Oxblood

[quote name='99ster' post='37632' date='Jul 27 2007, 02:50 AM']If you talk to any amp tech they'll all tell you the same story - they get loads of business from repairing Ashdown gear because it keeps breaking. And that can only happen because they're poorly designed, or use cheap sh*t components, or both. That tells me all I need to know...[/quote] I'm convinced that it's all down to poor Quality Control in the far eastern production facility. It certainly isn't the design: that was done by Clive Button, no less: he who designed all the really good Trace Elliot stuff. I doubt, too, that they're cutting corners on component quality - at least not on purpose. I mean, after all, no company with any sense would willingly to make themselves hostages to fate by deliberately using crap components. The real variable in the mix, though - and the one over which they have the least hands-on control - is HOW the things are assembled. The unavoidable fact is that if your HQ is in the UK and you've outsourced your production to an emerging economy on the other side of the planet in order to save money, then however well-intentioned you may be as a company, you have removed yourself from what's actually happening on the factory floor and made yourself reliant on the reports/promises you're being given by the managers of that facility. It's all very sad, isn't it? If you really want an ABM (and a proper, British-built one is a marvellous piece of kit), I'd go hunting for a real early one, with the white push buttons and black sliders. Nothing later than an EVO, anyway. BTW: I always wondered what "RC" stood for in the name of these current products. Does it stand for "Republic of China", by any chance?

When it comes to basic signal processing gear like mixers, effects, pre-amps etc., Behringer can get by pretty well. I have an old Behringer rackmount Mic pre-amp myself: the Pre-Q model 502. It was given to me as surplus by my brother. I use it now and then for recording vocals, and it's fine. Not the quietest thing on earth, but it works. Of course it does: it doesn't have to do anything very demanding or deliver any power. The problems arise when Behringer apply this same corner-cutting, cheap 'n' cheerful manufacturing philosophy to items which ARE required to do demanding things - i.e. amplifiers and loudspeakers. They then compound the sin by advertising said flimsy trash by means of vague, impressive-sounding pseudo-technical nonsense and completely unrealistic performance claims. The most telling factor is this: Behringer NEVER quote figures for power output (amplifiers) or power handling (speakers) in the generally accepted, measurable, comparable terms used by all respectable manufacturers throughout the industry: i.e. [b]RMS Watts[/b]. Instead, we get hyperbole: "An amazing X Hundred Watts of massive/earth-shaking/seismic (choose your favourite superlative) Bass Power!" - but nowhere in their literature will you ever find anything that quantifies exactly how these "hundreds of Watts" are being measured. If any of their amplifiers were actually capable of producing the wattages they claim to [i]in genuine RMS terms[/i] - and that automatically assumes being able to do so cleanly and reliably across the whole usable frequency range - Behringer would be only too keen to tell us about it. The fact that they don't (or rather DAREN'T) tells you everything you need to know. ADDED LATER: Good heavens, they must have heard me shouting all the way to Germany! Take a look at this: [url="http://www.behringerdownload.de/BB-Serie/BB210_SPECS_Rev_AB.pdf"]BB210 cabinet PDF spec sheet[/url] In describing the power handling, it actually uses the letters RMS. Nurse...the screens! Aha. Wait a mo. Just one tiny problem. What it really says is "(RMS / Music)" - and therein lies their sneaky get-out clause. They've used the term "RMS" to fool the unwary into believing that they're actually talking genuine Root Mean Square measurement. In fact, they're talking "Music Power" - a discredited (disreputable, even) measurement regime invented in the 1960s for marketing cheap, low-powered home entertainment systems. It delivers figures that are impressively (but misleadingly) large. What "Music Power" describes is the maximum power the speakers are able to handle over a very short - almost instantaneous - period, such as the attack peak of a note. This is always far higher than the genuine average power handling capacity of the speaker over time. In other words, the same old brand of flim-flam, smoke, mirrors and sleight-of-hand we've all become used to from Behringer.

If you fancy a fat, Gretsch-ish archtop, the Dean Stylist ([url="http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=1308"]see my review on dis hya very forum[/url]) is 32" scale, affordable and damn good for the money. Also, Thomann are doing something that looks almost identical under their Harley Benton brand, for even less money.

Hi Rick, You can do this sort of mod on any bass. All it does is rob the signal of low end (or to put it another way, shift the tonal emphasis toward the midrange and upper frequencies) - so if you're after more twang 'n' clang from a given pickup, give it a try. Obviously, the overall signal level from that pickup will be slightly reduced, too. It doesn't have to be a .0047uF cap, either. Experiment with different values and see if you like the result. If you decide to keep the cap onboard, do what Rickenbacker do and make it switchable (just add a simple single-pole on/off switch that bypasses the cap) - then you've got the best of both worlds.

