Chienmortbb

Many of us built the @stevie designed Basschat BC112 MK3 a few years ago. I have been using one for a few years and it is a great cabinet. If you were closer you could have tried mine. You could PM @stevie

Two cabs will give you more volume but a well designed single 12" cab will probably be all you need. Modern 12" drivers have the excursion, moving more air and with a properly designed crossover and high quality compression driver/horn combination you will probably never need another cab. Bill is right that no speaker can stand 800W continuous no matter what the manufacturers say and if a you get to even half the rated power, power compression will kick in. Beyma used to publish power compression graphs and in general half power continuous meant a power loss of about 1.5-2dB. it was closer to 4 dB at rated power. I have seen nothing to suggest other manufacturer's drivers are any different. Luckily as @Bill Fitzmaurice said, most of the time we are using a few watts. When you have cabinet with a sensitivity of say 98dB at 1W then 16 watts gets to 110dB and 128 watts gives 119db. That would be loud enough for most situations even allowing for power compression. Two cabs will give you more volume or allow you to to run them at a much lower volume. Many people run two cabs so they can hear themselves. The poor dispersion of bass drivers means that you can barely hear a cabinet around your feet. Adding a compression driver, well designed crossover and wide dispersion horn at the top of the cabinet, will allow you to hear your playing.

Surely Skid Row were a shite cover band?

This happened to me at our last gig. the strap button came out, first number second set. I did manage to catch the bass and after a few bars of bass silence, played like quasimodo to the end of the song. Unlike your bandmate I always have a multi-tool in the case and a after a short break managed a temporary repair. there were several lessons: Take a spare bass Check your equipment before leaving home. Practice catching a falling bass. There was no real trauma and I had forgotten it until I read your post.

I realise that fan noise is an anathema to many but like many things, fans are a necessary evil. On the plus side a fan can improve the cooling efficiency by up to 4 times, the downside is possible noise and the fact that fans are an electromechanical device. The best compromise is a temperature controlled fan but that adds to the cost and complexity. GK came a cropper by not fitting fans to some of their 200 watt combos. They used the ICEPower 50ASX2 in what was effectively a closed box. They added fans in the MK2 versions. The active cooling in some Aguilar amps is sub-optimal and I am sure they are not alone. Am anything be done? Yes but more on that later. As @Passinwindsaid earlier, it is possible to add passive cooling to a class D amp but that comes at the expense of weight, size and cost. Shipping is charged by weight and size so a bigger amp will cost more if everything else is equal.

I do have a travel router too that is dual band but I had trouble setting it up. I might try it again, although i do the main mix from a laptop running Ethernet.

The finer side of those nail buffers is several thousand grit. Much easier to get than a high grit paper/cloth.

I should add that I bought the 2.4GHz router in a rush, it was the only one that was available at Curry's at a reasonable price and it has not let me down. You shoud alos remember that the range of 5GHz signal is much less than 2.4GHz.

Can the words "Amber Nectar" be used in the same sentance as "Rock Star"?

I am pleasantly surprised at the responses, I half expected ridicule but there are some great contributions. Thank you.

I love the Beatles but am always amazed when someone says McCartney is a great bassist. Can someone tell me what I am missing?

As a maker of the finest bespoke cables, I insist that you return it and buy one from me at a vastly inflated price. On a serious note be sure that you get good quality connectors on a cable. Within reason, any cable will do but the connectors will let you down if they are sub standard. For example, this one will surely fail at a gig.

I was a bit hesitant to post to be honest. I know Scott has focal dystonia and that is not my problem. However the feeling I get is somewhere between pain and numbness. I suppose it is a kind of peripheral neuropathy that makes that finger feel different to the rest. The reduced feeling means all fingers feel similar. I might start wearing a fingerless glove on the other hand as the old arthritis is giving me gyp now. Good point. I will try 10 minutes glove on then glove off and see if it changes.

One of the lessons from this little blip is firstly to to get your design down on screen and/or paper before committing to any hardware and secondly to read datasheets properly. Each hole in the panel costs money so I have wasted a few £s there. On the subject of the panels, I may have already mentioned it but the holes to attach the IEC/Switch/fuse module to the panel were threaded. As a result there is no need for a nut on the inside. The extra cost was 11p per hole (£0.11). The cost of doing all the screw holes would have would have been about £2.50. It has cost more than that to buy nuts so it was a false economy to not get all the holes threaded.

Looking back at the reat panel, I now have redundant holes, the Stereo/Bridge swith and the Bridged Speakon in the centre. I have decided to put a grille over the two holes that will act as the air inlet for a small fan. The white writing will be covered by black paint as the text is all engraved and filled with white paint currently. The amplifier modules have a temperature monitoring pin each, such that I can turn a fan on, only if the temperature rises too far.

