Peter Williams

There are a number of issues here. The overiding one is portability. You can fit a double bass in pretty much any car, but not if there is even a medium sized bass cab in there as well. The other very significant factor is that the bass itself is a speaker cabinet, with a pickup or mic right up against it. If you crank the volume too much everything will just start feeding and begin to sound muddy. The final thing to point out is that generally, the larger the cabinet, the poorer the higher frequency fidelity. I might be picked up on that, but I'm quite certain of it. The DB is an acoustic instrument, so we want a good flat frequency response up to at least 14 kHz, otherwise we may as well be playing an electric instrument, where the amp and cabinet are as much a part of the instruments tone as the bass itself.

Yep, Laurence is awesome. I had an amp break down on me mid tour. Obviously there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, but he dealt with my e-mails so courteously that he retained my AI loyalty.

I'm not certain, in fact I am building a cabinet to check this, but I think it kind of does get around Hoffman's law. In a cubic speaker cabinet there are numerous opportunities for standing waves, this affects the cabinet's resonant frequency, which is whee it will give the most volume. With a cylindrical cabinet (and we see this in all the portable phone speakers that have become so popular) there is far less opportunity for a standing wave, essentially the cabinet behaves as if it were very much larger.

I understand this concern, but I don't think that is necessarily true. Phil Jones Bass for example use get very good bass sensitivity from 5 inch drivers in very small cabinets. This is essentially line array acoustics... the wave fields from each driver combine with constructive interference - moving more air. I suspect AI are doing the same thing here, just using a bigger angle between the cones. Additionally, AI have been using cylindrical enclosures for many many years, this has the effect of an infinite baffle, or at least a much larger baffle. The lack of specs does worry me, as it did with the upshot, which doesn't have a big bass response, but I have been using a series III coda from AI for about ten years, that combo is not much bigger than the double shot, it has an amp on board, and it has never really struggled to give me enough volume on upright or five string bass guitar. I've put my name on the waiting list, but then, I am a gear junkie.