Like Buzz said: Bill Fitzmaurice and Alex Claber will give you chapter and verse on this, but basicly it's a VERY BAD IDEA. MDF may or may not sound better than chipboard, but one thing's certain: it would weigh a TON. Also, you can't just re-configure cabs to make them a more convenient size/shape. Do that and you'll throw all their acoustic design parameters into a mincer. Unless you work to a proper design and use something light and strong like spruce ply, you're just going to end up with a pair of very heavy honk-boxes that will sound like s**t and have zero re-sale value. Re. your reply to bass_ferret: [i]"I would turn them on their side but there's no carpet on the arse of them!"[/i] - well there's your answer straight off: buy some carpet and some glue (Blue Aran do both, I believe), and turn them on their side. Problem solved!

4003 Jetglo

Have a butchers at this thread over on finnbass. The word is pretty conclusive. If Bill Fitzmaurice thinks they're crap - they're crap! [url="http://www.finnbass.com/showthread.php?p=13303#post13303"]finnbass discussion re. BOSE[/url]

Shergold: a million thanks for that link to ClamXav. I despise Symantec and all of its expensive, resource-hungry paranoia-fuelling Norton products. I've been on the lookout for a free AV package for my OSX machine for ages, and this one fits the bill nicely. Ta! Just because there aren't any viruses being written specifically for Mac OSX right now (a situation that only pertains because of Apple's pathetically tiny market share), that's no excuse not to have an AV product onboard adn keep it up to date. Mac users share data with Windows users all the time. We have no right to allow our machines to act as portals for infection, regardless of which operating system is the target.

I don't normally take much notice of Laney gear. No real reason: it just never seems to appear on my radar. However, the new 400 Watt Nexus valve head looks interesting. This link here: [url="http://www.gearwire.com/laney-nexus-bass-amps-winter-namm.html"]http://www.gearwire.com/laney-nexus-bass-a...inter-namm.html[/url] ...will get you to a page with a downloadable video in Quicktime or WMV, in which a Laney rep describes the amp in some detail. He's a bit of a plank, to be honest, and even worse there's no footage of anyone actually playing through the thing, but I thought I'd post it FYI. Apparently the all-valve head sells for about £1350 Sounds a bit steep, to me. Anybody out there actually bought one?

[quote name='nedsbeds' post='27776' date='Jul 6 2007, 09:26 AM']Blimey. It looks like they have used just about everyone at some point! I had a new 15" from them 2 years ago and it was a sica. came in a celestion box though [/quote] And just to confuse the issue further, we mustn't discount the possibility that Celestion were sub-contracting work out to Sica - or vice versa!

