Phil Starr

7 minutes ago, DocTrucker said:

 

Can this be done on the cheap with an analogue mixer, room mic, and drum isolation headphones? In ears are no good for me. Guessing it really needs to be seperate headphone amps for each member?

It can, there's nothing complex about it in theory mic->headphone amp-> headphones. There's a simple shortcut though; use a small digital recorder and plug the headphones in directly so you re using the internal mic and headphone amp. I've a little Olympus voice recorder (WS650), about the size of an old iPod which you can fix to a lanyard around your neck or to a mic stand. Other brands are available of course. You'll be dependent upon the on stage sound but on the plus side it's completely free standing with no connection to anything so you can carry your monitoring with you anywhere and you'll pick up all the chatter on stage.

If you already have hearing loss then you need to be thinking very seriously about in-ears from the start. I'm no medical expert but just turning off your aids is not going to stop the same level of energy reaching your ears. Even at an open mic with an unknown PA its possible to use an ambient mic to run your in-ears and hear the same mess of sound as everyone else but at a lower and safer level.

Most band nights will either provide some simple back line or someone will lend you something so you may be able to play if you choose the right mic night. No guarantees but a bit of research might pay dividends and give you more time to sort out a longer term solution. 

So the advice David  gave you about the bottom octave is correct, You really don't need to worry about 30Hz and a B string. They sound rich and thick because of the harmonics, we can barely hear 30Hz and in any case because of the positioning of the pickups there is almost no 30Hz passed to the amp anyway. Most mid to high priced PA cabs will handle bass as well as a bass cab and many of us gig with PA cabs quite happily, I've actually done Jam nights with a single RCF310 as the drums at these things tend to be stripped down ancient kits without the volume of most bands 'real' kits. Are you proposing to use your MAG with a passive cab as backline or will you buy in an active bass cab to do the job? 

The theory of using flat response systems and using your Digbeth for tone shaping is a good one. I've gone down that route and it does simplify set up even if it isn't quite as simple as it sounds on paper. The Ashdown has a pre shaped tone and I found it dull sounding when I had one. Great amps but they are coloured with the Ashdown tone and that may be fighting the Digbeth. The RB3 is probably just as coloured but in different ways. Don't be scared to eq the Ashdown differently when using the Digbeth.

The other thing to consider is speaker placing and room acoustics. You may be using the Laney in tilt back mode with the speaker pointed at your ears and the 4x10 pointing at the back of your legs where you lose  all the upper mids and treble. Your home practice space might be a bit livelier than the rehearsal room or the 4x10 might be jammed into a corner and just moving it might improve things.

If you want to try the in-ears/ambient mic route let me know and I'll give you a quick run down. Look after the hearing you have though

On 14/12/2023 at 17:04, Chienmortbb said:

I had a few hours to kill while herself was going around the Range, Matalan, Pavers and Dunhelm. So popped into Absolute Music. I was moseying around the speaker display when a keen salesperson asked if I would like a demo. So off we trotted to the biggest rehearsal room with a pair of HH TRE 1201s and a pair of RCF ART 912s. 

 

I tried some of my favourite tracks on both, at medium then loud volume. At medium volume there was very little to choose, as the volume was increased the RCFs kept the high-end clearer and more defined. I could feel, and I believe hear, cabinet resonances in both speakers, although more so in the HHs. The RCFs are bigger and heavier, so I suppose that would be expected.

 

Were the RCFs worth almost twice the price of the HH? Clearly, it does take a lot of money to get small improvements, but whether the extra cost is worth it probably depends on how big your bank balance is. The HH are £299 and the RCFS £550. Either would be more than adequate for vocals only and work fine with a sub.

I think the choice of speaker is all about practicality. Your stage sound is more about the ability of the person mixing. Ultimately without someone out in the audience mixing dynamically then your sound will always be compromised. Let's be honest here Lewis Hamilton in a VW Polo would beat me round Silverstone in  a Golf GTI by a very big margin. Buying a top of the range RCF (remembering that the ART series are their base range) won't guarantee better sound in practice. Sadly it won't improve my bass playing either

The thing about designing active cabs with digital signal processing is that it's easy to get the design optimised. Class D gives the designer unlimited power at low cost and weight. It's cheaper to use a 1,000Wamp across the range and throttle it back in the smaller speakers than to make 6 different amps across the range. The crossover design, frequency correction and speaker protection are all done in the digital domain and cheaper components can be optimised to give a great sound. I've heard bands sounding great with Alto's, HH, Laney and even the much reviled Mackie Thumps. All plastic cabs are compromised by resonances, to a lesser extent all cabs even wooden ones are compromised by resonances and the best plastic cabs will probably beat the worst wooden ones.

