Dan Dare

Pour encourager les autres. Exactement.

Have a look at the qualifying statement with the headline figure. It will usually say something along the lines of "400w into 8 ohms at 1khz for xx amount of time". Wattage ratings are pretty inexact, but manufacturers and consumers need some sort of yardstick. Wattage is easy to understand, so watts it is.

No, it wouldn't "mean that the copyright law has been repealed". Repealing a law can only be done by the body that makes the law (a nation's Parliament or its equivalent). However, precedent is important. If artists do not pursue cases of copyright infringement, they could be creating a potential loophole for pirates to exploit. There are many laws on the statute book that are no longer followed or enforced, because custom and practice has caused them to fall into disuse. Formally repealing them would be costly and time consuming and a waste of limited government time and resources, so they are left to languish. Once that happens, it can be difficult to resurrect them. What appears to underlie your argument (and that of others on this thread) is that it's OK to steal from someone, provided the person being stolen from is wealthy and the person doing the stealing is not. Given that we are musicians on here, it baffles me that so many can argue against enforcing copyright laws. Would we feel the same were it our work that was being pirated?

Most drivers can tolerate occasional short term peaks that are higher than their rated input power. Most amps are rated according to how much power they can deliver in short bursts (think milliseconds) at a particular frequency. Their continuous power delivery will be lower, often considerably so. The disparity between your amp and cab is not enormous. I wouldn't worry about it. You'll know if the speaker is struggling because it will not sound pleasant. If that happens, turn down.

Sorry, you are wrong on so many counts. SD's most important point was in his first paragraph, to wit: "One thing that's common to copyright laws in different countries is that if a copyright holder knowingly fails to act on a copyright infringement then a subsequent infringer (?) can use this as precedent to demonstrate that the copyright holder does not defend copyright, ergo there's a loophole for full-on bootleggers to exploit. You can't pick and choose which copyright infringements to go after. You have to go after them all." Read that carefully. If he/his lawyers fail to pursue a case of copyright infringement, they are effectively giving a get out of jail free card to subsequent pirates. You acknowledge in your third paragraph that piracy is rife in Germany. Artists have no choice other than to pursue every case or risk setting a precedent that will enable pirates to ply their trade with impunity. Too much white knighting going on in this thread.

I carry a socket tester for this reason. They're cheap enough. Have found a couple of sockets where neutral and earth have been reversed over the years.

Good summary and certainly sounds plausible. I couldn't care one way or the other about EC, but I don't see anything terrible in what is ascribed to him here. I'd be surprised if he even knew his lawyers/management/record company approached the woman, certainly initially. He won't be wasting his life scouring the 'net for every possible copyright infringement. He pays people to do that for him. Had she said fair enough and withdrawn the CD, I'm sure that would have been the end of it. However, it seems she (or, as Al points out, lawyers acting on her behalf) decided to pick a fight. More fool them.

Did they ever have it in the first place? Farmer George (Keef's nickname for him - see his lovely video tribute to him on YouTube) was too nice a bloke.

There's an Eden Ext112 in the Marketplace (not belonging to me or anyone I know) that would probably do the trick for not much money.

You never get back anything like what you spend on customising instruments. In fact, it usually lowers their potential resale value. If the bass does not work for you in its present form, probably best to sell and put the money towards something else. Given that you refer to your electric basses, I assume you also play upright. Can you still manage it with your arthritis? I would have thought the stretch and hand pressure needed to play it would be greater. If so, might it be worth having the frets pulled on the Ibanez (a decent luthier will fill the slots with hardwood - that is what I had done when I converted a bass to fretless), which should be cheaper than commissioning a new neck? That won't solve the issue of reducing resale value, but it will enable you to keep the Ibanez electronics and sound at lower cost. Soft, even tapewound strings and adopting a more upright hold of the instrument (closer to that you'd employ with an upright) may help improve playability for you.