[quote name='The Funk' post='27547' date='Jul 5 2007, 05:55 PM']Interesting basic article about valves vs. transistors. [url="http://www.drawmer.com/help2.html"]http://www.drawmer.com/help2.html[/url][/quote] Interesting in more ways than one. It could have been a great article. It's actually trying to make some worthwhile points, but unfortunately all these good intentions are ruined by the fact of it having been written by a TOTAL DWEEB who has: a ) less idea of how valves work than my dog, b ) an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate for effect, and c ) an appallingly arrogant attitude. Examples of Mr. Wentk's dweebdom: [i][color="#A0522D"]"A radio made out of valves lives in a box the size of an LP collection, produces enough heat to toast the occupants of a small room, and needs the kind of power that's usually reserved for kettles, cookers and washing machines."[/color][/i] TRIPE. Even in the 1940s, using miniature valves, battery-powered radios were being made small enough to fit into a car dashboard or be taken on a picnic. Even the very largest domestic valve radios only emitted a moderate amount of heat, and consumed about as much power as a couple of lightbulbs. [i][color="#A0522D"]"Valves rely on the peculiar properties of clouds of electrons in a vacuum being pulled around by an electronic field applied to a metal grid. To create the electron cloud you need to heat up part of the valve, which is why valves glow. [b]You need to apply thousands of volts to make this happen, which is why valve equipment runs for about a tenth of a second if you try to run it off a battery. Even a car battery.[/b]"[/color][/i] DRIVEL. Most valve heaters run off very low voltages: as low as 1.25 Volts. The highest-voltage heater for which I have data was only 80 Volts. As pointed out above, valves will run perfectly well off battery power, provided they are designed to do so. In fact, in the early days, all valves ran off batteries. Mains operation was a later development, which only became possible when stable mains power became available nationwide. Thousands of volts my arse. [i][color="#A0522D"]"As for the crap valve kit, you'll often find this being sold at vintage hi-fi exhibitions. Sad men in anoraks discuss the virtues of amplifiers of yesteryear while drinking weak tea and polishing the bottoms of their terylene trousers on plastic seats. And even here the stuff is expensive - £500 will get you an antique amp that must have cost all of seven guineas when it first appeared and which sounds nothing like a good modern amp. In a word: avoid - there's nothing here for most people. (Unless, of course, you like weak tea and terylene trousers.)"[/color][/i] INSULTING DRIVEL ! Not content with spouting ageist (and innacurate) nonsense about a body of real tech-head enthusiasts who - unlike him - actually know what they're talking about, he goes on to pour arrogant, ignorant scorn on an entire generation of equipment, purely on the grounds that it wasn't made last week. In truth, amplifiers such as the LEAK Point One, TL10 and Quad 22 had such ground-breakingly low distortion and noise figures that thousands were bought by the BBC, commercial broadcasters and recording studios worldwide. [i][color="#A0522D"]"...you'll see the same old model numbers with exciting names like OC71 and EC88 appearing in lots of kit."[/color][/i] Childish innacuracy that could have been corrected by referring to a basic data book. EC88s are hardly used at all (he means ECC88), and an OC71 is a Germanium transistor, not a valve. [i][color="#A0522D"]"...unlike transistors, valves do wear out after a while."[/color][/i] Nope. In fact, both valves and transistors have similar life expectancy. Provided they're not abused, both will last for decades. Summary: Considering the well-deserved reputation of Drawmer as a manufacturer of top-notch studio signal processing gear, it is to be hoped that, whoever Richard Wentk is, he isn't employed by them in any technical capacity. Ooh, I can be a bit tart when I want to, can't I ?

Kurt, just to clarify: you have tried running the GS112 cab off another amp and found it still to be faulty, haven't you? I was basing my advice on that assumption.

[quote name='Kurt' post='27310' date='Jul 5 2007, 09:10 AM']I've had a poke about in the amps forums here and on TB trying to find an answer to my question but am now more confused than when I started!. Here's the deal. I've got an Aggie GS112 which, for rehearsals I run on its own with an ABM500. The amp's master vol is never turned up much above 10 (o'clock) and there is no extreme eq'ing going on. I did notice the other night that the VU meter was full scale on every note as I had mis-set the input gain (ie the pre was clipping). Now the speaker in the GS112 is distorted at anything approaching a useable volume. I've tried different cables, my bass into another amp etc, all pointing to the cab still. The only thing I can't try in my amp into another cab at the moment, but I guess if I'd fried the amp I'd get nothing out of it. Thanks in advance for your help, but please keep it simple. I don't know what xmax, excursion and all the other tech terms I've come across are!!! Peace[/quote] Well, you've obviously got a knackered speaker on your hands, but one thing's certain: it won't have been caused by clipping of the ABM's pre-amp stage. Despite popular myth, clipped signals cannot in themselves damage LF (low frequency) drivers (although they can damage tweeters on account of the greatly increased HF component in a clipped waveform). There are two forms of damage that can occur to an LF driver: thermal or mechanical, and both are caused by the same thing: having more power put into it than it is able to dissipate, either as sound or heat. The GS112's driver is only rated to handle 300Watts RMS, and you've been driving it with an amp capable of 575 Watts RMS, so it's quite possible that you've accidentally over-taxed the poor thing with clean power (yes, even with the amp's master gain down at 10 o'clock). Looks like you'll have to replace that speaker, I'm afraid. Make sure your next one is capable of handling at least 600 Watts.

Y'know, Ped, the more I think about it, the more your impending surgery starts to look like a golden opportunity. In addition to the aforementioned truss rod modification, while you're under they might as well do a couple of cochlear implants. Fit an XLR socket into a suitable orifice and you're sorted!

[quote name='rhino' post='25871' date='Jul 2 2007, 09:17 AM']Hi, If it's of any interest, the guy who designed Simms Watts, Pete Tulett, designed and produced Peterson combos. Rhino.[/quote] It is. Thank you!