Well spotted, I missed that. However unlike the ASX series modules, the circuitry is built on the board so it does not need external bridging circuits.

I was starting to think that way. The easiest and most sensible course is to abandon the bridge mode possibly utilising the switch as a stereo/dual mono switch.

That shows the internal balanced input circuit but the output from that is single ended feeding the power amp. It could be that there is bridging going on inside the 700AS1 but as you say, the ASX range have two separate amplifiers that have to be fed antiphase signals.

Many of the ICEPower modules are bridged for maximum power for example the ASX series as used by many, are really stereo modules that have been bridged for use in bass amps. Let’s take some examples. The Aguilar TH350 uses the 125ASX2 bridged to give a conservative 350 watt rating into 4 ohms. The 125ASX2 is rated at 125watts per channel into 4 ohms but bridged can achieve between 250-450 watts bridged depending on how you measure it and how you cool it. The. Same module is used in the. RM500 by Ashdown as far as I know and I’m that case they rate it at 450 watts. The TH500 uses the 250ASX2 module. The GK MB200 and several of their 200 watt combos use the 50ASX2 module and all have to have have bridging circuits added to the preamp to achieve this. The 700 and 800 watt modules used by the like of Mesa etc. are not bridged, they use the later AS700 module that is a single ended module capable of 350/700 watts into 4/8 ohms.

So the rethink about the wiring, it is going deeper than I had thought. I have two choices, either I change the wiring and accept that the volume or level controls are at max in bridge mode or accept that I am unlikely to need an amp outputting close to 1200W into 8 ohms. To achieve bridge mode while taking out the volume controls in bridge mode would require an inverter stage and this is a lot of fuss for something I will probably never need. However it may be possible using the DSP but the learning curve for the DSP is quite high and I really need to have a working amp quite soon. I am going to investigate and make a decision tomorrow. If I do decide to go deeper into DSP then there are other things may be possible.

They are based on the IR/Infineon IRS2092 mosfet driver chip. More information at https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/evaluation-boards/iraudamp7d/. However they also include an integral Switch Mode Power Supply. Connex have been supplying SMPS and amplifiers for years for the DIY audio market. They are a bit cagey about publishing too much about their designs as they say the do incorporate proprietary circuits that make them a cut above the usual Chinese modules and they charge accordingly.

Yes I originally did a long explanation of bridging but it looked so complex I deleted most of it. Yes is you like the amplifiers push and pull. One amp goes +ve while the second goes -ve. So the voltage swing is doubled. This should increase the power by 4 times but in reality two is usually the best you can do.

As an aging rocker, I often find my left hand index finger gets sore after playing. I have often been intrigued by Scott Devine's glove and while searching for something to make up Amazon's £20 free postage offer I saw some musician's practice gloves. I thought it was worth a punt. They came about a week ago and I have been quite impressed with them. My fretting hand technique does seem to have improved and I can play for longer or so it seems so Emperor's new clothes or useful practice/performance tool? Has anyone else tried them and what do they think?

As with all these home brew projects, you are constantly re-evaluating the design and as Ivthink about the switch wiring, I realise that my thoughts were wrong. Bridging an amp (or more correctly amps) require that two or more power amplifiers run in anti-phase. One amplifier will drive the +ve terminal of the speaker and the other will drive the -ve terminal of the speaker. By doing this we double the voltage swing across the speaker and potentially quadruple the power available. In reality most amplifiers will be currently limited, that is that they will only be able to supply a given amount of power and in most cases That would limit the increase in power to a factor of two. Many of our favourite amps run bridged amps including the Ashdown RM range, Aquilar TH range and some GK amps like the MB200. Of course there is no such thing as a free lunch and the increase in power comes with several negative including increased distortion. Luckily in most cases this is minimal and still well below what we could hear. Tfe problem with the Kilowatt design as shown in the original wiring diagram is that the level or volume pots have to be set exactly by hand/eye to exactly the same level otherwise the distortion will rise considerably and one amplifier worked harder than the other. So I am now rethinking the wiring to take human error out of the equation.

The speaker connections are done and I have tried to tidy them up with some cable ties. The cable is quite heavy duty as it carries the most current. The mains cable carries more power but you need thicker cable to higher currents. You might notice that the RED Speakon connector has two red cables. That is for Bridged operation where the +ve connection from both amps are used to drive the speaker. Neutrik recommend that the 1+ and 2+ Terminals are used for bridged connection. This is to ensure that normal Speakon leads cannot connect to the amp in bridge mode. The thinking is that you have to know what cable to connect to get bridged operation but that installing a conventional Speakon cable would do no damage. The speaker cables should be twisted if possible but these are quite stiff and I can only get a couple of turns on them. Next to with up the inputs and switches.