Gottastopbuyinggear

I had a pretty quick response to an email so I think all is probably well. They said they were still waiting for replacement units.

I think there’d be an argument in my house if these appeared in the living room!

Not quite so bizarre apparently, as the original lyric is allegedly “clitares”, a French term for a bathing costume. I learnt that on Basschat, by the way

Normally I’d jump in and say I’d have a go at modelling it, but to be honest I wouldn’t know where to start with anything other than a basic ported cab, and I’m not sure whether WinISD is capable of doing so. Someone more knowledgeable may come along and comment...

Chris bought my Tech 21 Bass Driver Programmable. Really easy transaction with clear communication and absolutely no delays - would happily do business again.

With respect, and in the nicest possible way, what nonsense! If you can afford them and they give you pleasure, and you do actually play them, then why shouldn’t you have them?! I don’t agree with collectors buying instruments and locking them away in bank vaults, thus denying anyone the pleasure of playing them, but who’s to say that you don’t get more appreciation out of your instruments than someone who may be more technically accomplished? That’s just about the middle bit, by the way - the beginning and the end are fine!

Saxophone - hence the Yamaha alto I have up for sale on here at the moment! I'm proficient enough on guitar and enjoy playing it, but don’t seem to have the imagination to improvise over anything more outlandish than a basic blues. I have a mandolin gathering dust and probably mould in the loft, which I used to be able to play okay although never really got to grips with tremolo picking. My peak on that was the jig from the Stonehenge scene in Spinal Tap! Next on the list to try is drums (electronic kit only) though lack of space means I’ll need to wait for one of my kids to leave home before that becomes a reality. My master plan is to justify learning drums partly as an exercise in keeping my brain nimble - don’t know whether I’ll get away with it yet though!

Just to offer an alternative view to this, if you’re not likely to gig in the near future then personally I’d stick with the Sonic Port. I use Amplitube on my laptop for all my home playing and it’s great - near silent so not likely to disturb the rest of the family, the sound when playing along to something is much more “integrated” if you see what I mean, and it’s not big enough to attract any questions about why I need "that massive great thing". I do have a small guitar amp (I decided once that I 'needed' a real valve amp...) but I never use it, and it’s wrapped up in dustbin bags in the shed at the moment. YMMV etc.

I’m a bedroom guitar player, weekend warrior bass player. My bass gear is mid range - MIM fenders. On the guitar front I have a Les Paul, American Tele, Strat, and a few other pieces in absolutely pristine condition, and I’ve probably played two of them this year on one occasion each. What am I thinking of doing with them? Absolutely nothing - situations change and I’m positive I’ll come back to them at some point, even though I’m unlikely to ever gig as a guitarist. If you don’t need the cash, have the space, and have some sort of emotional attachment to your basses and they’re not just tools, then I say hang on to them. In x years time you’re more likely to regret selling them to hanging on to them.

I've got the Smoothhound unit and it seems like a good solid piece of kit. It was a toss up between that and the G30, but I decided I wanted something compact and sturdy on my pedalboard so the Smoothhound with its metal case won over the G30. £149 including delivery direct from the manufacturer - the extra £29 to buy new gives you peace of mind for a year on the warranty - might be worth thinking about.

If you can afford it and can keep the Ibanez too then I’d say go for whatever makes you feel enthused about playing, and hence learning and progressing. Also, have you asked your teacher's opinion? They may be the best placed person to have a valid opinion on this. Unless they happen to have a five string Fender Jazz for sale that is

Oh good grief, why did you have to go and say that? I’ve already justified having two P basses by needing one with flats, one with rounds - I hadn’t considered tapes before!

Ooooh, Nice! I'm glad you bought this - I saw it on Gumtree just yesterday, and really didn't need it in my brain at the moment, especially since I'm expecting some cash from my band in the next few days!

I suspect some people feel that exchanges of messages are somehow a bit different from dealing with people face to face - a bit removed maybe - and they might often be more polite if they met "real" people in real life. A bit like the old "on the internet nobody knows you're actually a dog". I try and behave to the opposite of this completely - when you deal face to face with people there's usually little opportunity for confusion when you have language, body language, facial expression etc., but there's plenty of opportunity for that when it's just written words. On top of that, I think it's very easy to get a bad reputation in no time at all in a forum environment where things can escalate really quickly.

Just bought a Sansamp RBI from James (jeid). Communication was great throughout, the unit was well packaged and arrived quickly. Altogether a very pleasant experience and I'd be more than happy to deal with James again.

Had my first proper (i.e. not school) gig at the tender age of 49, and I was quaking in my boots. About a couple of dozen gigs later I do sometimes still get a bit nervous but settle down after a couple of songs - I wouldn’t want to play anything that wasn’t pretty simple for the first song though. I have found since I started doing our sound, which means wandering out among everyone in the pub to have a listen while we sound check, has helped with that - you’re quite exposed when you’ve stopped playing to fiddle around on the iPad you’ve plonked on someone’s table, and they haven’t a clue what you’re up to! As for the audience - strangers, no problem as I’ll probably never see them again; family, no problem as they’re supportive; work colleagues - now that is scary!