The earliest Ashdown ABM cabs definitely DID come with Celestion drivers. Here's a quote from an interview with Mark Gooday from December 2000: "One change to the range this year is that the Celestion speakers that graced all the cabs have been replaced with the very distinctive looking Blueline speakers. Celestion make very good speakers but I was trying to get something a little bit better and they weren’t that much better or different sounding to what I’d used prior with Trace. I’d put a lot of effort into making better cabinets, better speakers in the same sort of price range and I went over to Italy and spent two or three days there, over the course of two years and probably fifty or sixty different samples of tens twelve’s and fifteen’s, we actually built what I would say were significantly better speakers to suit my price. Celestion right now are nearly there again, they’re using what we’ve done and they’re very close but there’s still this tone that I can’t swear is a Celestion but I can hear it in my ears. So I’m happy with my own speakers now with bigger magnets and thicker cones. The blue covering was actually a protective coating that we spray the cones with so we said well we might as well do it in a tint."

[quote name='dood' post='24917' date='Jun 29 2007, 02:37 PM']The only sweeping statement I will add to this thread, is that the 'biggest problem with valve amps are the myths that seem to surround them'. lol. My own feelings towards them have already been echoed several times. They aren't better, just different to SS. Long live amplification!![/quote] +1 Dan. Couldn't have put it better meself.

[quote name='finnbass' post='24849' date='Jun 29 2007, 12:43 PM']Nothing very special at all I'm afraid Behringer Rack tuner with rack lights. Behringer V-Amp Pro Phonic tube optimiser Phonic tube enhancer Phonic power conditioner/distribution box with rack lights Phonic 34 band graphic eq Behringer europower amp All bargain basement gear [/quote] Holy **** Finn! I've seen aircraft cockpits with fewer dials.

Hi Pete, Not a direct answer, but [url="http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/fyfeholt/aria.htm"]THIS GUY[/url] might be able to help.

[quote name='Lfalex v1.1' post='24171' date='Jun 27 2007, 10:08 PM']Maybe I should go "rigless" and use in-ear monitoring...[/quote] Naaah. It'd go bust on you. Tried a packing case and broomstick? You could spearhead the 2008 skiffle revival.

[quote name='ste_m3' post='23449' date='Jun 26 2007, 11:32 AM']Question that hasnt been answered that im fair interested in, are tube amps less bothered about whether you put guitar or bass through them? Ive seen a couple of randall all tube guitar heads go for fair money that ive really wanted to see what would happen if i tried bass through them. Put my GT6B in front and use that for any EQ adjustments? hmm.[/quote] In addition to what rodl2005 has said about the EQ options, in a decent valve amp designed for bass, you'll find that: 1) the coupling capacitors (used to pass the signal from one stage to the next while blocking DC) will be of a larger value, allowing more low frequencies to get through. 2) the output transformer will be larger and designed with care to deliver all the low frequency energy fully and faithfully Designing guitar amps is easy, because they don't have to be optimised to deliver such a wide frequency range. Designing a good bass amp is a much more demanding business. Everything from the power supply upward has to be heftier to handle all the LF energy, and the circuit as a whole has to be more carefully designed to avoid slipping into instability, and these factors naturally make it more expensive to build. Guitar amps are like TT motorbikes; bass amps are more like monster trucks. By all means experiment with the Randall heads (before you buy!). I'm not au fait with their innards, but to be honest I don't imagine they're significantly different from most other valve guitar heads. Just keep in mind that in asking them to deliver bass faithfully, you may be imposing on them a burden they were never designed for. P.S.: rodl2005 mentioned getting good results using a valve PA amp. Again, these are a much better bet than guitar heads, for the same reasons. They are designed to deliver the full audio range with faithfulness and stability.

Soundclips next...!

[quote name='Lfalex v1.1' post='23374' date='Jun 26 2007, 09:21 AM']I've decided I hate amplifiers. That, or they hate me! Tube or SS, you send 'em, I'll bend 'em. (And it's not like I'm some psychotic volume freak who wires it all up wrong, either. Before you ask!) I need something that will not go up in smoke at the sight of i) an input signal ii) a pair of cabinets. Not very constructive, I know, but I'm sick of things breaking without them suffering what I'd call abuse.[/quote] Hell, you have been having a bad time! There may be some undiagnosed common factor going on. Something that's not immediately obvious. Here's a shortlist of possibles: 1) Dodgy local mains supply (unlikely, but...) 2) Mains wiring fault in your house/rehearsal space 3) Faulty wiring inside one or both of your speaker cabs 4) Having met a mysterious stranger at the crossroads and signed a contract in your own blood... My money's on the last one. C'mon, don't you remember me...?

Don't want to spoil the party, folks, but how did this thread end up in the Reviews section? Shouldn't it be in "Bass Guitars"?