I've gradually upgraded my PA over the years, Passive Yamaha->Wharfedale Titans->Wharfedale EVP's->RCF ART310->RCF ART 745. Do the RCF 745's sound great? Absolutely, but so do the 310's with my duo but I used to get more compliments for the sound with the Yamaha's, everyone else has got better. Do we get a better audience reaction, only when we play better  The biggest compliment I ever got for sound was at a free festival, I used to run FOH at the Windsor free festivals on stage 3. Steve Winwood turned up with Traffic and refused to go on the main stage because the sound was awful despite them hiring in proper touring kit. He rocked up at my stage 3 with a load of borrowed mismatched gear including a mix of WEM columns and some home built Altec A7's. All I really had was enthusiasm and a set of 24 year old ears, they sounded great because they were great musicians and i didn't get in their way.

So get the best PA you can, but don't worry if it is modest. Match it to your needs not someone else's. Does it fit your car? can you lift it onto the poles? Are you playing Wembley of the Dog and Duck? Are you miking up drums and putting bass through without backline? Singing four part harmonies and needing the vocals to be crystal but not loud? 

So taking the example above the ART912's can be safely pushed a bit louder and will probably take a little more bass and deliver it a bit more cleanly. If you aren't needing that extra volume and you are only putting vocals through the PA then why pay extra? If you are using SM58's as vocal mics and the quality of your singers voice isn't the most important thing about your band anyway the 912 will do a good job, but it is limited by a 1" horn and you might want to look at the ART 732 if the vocal quality is more important to you. A 'good' speaker is just one that matches your needs. A great sound is more about playing well and the time and effort you put in to squeezing performance out of your rig.

I can testify that removing carpet is a truly horrible job. I rebuilt some Yamaha PA subs years back and managed to peel off the carpet and ultimately stick it back down but cleaning up the adhesive  from the panels was awful. I don't think Tuff Cab will be flexible enough to form a continuous coating or that it will be 'Tuff' on a soft fabric undercoat.

I've never looked inside mine but I've assumed from the way they work that they are non latching/momentary switches. You hold them down to programme the settings so the switching must be done in the circuitry, the switch is just sending a signal to the processor. Mine all click when pressed so I'd guess that's a spring giving a good positive contact.

I'd be looking to see how clean it is inside the box blowing out any dirt/dust/spiders that have accumulated, paying special attention to the switches of course. If that doesn't fix it use a bit of Servisol switch cleaner (not WD40 or anything oil based) might solve the problem. Only on the dodgy ones though. No point in disturbing anything working

Hi Smanth, with that cab I'd probably get up fairly close to one of the drivers only, rather than move out further and risk comb filtering between the different drivers. You'' also cut out other sounds like anything from the drums from feeding into the mic in a live situation. Apart from that I'd do it by ear, wearing headphones and listening to the changes as I moved the mic away from the centre of the cone towards the outside a small step at a time to find the sweet spot. Then measure the distance so you can find it again I'd only be mic'ing live if I particularly loved the sound of the cab though and even in the studio I'd be mixing it with a DI feed if I miked up at all. 

There's no right or wrong but its a lot easier to add to a clean feed DI'd from the bass than to remove distortion and eq after the feed.

Just couldn't resist, Squier Anniversary. Never bought a new bass before

Welcome to Bass Chat

It’s the nature of BassChat that threads are often derailed and become rambling catch-alls for all those with related but different issues. The only exception that comes to mind is the ‘IEM Bible’ where @EBS_freak puts in a lot of work and wrote an extensive wiki. There are probably others but I’m not so addicted to BC that I know every nook here.

This is @Pirellithecat thread and I’ll be coming here to see how he is getting on. It’s up to him how he does it and if anyone wants a different thread then go ahead and start one of your own. We are all just here for the craic in the end just friends talking 😀 

If someone wants to write a wiki it would be a great addition to the PA sub-forum. I’d love to give it a go but it’s weeks of work and I have a bass to play.