Apologies if this is asking the obvious but have you considered getting the wax removed and just going for generic or custom moulded plugs? I tried to get impressions taken for custom plugs a while ago and the audiologist took one look in my ears and said there was no way he could do it due to the amount of gunk in there. I tried getting them syringed by the nurse at my local practice, but they will only progress until they can see the eardrum, so no good for getting really clean. I eventually had microsuction, which is significantly quicker and less unpleasant than syringing. Average cost seems to be about £30 per ear. It literally took seconds per ear (I'm trying to not do the sums and work out what I paid per second!). Interested to hear if you've been down this path or not - I have my custom moulds on order now, but I am slightly concerned about whether any fresh wax will build up and get stuffed down towards the eardrum when I use the plugs. I'm going to try to guard against this by using olive oil drops once or twice a week.

I don’t need one of these, but PMT have the rack mount version on sale at £549 which seems like a genuinely good price reduction? As I say, I don’t need one. Must keep repeating that...

I was having trouble with the whole business of impedance, and the effect of adding drivers. I'm happy with the very basics of this - the analogy of a hosepipe where, if I connect two 8 ohm speakers then I'm effectively doubling the size of the hosepipe connected to my tap, so I can get twice as much water down the pipe, or roughly twice as much power to the speakers. What I had difficulty getting my head around is that when I play a note on my bass I'm not getting a pure sine wave at one frequency, I'm getting the fundamental plus a load of harmonics. Thinking about it, is the correct analogy that in that case I have a bunch of taps and a bunch of hoses, and the size of the hosepipe for each higher frequency component is reducing slightly as the frequency goes up (forgetting about the resonant peak)? The other aspect of this is that as frequency goes up then power required to excite the speaker goes down - if I recall correctly then for every octave, so every doubling in frequency, I need half as much power to get the same volume. Hence by the time we're getting up towards 1KHz the power required is already a fraction of what's needed for the fundamental and lower harmonics. Does this mean that, from the point of view of not overloading the amp, adding another driver in parallel high passed at perhaps 1KHz would not create a problem as the amount of additional power which would be drawn is mimimal up at those frequencies? That brought me on to another question. The Trace Elliot Bright Box idea - if the high passed Bright Box is added in parallel with an existing full range cab that is not low pass filtered then will there be interference problems due to both getting the upper range of the signal, and potential phase problems depending on the positioning of the two relative to each other? Applying this to what I'm considering doing with one of my cabs, could I use a crossed over woofer + mid cabinet on top of a woofer only cabinet with the full range going to that lower woofer? Would I get better results by balancing the output of the mid-range in the top cabinet with two woofers and low pass filtering the woofer in the lower cab as well? Finally, who dreamt up such a ridiculous name as "woofer"…

Hi Phil, I was hoping you might come along! I think that mids are where it's at for me, at the moment at least. I've taken a look at my raw bass signal on a spectrum analyser plugin and there seems to be precious little going on above 4Khz with my P bass with flats, so whilst the Faital doesn't seem to have much going on above 5Khz I don't think that would bother me. Most of the time when I gig I've got the tone rolled off and the mids a little boosted anyway. Apart from the fact that I could only fit a 5" driver on the baffle I'm assuming that I'll get a little better dispersion from a 5" than a 6" mid range. I'd seen your comments before about trying four smaller drivers and that was quite appealing just for being a little different, but I wouldn't get those on the Basschat v1 baffle and I probably wouldn't be doing this if it meant building a new box specifically to experiment - I'm not that confident in getting something usable! I actually have a MiniDSP board from a project a couple of years ago and it did occur to me that I could try an active crossover, but I don't have a power amp at the moment, and whilst I've been considering trying power amp and preamp instead of a dedicated bass amp I'm not convinced I want to go there yet. A couple of questions you might be able to comment on: First, how rigid does the chamber for the mid-range have to be? I'd assumed I'd make a box out of some 6mm ply I have in the garage, but it also occurred to me that I could use manrose pipe and cap the end somehow - however that's pretty flexible. Second, what sort of volume should that chamber be, and is it in any way critical? I see that Eminence publish ranges with their driver specs, but Faital don't. I'd guess at somewhere between one and two litres? I've not come across the Bright Box before. That's already raised another question which has pushed me way beyond the limit of my understanding - if there's just a high pass filter in that (or something like it that someone might think of building...), and no LPF affecting the woofer, then what do you need to consider regarding the impedance the amp sees - is it not a consideration as the impedance of the woofer is already relatively high at the frequency of the HPF? [EDIT: A slightly clumsy question maybe - I've thought about it a bit more and posted more below] Such a lot to learn, and I very probably haven't the brain capacity to do it!

Can you measure the exact width and height of the port? Also, is it completely open to the full width or divided? If it’s divided then can you give the width and height of each division, and is/are the dividers the full 120mm depth of the port or just at the front part of it? Finally, can you tell the thickness of the cab walls at all? I’d guess they’ll be 12 or 15mm or thereabouts

I should caveat the above with - assuming you’re convinced you want to try this? To echo what others have said, there’s no guarantee that it’ll sound any better, and every possibility that it’ll sound different