Bill Fitzmaurice

Probably rounding it up. That's OK, because nominal driver impedance ratings are just that, nominal, not exact.

You'll get the best result with another cab loaded with the exact same driver. Otherwise you're creating a chain with a weak link. Comb filtering has nothing to do with the driver sizes. It happens in the highs when drivers are placed side by side. Doing so also halves the horizontal dispersion in the mids compared to a single driver, or multiple drivers vertically stacked.

Three 16 ohm drivers would give 5.3 ohms, which is as low as one really needs. That's no problem with OEM, but at retail there aren't many 16 ohm drivers to be found.

Resistors won't work, they lose too much power and get too hot. 12 ohm voice coils aren't a problem for OEM, you just have to meet the minimum order requirement. With Eminence that's 50, although I can't see anyone order fewer than 100.

Oh, I always replied similarly when my wife said something. But I never actually heard what she said. It was just a defense mechanism against her repeating herself. 😉 I didn't notice where you were ordering it, so this advice is late, but this or something similar would do much better: https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/AmpStd--on-stage-stands-rs7000-tiltback-amp-stand

I'd think it's cold enough there to put much of it outside. Not frozen, of course, although I could have done that last week.

I wouldn't, since my 112 goes as loud as a '69 SVT 810 would. 😉 It's a form factor that we really haven't needed for some thirty years now, thanks to both driver technology and PA. It remains the staple backline rental cab, since you won't find anyone who can rightly say that it's inadequate.

It's certainly possible. How low or how high a driver will go isn't determined by its diameter.

When you have one speaker that's optimized for use in the lows and one that's optimized for use in the highs. Electric bass 410s and 215s are not. They're both full range.

I saw that, but separately powering isn't bi-amping. I said 'you may' as one amp may suffice, if the impedance load isn't too low,

That could make things worse. Ground loop noise intensity is increased as the length of the ground wire is increased. Worse, it varies by the square of the wire length. Doubling the wire increases noise by a factor of four.

That, along with the rest, indicates you might have issues with midrange. In ear may not help unless you have EQ capability to boost the mids, for added intelligibility. As for the Missus, IMO they shouldn't use female voices for GPS, as I'm genetically programmed to ignore them.

Don't bi-amp when both speakers are operating in the same frequency range. Chances are your Trace 410 goes if not just as low then almost as low as a 215. You might want to separately power the 215, for independent volume and EQ control, but you wouldn't use a crossover. Where bi-amping would make sense is using a 110 with a 215, and then only if the 110 is loaded with a guitar driver.

It saves your back and gets the cabs even higher, which is a good thing. 😉

Not necessarily. Boom occurs in the 80-120Hz range, an octave above pant flapping lows. Ported cabs can be boomy, if they use drivers that don't have specs that are tailored for ported and/or the cab is tuned too high and/or it's too small. If anything sealed are more likely to have a response bump in the 80-120Hz range, while dropping off like a cliff below 80Hz. If you're used to the thin lows of sealed and prefer it that's fine, but where economy of size is concerned a pair of ported 2x10 will equal the low end output of a sealed 8x10, while you can cut back the lowest octave with EQ if that's your preferred tone. What you can't do is to boost the low end of a sealed cab with EQ to get those trousers flapping, as the drivers will run out of excursion.

A pair of vertically stacked 2x10 will. Sealed don't go as low. Where the bottom end is concerned a pair of ported 2x10 will match a sealed 8x10.

If it was good before and isn't now something's been changed. Find out what and you'll probably solve the mystery.

The leads me to believe a bad ground on the mains, or massive interference from either florescent lighting ballasts or refrigeration compressors.

Power conditioners don't do much, if anything. The best method of power conditioning is to rectify the AC to DC, then remove any ripple with filtering capacitors. The thing is that's what your amp power supply does. Besides, noise isn't necessarily on the AC line. It might be airborne RFI or EMI. You mention having a complicated set up. That could be introducing ground loop noise. First things first, run the amp with nothing plugged in. If there's no noise that rules out the AC mains. Then just the bass. If there's no noise that rules out RFI and EMI. Then add the effects. If noise results it's probably a ground loop. There's also the possibility of a bad ground on the AC mains. It's a good idea to carry a plug in mains tester to be sure it's not dodgy.

Make a cardboard box the same size as the cab to test it.

It's an issue, but not one necessarily caused by the pot. The total voltage gain from pickup to speaker starts with the pre in your bass and ends with the output stage of the amp, with every gain and EQ stage in the chain making its own contribution. Google 'gain staging'. That said, you've got the effect of the pot backwards. Assuming you have a linear pot wide open versus at half the attenuation at the halfway point is -3dB. That's audible, but just. It's not half volume, which is -10dB. A log taper pot at half is -10dB compared to at full. Therefore the linear pot goes louder earlier in its rotation, not later. Some amps did so on purpose, so that someone trying one in a shop would be impressed at how loud it got at, say, a setting of 3. They wouldn't have been able to realize in a shop that anything past 4 didn't get any louder. 🙄

Most assuredly it does not. Power output depends on a number of factors, starting with the voltage output and frequency response of the bass, ending with the actual impedance of the speakers, which isn't a constant. It varies with frequency. This is a plot of the power output of an amp across the frequency spectrum into a typical 8 ohm twelve in a ported enclosure, driven with 28.3v, which is nominally 100 watts. There's nothing linear about it. This, BTW, is why loudspeaker engineers don't deal in watts. We deal in volts, which are a constant into any impedance load.

I didn't miss it.

That wouldn't be caused by the different driver sizes but by different phase responses. At frequencies where they differ at or close to 180 degrees apart they cancel. This scenario is one reason why well engineered systems never use different drivers in the same passband. Comb filtering is a related effect. It's when wave fronts from multiple sources meet at or near 180 degrees apart causing cancellation notches that alternately occur and disappear as one goes across the sound field. The primary cause is placing drivers side by side. The easiest cure is don't place drivers side by side. If you must do so the fix is to low pass one driver, or one side of a 4x,6x or 8x cab, so that they only work in tandem in the lows where comb filtering doesn't occur, and not in the mids and highs where it does. It's a simple inexpensive fix, known as an x.1 alignment, that's been used for at least fifty years by PA designers. AFAIK the only bass cabs that use it are Barefaced. What happened there was you had a boundary reflection sourced low frequency cancellation zone on stage, where you were close to boundaries. Out in the audience away from those boundaries you don't have those cancellations, so the lows are louder there. If being where you were also put the cab on axis with your ears as it always should be the mids and highs would have been louder and more clear as well. The cure is to do your sound check listening out in the audience, adjusting both volume and EQ accordingly. Whatever that results in on stage you live with.

That's why you can't hear it. Why do you think the monitors are tilted upward?