It usually is the guitarist 😂😎😂

You have to say this is a failure of government. There should be laws to prevent the unwary being exploited and moral hazard for all those who mis-sell or mis-price goods. It is everywhere from the pricing of train tickets to the sale of insurance. Even the removal of VAT on women’s sanitary products was taken by companies as a dividend and no reduction at all was passed back to the customer. When regulation is seen as ‘red tape gone mad’ or the ‘nanny state’ then you can only expect to be exploited. I would love to live in @Dad3353 world but sadly increasing parts of the economy ae controlled by corporations where the shareholder is king and the customer is only there to be exploited. 
 

Mind you we choose the government.

Ok so you have some noise and the KZ’s are emphasising it.

Let’s look at the noise, it’s coming from somewhere. I’m assuming you have more than just the bass coming through your in ears? Try tuning off each active channel on the mixer. The noise could be from anything from a dicky lead to a broken amp but fx pedals are often a nightmare noise source. Just find which channels are noisy first.

In the meantime just try rolling off the treble a bit in your monitor feed if you prefer the KZ’s. You don’t need the hyper real sound and nothing above 10khz is going to matter as a musician.

6 hours ago, Elfrasho said:

Hopefully I can hijack/resurrect this thread and ask, what's a good option out there under £250? I'd prefer a 12" and wil only be used for monitoring, but I fancy one. I've tried the headrush 12" which would be ideal but if something out there for a good wedge cheaper can do the same job id be keen to hear.

 

 

You will struggle to get something all singing and dancing at that price. Bass is quite demanding of speakers and high quality at high volume is always going to come with a cost. You are probably going to have to compromise a bit. I’ve successfully used an RCF ART310 but I’m not looking for huge volumes and I roll off the bass so it is less demanding of the speakers. Bass goes through the PA and of course the lower frequencies come back from them onto the stage  anyway so rolling off the bass is necessary anyway. If you can compromise on volume Then you could pick up something like that used but within your budget.

Amps don’t really need ‘servicing’ at all. There aren’t any moving parts or any components that need routine replacement. The idea of a service comes from machines which wore at a known rate which would need regular checking to see that they were wearing at the expected rate and parts replaced at regular intervals. Parts in an amp all have known rates of aging but they usually last decades. The only exception to this is a valve/ tube which decay slightly quicker than the other components and can be expected to need replacement. If you were a touring band you’d probably get the valve amps checked regularly. Even so a pre amp valve like the ECC83 often lasts decades. I’ve got a valve radio from the 50’s still working with the original valves. Power amp valves run hotter and last less well but even so can give years of life..

The only thing that might make sense are regular safety checks. PAT testing in the UK, maybe blowing out the dust and cobwebs every 5-10 years if you are an obsessive. The thing is that components have a half life, a very few will fail in the first year some might last a century but it will be decades before most of them fail and you can’t really predict which resistor or capacitor will go first or indeed if it might be a bit of plastic insulation on a wire that goes first. There is no point in replacing everything just to be safe and it would cost a lot more than a new amp to do so.

The other thing is that cleaning the pots (volume and tone controls) is more likely to shorten their lives so regular tinkering IMO is more likely to shorten the life of a modern amp. Save your money and don’t let some monkey poke around in your precious bits😆

Let me know how you get on. The KZ’s won’t create any noise but it may emphasise something which you barely notice otherwise.

It’s difficult to be certain of these things over the net without being abl to see or hear what is going on. First check your batteries. I’ve had the odd noise with dying batteries. 
 

Also be aware that the KZ’s have a pretty extreme frequency response boosting bass and treble a lot. I’ve struggled with the bass tone generally with them and booting the treble will emphasise certain types of noise.

Also look at your leads, you’ll have wiggled them when swapping the D770’s in, duff leads can be intermittent.

Just use the main output sockets on the back of the mixer. I'm not sure if this will disconnect the internal power amps or not but it shouldn't pose a problem.

First of all it sounds probable that the coil is gone but you can check your 15. Get a large glass or a bowl so you can push the cone in gently without any sideways pressure. If you hear scratching as you push the cone then the coil is rubbing against the side of the magnet and your speaker is effectively dead.

