. In my opinion, unlike a six string egg slicer (guitar) a bass should sound like a bass and the distortion so loved by guitarists is not what I want for a bass. Many of that great bands of the pasts used bass rigs that probably never got close to 100Hz at the bottom. The bass sounded like a bass because the harmonics way up the frequency scale do not decay much so most of the "bass" energy of say an open E is above 100Hz. It makes more sense to go as low as you can on a 5 string but striving for 25Hz may not be the Nirvana that many seek. Oh I now use an HH Bassman100 bi-amped into an HH VS Bassamp feeding a Ramsa 12" Sub and Ramsa 12" full range PA speaker. To me it sounds divine but maybe the cool lighting of the VS Bassamp sways it for me. I suppose that is also why some people love an SVT rig. It does look cool in the same way as a 100W Marshall stack does. Fender Aerodyne Jazz bass completes the rig. I will now sit back and prepare to be flamed

[quote name='ogri' timestamp='1346104801' post='1785449'] man is this thread still running lol!! im a convert from the last time i posted onnit. i always loved valve amps, bought a yank svt classic years back, discounted down from £1650 to £1050. cost me another 200 sovs to flightcase it.ran it with a Ev loaded mesa boogie 4x10. loved it, and it delivered til it got a few years old, when it started getting unreliable, despite being regularly serviced. was bloody heavy in its pukka case, and cost a lot everytime it needed valves. then it got even more unreliable. had it serviced, advertised it here, some young feller came down with the dosh. it bloody blew up while he was trying it...had it fixed(another 100 quid) he bought it, took it away. a week later got a call from his amp tech(checked out genuine) summat else had gone wrong. gesture of goodwill i paid that bill too. bye bye ampeg and bloody good riddance. anyhoo, two years down the line this time around i gotta get me gear sorted from scratch, right bloody quick like, and to a tight budget. i buy all secondhand..a GK rb 700 combo off a feller on here for £380, a eighties MIJ precision off another bloke in peterborough for £350 and a sansamp valve amp emulator thingy(what a cracking bit of kit) off a mate for 100 sovs. leads etc takes my spending to about 900 quid, and im sorted. so i get to the gig, and gorblimey guvnor!! it all sounds better than my old rig!or at least as good...and everything all together cost less than me old svt alone! i know valve amps are the mutts, but im done with the expense and unreliability issues, i'll stick with what ive got and be well happy with it, without feeling like a poor cousin to anybody with a tube amp. but then again thats all just my humble opinion, and whatthe hell do i know, im only a brickie.. [/quote] Probably a Brickie that knows more about Bass kit than me and a lot of others,

[quote name='4 Strings' timestamp='1349194930' post='1823118'] heh, pretty sure my Hartke gear wasn't built in the US either, but you know what I mean. [/quote] The drivers for some of the Ashdowns are made in Italy and the Electronics in China, all to UK designs. Their more expensive stuff is still made in the UK. With regards to Hartke, it always sounds to me like Bass Gear designed by a guitarist. With regards to the Cab design, I don't believe that most Bass cabs are designed to HiFi standards and if you take some of the best bass cabinets and put the figures through WinISD or another Cabinet Emulator, you will find that the response is far from flat. So leave the speaker in the Ashdown Cab as long as it sound good to you.