Motown. P bass with high action and well worn La Bella flats via custom preamp direct to board. Sorry, B15 fans, but the amp was only used for monitoring in the studio (to enable the rest of the musicians to hear the bass). The sound from it did not go to tape.

Derision, even.

Indeed. The hi-fi world is already awash with such nonsense. Some spend hundreds, even thousands, on phono and loudspeaker cables woven from virgin's hair and butterflies' wings. There are attempts to persuade musicians to waste their hard earned on "tone cables", but most of us appear too skint or sensible to fall it.

I bought some half metre square heavy rubber shock absorbing tiles from a company that supplies them to children's playgrounds and the like (they are supposed to stop the little dears bashing their brains out when they fall from the slides, etc). I use them under the PA subs and my bass rig. They work very well and were pleasingly inexpensive - a LOT cheaper than Gramma et al.

I had a similar experience around the time of the Boer War. We played in a hotel which had been built in a sort of faux Art Deco style. The ballroom was shaped like a cylinder cut in half along its length (we joked that it was a Nissen hut). There were few soft furnishings and walls/ceiling were hard plaster. The sound was appalling in the way you describe. Massive natural reverb - I had decent eq on the PA, which made virtually no difference - and any low frequencies caused huge booming. Probably the worst gig, soundwise, I've ever played. We tried to adapt, but I think it's fair to say we died...

Sue for ownership of an everyday phrase? Good luck with that.

I hope you laughed in his face at that little gem. Translated, it reads "You can't read my mind and follow me when I make mistakes. I'm a musically illiterate chancer and you show me up by knowing what you're doing".

Sums it up nicely. Since I've been checking sound/balance with wireless or a long lead, I've realised that striving for some mythical perfect sound is a waste of time. Move ten feet away from your rig and the sound changes completely to that which you hear standing next to it. You can easily end up chasing your own tail.

Given that on gigs, you are often playing in poorly lit venues, brightly coloured ones might not be a bad idea. I have a couple I bought from a builders merchant. I run them to where they need to go and plug a couple of 6 way Lindy boards into them. They work well.

Originally, Trace fitted mainly Celestion drivers to their cabs. I'm pretty sure they weren't branded on earlier models. The drivers in my old cabs weren't.

This is a good point. If you remove all the strings at once, rather than changing them individually, the neck relaxes and angles back as the tension is taken out of it. When you put on the new strings, it can take a while to be puled back into its previous position by the string tension. It's worth leaving it for 24 hours before adjusting the truss rod, so it can settle.

Bill's correct that the watts don't matter. See many other threads for explanations of how quoted/claimed wattage is not an accurate indicator of what an amp is capable of delivering in real world conditions. Just because your amp is set on just over half power, it doesn't mean that it is only delivering half of its power. It depends on the gain structure of the amp. The clip light may be being triggered by the input level (if, for example, your instrument is active or has particularly hot passive pickups). Lowering the input gain and increasing the master volume may help in that case.

I don't know how you'd feel about not giving an actual present on the day, but it can be a little risky buying something specialised, such as musical equipment, sports kit, etc, etc that you may not have knowledge of personally. The suggestions above are all good (and of varying cost), but choosing can be difficult. When I want to buy something I don't have knowledge of for someone, I will design and print a mock gift token on the PC - with lots of snazzy type-faces, colours, etc - that says something along the lines of "This entitles the recipient to choose a bass amp/golf club/fishing rod/etc of their choice". Then I go shopping with them and pay for it. Maybe not as good as giving an actual present on the day, but it means they get something they really want/like.

Good one. I hope to be able to use that myself some day.

I think that may well work well. It appears you're not looking for huge volumes. That's an assumption, based on the fact that you are looking to augment small PJB combos. I'm a PJB fan and user, btw. I have several of his 4x5 cabs, which I like very much. You could think about trying a C4 with a suitable amp as your sub'. That will certainly give you good quality bass. I have even tried my C4s as subs (with a suitable crossover and amp) to augment my home hi-fi and they worked very nicely. However, any clean powered PA cab should to it, too.