Double check your cone though, the glue line sometimes breaks where the cone joins the corrugated edge, at the point where the voice coil joins the cone or even the dust cap comes away. You can usually repair this with some latex based glue. As this is a Hartke is could be the aluminium centre coming away (less likely) so I'd look there too.

Any replacement speaker is not going to sound like the Hartke original, even if they are a good match for the cab the midrange which gives most of the character will be entirely different, maybe better or worse but certainly different. If only a Hartke will do then you need to look for a used Hartke of the same vintage. A replacement cab of that age will probably be less than the cost of a replacement driver.

8 hours ago, steviedee said:

I actually think I’m being daft worrying about it!

Not daft but maybe over-thinking it. Pre amp describes just about anything that deals with low level signals, they don't have to be something that changes or colours your signal and they don't even have to have any gain, they may just be matching impedances or buffering a signal to stop it affecting other parts of the circuit. Unless you intend designing your own electronics you don't need to know any of this Just be confident that the electronics in your interface are as clean sounding as they can be.

Hi Smanth, don't panic, whatever it is can be sorted. You can start by blocking those holes, and maybe sticking down the loose vinyl at the back of the cab. Just find some screws the right size to screw in the holes, you don't want to make them any bigger. You could even cut a couple of strips of wood the size of the old plastic strips and screw them on temporarily. It may not fix the problem but you have eliminated one possible cause.

I have a minor problem here so I'll only dip in rarely for the next week or so. 

On 22/11/2023 at 00:13, Smanth said:

So in simple terms @Phil Starr, if the amp is quoting 250W into 4Ω and I hook it up an 8Ω cab, it will be pushing out circa 125W, maybe a tad more?

 

For a 100W rated cab, one would need to avoid going full volume, otherwise the cab might get pushed too hard, will sound bad and perhaps even be damaged?  The amp will not being running at its max and distortion will likely be less?

 

For a 300W rated cab even at full volume the amp cannot overload the cab (Tho will not sound as loud as it could)?  Presumably in the real world, driving an amp at full power will introduce more distortion?

Hi again

You've kind of asked several questions here, I don't have a lot of time so I'll just answer the one in this bit of your post. So first of all you are spot on, basically you get twice the power through 4ohms and half the power moving back up to eight ohms . But that's theoretical, the theory works when the amp is running with the volume down but when you turn up full practical limits come in and it's almost always slightly less than double. 125W is as good a guesstimate as any.

The second bit is about how much power the speaker is safe with. Matching the amp to the cab (there is a third question about matching two speakers but I'll ignore that for now) It's slightly complex because the power rating of a speaker is measured very differently to the way an amps power is measured. For the amp you are just measuring it's electrical output. If you know the Volts and Ohms you know the theoretical power and you just need to check that the amp can provide the current.

Speakers are more complex, you can destroy them in two ways, pass too much power and the coil gets hotter and hotter and eventually blows. (heat causes other problems too but let's keep it simple). The second thing that can destroy a speaker is uncontrolled movement beyond the design limits of the speaker. The more power you apply from the amp the further the speaker cone and couil move, but this is also affected by frequency. The lower the note the more the speaker moves and a combination of excessive bass and power is what is more likely to cause failure by over-excursion than heat alone. It's that frequency element that makes it complex because: a.) nobody knows how you are going to eq or play your bass and b.) The cab plays a big part in controlling excursion so the same speaker may handle 300W in one cab and only 150W in a different cab. 

So, at the factory where they design and build drive units they test speakers by putting them in a standard box and by passing a standard signal through the amp for several hours until eventually they know how much power they can apply before the speaker fails. The standard AES test is for two hours and the standard signal is white noise (all the frequencies) but filtered to mimic the mix of frequencies in 'typical' music. The AES test says the speaker should be able to handle the power for two hours without failing. It's a good fair test and easy to do so you can compare speakers. Engineers  and speaker designers can be pretty confident with this information but they knows that this is only half the story.  Once the drive units leave the factory they cannot know what cabinet they are going into and what instrument they will be used for or how the musician will play, there are so many unknowns that no attempt is made to rate the speakers for use.

