Phil Starr

Hi, from what you are saying you want a pretty competent PA with nothing weighing more than 30lb/13.6kg and the budget is limited. That's a fairly difficult thing to do Your only advantage is that you don't need it immediately so you can take your time and wait for the right bargains to come along. I've run my Behringer amp with a couple of passive Yamaha speakers and it was perfectly competent. I don't know of your Sampsons but there are loads of cheap and good used passive speakers out there so swapping your amp might be the best idea the Behringer might be a good choice. There are loads of other cheap class D PA amps out there too so you may not just be limited to the NX3000.The Thomann amp is not completely undesirable so you might get most of the cost of a used NX3000 back anyway. It might be worth seeing if you can sell it with the Samsons too as a complete PA. People buying their first PA quite like a package if it has leads and stands thrown in Do you want advice on lightening the load. Getting a competent PA speaker at under 30lbs is pretty difficult at any price. The old passive ones tended to have wooden cabs, often heavy Chipboard or MDF so that is difficult and for a 12" system to be loud and have good power handling usually means a fairly hefty magnet again making 30lbs a difficult target. They exist but usually at a price. The other approach to problems lifting is to use a sub or two. they are heavy but stay on the floor and smaller lighter tops become possible. Long term it might be worth looking into a digital mixing desk, you can then ditch the outboard gear. Basically though I wouldn't rush into swapping things around until you have a clear plan of what you are trying to achieve.

I didn't save the simulations but you are of course correct, excursion is greater in a larger cab, directly in proportion to the extra bass. I think 'tears itself apart' might be a little too strong The power handling is reduced might be a bit fairer and of course this is true universally for all speakers in over-sized cabs. The thermal power ratings remain the same of course and since we haven't specified an amp or what the signal looks like the speaker might be perfectly happy. The actual reduction in power handling is dependent upon the mechanics of the speaker itself too and may or may not be significant. I was aiming for something simple to understand without saying anything that wasn't misleading. The truth but not the whole truth maybe

What do you use your PA for? Is it just or mainly vocals or are you putting more through it. Specifically kick drum, bass and keys which is more demanding? Also how loud is your band? That makes a huge difference as to your options. For anyone buying new nowadays I'd say the practical solution is pretty much always active speakers, quick and simple to set up and with DSP almost impossible to destroy in normal use, even the cheap stuff is reliable. With built in class D amps they can be pretty light too. Unless you really cut corners they are probably going to sound better than your Samsons, which you are happy with anyway. I've got the Behringer iNuke whic I think is the NX3000 in a really ugly case, same electronics. From memory it is 250W a side into 8 ohms 350W a side into 4ohms and 700W+ bridged. The same amp as is in the Bugera Veyron I suspect. Anyway it's a perfectly decent amp and not far off my Peavey IPR1600 amps

Without going into the maths the bigger the box the more bass you get from any given speaker. This isn't just offset by the additional problem of transporting something big and heavy; the 'wrong' sized box brings problems withgettinga flat response. Typically an over large box gives a droop in the bass response and is difficult to make flat, a too small from ideal cab will have a much higher resonance and less deep bassbut will give some bass boost around this raised resonant frequency. This happens with all cone speakers and in both reflex (ported) cabs and sealed cabs though the details differ. These are the calculated bass responses of a 10" bass driver in a 40l cab (blue) 20l cab (green) and a 5l cab (red). The medium sized cab in green gives the flattest response and a practical size. The red cab is way too small and -3db (the lower dotted line ) is 150Hz ish way to high to be useful. The large cab in blue has the response gradually falling from 500Hz and clearly isn't flat but crosses the -3db line way lower than the smaller cabs. Generally speaking cheap speakers with weaker magnets work better in huge boxes. A lot of old cabs tend to be large because speaker magnets in the day were weaker and powerful magnet systems were extremely expensive. Cheaper manufacture and better manetic materials have allowed box sizes to be reduced but big old boxes can still be fun and have a sound of their own.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/126768403062?var=0&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=710-53481-19255-0&campid=5338590836&toolid=10044&customid=c440980d344e191873caff8e772fe903

That's interesting to see inside the cab. for a commercial cab it has a lot of bracing, It would be difficult to adjust the tuning for most people but the folded port isn't unusual in small cabs. No damping material in the cab though? I'll try and get the calcs done this weekend.

I've had a quick look and the cab is roughly 25-28 litres and my guess is tuned to 50Hz. If you want to measure the internal dimensions of the cab and the port dimensions I can check that for you. That is typical for a 10" cab so probably a range of speakers will fit and work OK. I can do a quick check and identify any complete mis-matches with the drivers suggested if you give me those dimensions

Yep those are the ones, I had some 12's Mine had aluminium voice coils and the aluminium wire corroded creating a dry joint leading to speaker failure. Your BN10-300 is a much better speaker and quite expensive hence recommending the Pulse 10. I've used both. You can get all the specs for these speakers so if you want to fit anything like these we can do the calculations and you can potentially tweak the cab to match the speaker

I had some failures of that generation of Eminence drivers (which hasn't been true of the current range, I'm not knocking Eminence generally) I think they are from the late 70's early 80's so too long in the tooth to buy as a replacement

The Celestion Pulse 10 Ashdown recommended is a great little speaker, it's the driver we recommended in the BassChat 110T @stevie designed a couple of years back.

How are the Ayras? Have you played bass through them yet?

Well I blame you for all the spending on things I 'need' Al, why shouldn't I blame you for other peoples thoughts 🤣😂🥰

Combining this with the pic you sent of the PA set up at your recent gig makes the problem pretty clear. That's a sizable PA which could easily produce sounds well over 130db and is way too close to the musicians. If we take a median 33db of isolation that means you are still getting probably 100db sound levels getting past the in-ears. given you want the sound level from the in-ears to be audible over the spill then that's way over what is safe. We also know, and you allude to this that the isolation is frequency dependent and that low frequencies pass more easily and on top of that are radiating 360deg from the bass bins. Truly we risk drowning in the low frequency backwash. Even worse if the sound engineers are mboosting the lowest frequencies. I don't think you can do anything other than blame the PA for this. Pulling out the IEM's and replacing them with ear plugs isn't going to change the isolation either. You are still stuck with 33db of frequency dependent isolation Moving the subs away from the stage, considering cardioid subs and using judicious eq and HPF would be more to the point.

I think all this comes down is that you can eff up any system. No good having the perfect system if the fleshy bit between the ears isn’t working. Im never one to tell anyone that they have it all wrong. If the music sounds good and the audience are having a good time then there’s not much wrong. In years of mixing however I can say you can’t give all the musicians what they each want using backline only or even with floor monitors. Anything you do in one corner spills over the whole stage. You can’t have a p***ing area in a swimming pool for the same reason. Only in ears let’s you give everyone more me. on a personal note thanks for sorting my sound. A SansAmp gives me a little magic to feed into the PA.

Still not time to actually play with WINisd and I'm looking at a few drivers at the moment but the 6FE200 is looking favourite at the moment and possibly better than the original Fane. I have to say I'm impressed generally with some of the offerings from Faital at the moment. The price is wicked