Jack

Please explain what this is so I can buy one?

Dude, you seem to be taking this personally as if I chaired the committee that decided this. I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm not saying it's what we should all be doing. I'm saying it's what amp manufacturers do and I'm repeating the reasoning that I've heard Bob Lee state before. I like the GK that I mentioned above and I like the TC that you posted, both seem quite clear. Most manufacturers don't bother though.

It's modern not ye olde, but fwiw my 750W GK 1001ii has it very clearly. It's almost certainly better to have more information rather than less, but most just seem to quote some sort of average. I think it's always been this way afaik.

To continue my analogy, my car has 180hp and will do 51mpg. But not at the same time. It's a standard procedure. A 200W RMS amp will likely draw ~300W or more for fractions of a second when you slap a low B and then <5W when it's idling between songs. So what power figure do you put on the back? The maximum, the minimum, an average, a real-world usage?

Because you don't create a pure, constant sine wave with your bass. The average power draw of that amp is 30W due to the fact that a typical bass duty cycle is around 1/8 power. As in, the average output of your amp is around 1/8th of what it's capable of. Imagine what fuel consumption figures you'd have to quote when selling cars if you measured their fuel consumption driven flat out. You don't, you measure the car in something that approximates real life use rather than full-tilt-boogie.

I don't see how that could do any damage to the amps. Excessive heat could likely melt the glue in the cabinets at some points and maybe reflow the solder in the amp but surely for anything like that it would have be actually in the burner. I always try not to leave gear anywhere that I wouldn't to hang around in myself, so on that basis I'd imagine if you could survive happily in the cupboard then your stuff could too. Most proper electrical gear has an operating and storage temperature range in the manual. They say something like 'operating 5-30oC and storage 0-40oC' or whatever. As for the basses, I'm sure it's not hot enough to do any damage again but obviously they're sensitive to temperature variations more than absolute heat. I could see how hot cupboard>freezing cold outside>hot car>freezing load in>hot venue might cause some setup, tuning and intonation issues. Maybe. Realistically this probably isn't that different from what most of us do every winter anyway, just that your cupboard is a little warmer than where most of us keep our gear. EDIT - This is my 1000th post! And my 3rd actually useful one....

We got our Alto TS115 tops for £500 second hand. We did it over my protests as I wanted something more QSC or RCF but honestly? They sound great. So good I've since bought a pair of their cheaper TX10 tops for myself. When you feel like it later on, the matching TS118S subs were cheap too.

Is it one of the ones where the eq switch is backwards? So pressing the switch in actually defeats the horrible preset eq curve? Otherwise you just set the gain high and make the graphic eq look low a frown, should be easy if everything on the amp is working like it should.

I had the head as part of the combo, although I'd asked for mine to be detachable. I bought it to use with my EUBs (for which it excelled) but ultimately that project never took off, I stopped playing the EUBs and eventually sold them and the amp. I can't stress enough how good the amp sounded, really, really clean and full. However, with the external power pack and the fact that it needs proprietary cables it's bigger than you'd think and for the volume it produces it might as well be a DI box in any 'proper' guitar and drums band, so like I say I found it hard to have a use for it. For a double bass amp on jazzy gigs or as one of the world's nicest bedroom amps I can recommend. Also, Didier is pretty much a gem. Great customer service, great communication, all-round stand up guy. A Sumo power amp is on my GAS list as soon as I get round to it.

GSS is one French man named Didier. I'd assume it's a Google Translate problem rather than anything else. The amp is bleedin' amazing despite the marketing copy.

The girlfriend contacted GK last Christmas about buying me a GK-branded tshirt as a present. They put her on to Polar, Polar were awful, slow and dismissive. She ended up buying a snide one on ebay, which is kind of a shame because we don't really 'do' fake stuff and it means GK lost a sale, however small. It's a shame that they really give GK such a bad reputation in Europe, whilst everyone in America just rings Jason at GK and gets great service the same day.

Is that an old person joke?

It seems that there's not a lot of graphs out there. I was able to find an RTA of a sansamp modelling a 300W SVT. Which is nothing like what you asked for but I suppose that it's a pretty good recreation of a pretty common tube amp? So. No. Is the short answer.

They're normal equalisers aren't they?

Unfortunately I don't think they will, the unwashed masses will see that it starts to taper off at 30Hz, say to themselves "but that means it'll have less low end" or maybe, "that means you won't hear my low b string" and they'll choose another amp over a Genzler.

Well this one is £20.

@Dood is there a thread or a review about this somewhere? Do you at least have the trace from the scope? Sounds intriguing!

It didn't matter so much with a 100W tube amp into a cab that starts to roll off at 75Hz but nowadays we have 2000W of perfect, digital, clean power and cabs that go subwoofer low.

Hi all, I have a Behringer MIC100 that uses a 12AX7. It's supposedly for warmth, but realistically it doesn't seem overly tubey at all. It's standard starved-plate, low-voltage, there-for-marketing-purposes kind of job. Anyway, said tube has now started to fail. It goes all quiet at times and is very distorted. So I need a new tube! Now, I'd never bother tube rolling with this thing, it's not like it's a vintage SVT, but at the same time it would be silly to waste my time putting the 'wrong' tube in. I know that they sound different, have different distortion and outputs, some have more or less bass, etc etc. What's a good tube for this DI box, being used only on bass guitar, for less than £20? I can get a new preamp for £25 and they're much less than that second hand so there's no point putting a £250 tube in it. Having said that, I appreciate that there may be some sonic gains to a nicer tube. I have to get this thing back working again and I'd prefer to spend the £20 on a new tube rather than a new di box. It just seems less wasteful!

Indeed. I alluded to it with my 'not a sub-bass guitar' comment and Phil covered it way better than I could have but basically there's not a whole lot of fundamental in a bass guitar signal. An SVT 8x10" rolls off around 70-80Hz and sounds great.

Looking up there, there's a 320W speaker cabinet. We all know that the engineers who designed the cab would say it's 250-300W to be safe. The marketing department are going to round that up to 400W+ though. It's probably worth pointing out that it's the ability to do this kind of math at home now that's helped to make the high pass filter the ubiquitous gadget de jour around here over the past year or so. We can do the math, it's 320W above 40Hz and only really 20W at 20Hz, which is why people are so up on the HPF to filter out the sound below a certain point. Not only to clean up the muddy tone but also to protect the physical speaker. If you were to give that cabinet the full 320W at every frequency (you would't anyway, it's bass guitar not sub-bass guitar) then you've got 320W at both 40Hz and 20Hz, bad. If you put a 10dB/octave high pass filter from 40Hz down, then you're at 32W at 20Hz, which is looking a lot better. Most HPF are either 12dB/oct or 24dB/oct, so you'd likely be safe either way round.

It's a personal thing. We could all gig with a Jazz, but some people will prefer other basses... I really, really like balanced, quite high tension, coupled to bright sound so I'm loving the D'Addarios. Not everyone will though!

If you want proper headphones rather than IEMs then I'm very, very happy with my PJB ones.

Indeed, knowing they would be a bass amp 95% of the time is why I chose thethe FR800 too, I think I may push the band towards rcf. Thanks for taking the time.

What are your thoughts on the FR800 vs the 745? My main band is looking for an upgrade and I (as a bass rig) have FR800s, so we could do two of those for the PA but I have a feeling that the RCFs are likely better PA cabs.