Gottastopbuyinggear

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

If you can post the cab model you may find that someone already knows something about the cab and could suggest a suitable replacement. Alternatively if you are able to take measurements to confirm the overall dimensions of the cab, and importantly the exact dimensions (including length) of the ports, then someone will probably model it for you. In fact, seeing as I have another thread on the go here where I’m hoping for some relatively expert comment, I’m happy to put something back into the community and model the cab myself, though being relatively inexperienced I might ask for someone else to mark my homework!

...which might be that I should stop messing around and build something from the Simplexx designs I bought from him a couple of years ago!

I've been following the 12" Cab Diary Continued thread with interest, but rather than derail that thread I thought I'd start a separate one with my, possibly crazy, thoughts/plans. I built two of the Mk1 cabs and have been happily gigging with them for well over a year now. Took a while to get used to the relatively flat response and oodles of low end when used in a pair, but I have no issues at all with the tone. I've seen discussions about dispersion from cabs quite often, but only really started thinking about it as a result of the thread above. You could read that as "I now think I have a problem that I've always had but didn't know I had until it was pointed out to me" ! Actually, I don't really have a problem at all, but I'm interested in the promise of an improved experience from the Mk2 cab when standing very close to it. It occurred to me that because I've not glued the baffle in on my cabs (they're screwed on, sealed with gasket tape) I could make a new baffle and could squeeze the 127mm diameter manrose pipe based port and the P-Audio tweeter in. It then occurred to me that I could actually probably squeeze a 5" mid-range driver in, instead of a tweeter, and that seems like quite an attractive idea. Why a mid-range? Because I'm not interested in more highs, but I am interested in better dispersion. I'm assuming that if I crossed over to a mid-range driver at something like 1KHz then more of my sound would be better dispersed, if that makes sense. This is as opposed to using the tweeter, which I think is crossed over about 2.5KHz, and seeing as most of my playing is with a P bass with flats I think there's quite a lot of the bulk of the sound that's below that point. Quite early on in the 12" Cab Diary Continued thread someone had mentioned the Faital M5N8-80 mid-range driver, and more recently the new 12PR320 woofer. From a look at the manufacturer's graphs they look like they would be pretty good match if crossed over at a little over 1Khz. I know it would not be optimal, but I think I could calculate and build a (for example) 2nd order L-R crossover to achieve this. I realise it would be in no way tuned to the specific components. I could actually start with the existing Beyma woofer and attenuate the signal to the mid-range down to match it, just to see what sort of results I get without springing £130 for the 12PR320. To be clear I'm well aware that this might not end up with a nice flat response, but I think there's a reasonable chance of getting something that sounds pleasing enough. There's a couple of other things I know I need to consider - for example the mid-range driver will have to be in a chamber which will reduce the volume of the cab, so I'll have to take that into account when calculating the port length, and actually squeezing the chamber sides onto the baffle might also be a bit of a challenge. I'm interested in people's views on this - is it a mad idea doomed to failure? I'm well aware that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and a copy of WinISD and a URL for a site with a crossover calculator don't make me a cab designer - but I'm up for a bit of experimentation.

Weird - I’m sure it came up as the most recent post yesterday! If anyone with too much money and not enough to spend it on is interested in those things they should shop around - if you try hard enough you can pay $199 for them: https://www.moon-audio.com/jh-audio-iem-stand.html

Either I’m losing my mind or there was a post about a stand to display your in ears on, which has now disappeared? https://www.jhaudio.com/p/iem-display I thought it was you that had posted it. It could very well be me losing my mind. Perhaps I shouldn’t have stopped taking the tablets...

A snip at just $150! Good grief...

I guess the next step is to try it hooked up to a speaker to see whether it's something affecting the preamp, or just something affecting the headphone amp - the latter would be a pain but at least the amp would be usable.

It’s only valve amps that must have a speaker connected - you haven’t damaged it by using it without one. Did you buy the amp new or secondhand?

It would actually be complete overkill - I'm using an Ampeg PF500 at the moment and it's more than ample - rarely above midday on the master volume. The problem is I keep hearing people talking about more traditional type amps (i.e. not Class D) and using words like "authority" and "heft" (I'm sure you're one of the culprits, Lozz!) and I think, hmmm... I want to find out for myself what that's all about. The reason I have two Precisions is that having switched to flats on my first Precision I decided I needed another one to have rounds on. Trouble is, after getting the second I realised I'd gone off the sound of rounds on a P so I now have flats on both! However, I've been swapping between flats and rounds on the Jazz a lot recently and I really like both - you know where this is going, don't you! Oddly enough I always feel that the Jazz has more real bass, and I guess a more even spread overall. But the P has that ooomph in the upper bass and lower mids which you really feel.

I have my GAS under control at the moment. Well, almost. I have just the two Precisions and one Jazz, a couple of class D heads, a 1x15 and two 12s. The username comes more from my former 6 string exploits, and everything that comes with that. Now, however, I've seen the light! But, I do fancy an Ashdown ABM 600. And I'm quite keen on a Barefaced Two 10. That Thunderbird you have for sale at the moment is quite nice too. Oh, and I'm pretty sure there's a Sterling Ray 34 somewhere with my name on it, or maybe even a second hand Stingray if one comes up at the right price...

Shall we start a sweepstake on how long before this is up for sale? I thoroughly approve of the colour combination, as my profile picture will confirm. Mine is a 2007 MIM - I stuck the Fender '62 custom shop pickups in as I felt the originals were a bit lacking in clarity, but I think the MIM pickups have changed since then so hopefully you'll be happy with them stock.

Regardless of the fact that the extension cab is second hand you appear to have bought a combo with an output for an extension speaker, and the matching extension speaker, so it's entirely reasonable to expect that they will work together. In this instance, unless the combo was sold with a clear disclaimer that the extension output could never be used then I think it would be reasonable to ask Ashdown to give you a replacement 8 ohm driver for the combo. They seem to have a great reputation on here for customer service, and having seen itsmedunc's post just pop up it seems this is their error which they've rectified in previous cases, so I think it's well worth going back to them.

Saw this lady playing with Ben Poole a couple of years ago, and liked her playing: http://www.pepelemokomusic.co.uk/

Gorillaz winning Best British Group - can’t we do better than that? Even he obviously didn't expect to win, or he might have prepared something coherent to say and not got so smashed.

I think there’s probably something psychological about it but I’m having second thoughts about my Gator Pro Go as it does feel really heavy with two sub nine pound basses in it! They are good bags though - plenty of protection, and much more convenient than laying a hard case on the floor to get your bass out if space is at a premium. £135 from Amazon a few months ago, but I noticed the price goes up and down a bit.

Stevie, is your no-compromise design going to be using the Mk 2 cab as currently designed or will you be making adjustments (more than bracing arrangement) to it? Reason for asking is that I may have an excuse to get over to Bristol in the week at some point in February, so I'm thinking about placing an order with Avon Ply - I used them last time and they did a great job of cutting the panels to size. Unfortunately they're not open at weekends, and I live in Cardiff and work in Swansea so I'm a bit scuppered most of the time. So far I've not found anyone local that can source the Poplar ply and cut it to size.