So when you buy a 2x10 fitted with two Celestion speakers rated at 200W ea you will be told its a 400W cab. and samples of the speakers have been through the severest test possible of running for two hours at full power without harm. The reality though is that your 500W amp isn't going to overheat them. Music isn't continuous noise it has loud bits, quiet bits and times when you stop playing. Have a look on the back of any modern amp and it will give a figure for power consumption which is way below the maximum power of the amp. I've got the 200W Gnome in front of me and it says 60W power consumption. That breaks down to 10W of energy wasted heating the amp and 25% of the 200W going to the speakers on average when the amp is running flat out. If you keep the bass eq down and play 'normally' you can safely use a 1000W amp without your 400W speaker over-heating and some people actually do that. The problem is that you might like a bit of bass boost or you may add in all sorts of pedals and you still have the excursion limits of the speaker to worry about. There might be a frequency where each of those Celestions can only handle 25W each and your 400w cab is only a 50W cab at that point.

So going back to your question, you could almost certainly use your 100W speaker with your 125W amp. 99% of the time if you use a 300W amp with a 300W speaker you'll never have a failure, you can probably risk going a lot further and use an amp that is double the power. People rarely turn their amps up full anyway and in reality your average power use will never reach 25% of full power. You don't need to be over protective but you do need to be aware of the over-excursion issue. If you are using a of of bass boost, slapping your bass without compression or increasing the frequencies below 100Hz in an unusual way and you hear unusual noises from your speakers at high volumes then you just might have a problem. I suppose I'm saying just be aware you are comparing apples with pears when looking at amp watts and speaker watts, six apples don't necessarily weigh the same as six pears

Hi Smanth 

Power is all about the transfer of energy the watt is a transfer at a rate of one joule per second. In electrical terms it's calculated by multiplying the voltage by the current. So for 100W you could have a power supply of 100V at 1A. For a 10v supply you'd need to drive 10A and for 1V supply you would need 100A.

Your amplifier will be built with a power supply which has a fixed voltage which it simply can't go above and it will also have a current limit where it starts to overheat, the voltage will drop and eventually it will burn out (OK it won't as it will probably blow a fuse or trip something, but lets keep it simple)

So the current is reduced as the resistance increases. If your amp is a 50V amp and your speaker is 8ohms you'll get 50/8=6.25 amps. 50Vx6.25A=312W If you use a 4ohm speaker you'll get 12.5A which would give you 624W and a 2ohm speaker 1248W and so on, but of course you won't get unlimited current so in the end the amps power supply will overheat and break down in some way (usually controlled  ) This is why you see so many 300W into 8ohms and 500 into 4ohm put a  amplifiers. It makes no economic sense to put a bigger power supply into a medium power amp when you could up the voltage a little and deliver that power to an eight or four ohm speaker.

So the instantaneous peak is just advertising nonsense. You can measure the power supply voltage and you can measure the maximum current and that gives the power. The instantaneous power is just the real power multiplied by 2. Sometimes they give it away with an asterisk* sometimes they don't and even don't tell you they haven't ever measured it, because you can't measure a ghost!

*calculated (as if multiplying a number by two is much of a calculation) There is a fiddle here which lets the advertisers get away with it which I'm happy to explain but it's to do with RMS voltages and I'll only answer if you ask

So minimum load is 4ohms because any lower would draw too much current and overheat everything if you turn the volume up too high and the Speakon is only marked as an extra warning, it's written on the amp and in the manual too so you can't say you weren't warned.

22 hours ago, TimR said:

you can tell which members of the band have just learned the first verse and chorus,

That's almost a thread de-rail

One of my pet hates. They are always the ones that suggest the songs with all the clever arrangements, never get on top of the tricky bits and then tell us it is more 'creative' to do our own version with just verse/chorus and an extended guitar solo over 32 bars of  E7.

Genre often makes things more difficult too, I briefly played in a country band and thought foolishly 'all root-fifth and on the beat' Completely missed that this leaves nowhere to hide and the bass is prominent so you can't afford to be sloppy. Every genre has it's meme's and looks easy when someone else is playing. 

6 hours ago, uk_lefty said:

That thing the Killers do where they do half or three quarters of what you think is the verse, skip the pre chorus, throw in a bridge, go back to the second part of the chorus, hold onto a chord where you'd usually change.... When you're learning this stuff on the fly it's so hard to keep up, then commit it to memory out of a set of 100 songs.

11 minutes ago, tauzero said:

I remember Jonathan King once saying that the average song structure is verse, chorus, verse, chorus, clever bit, verse, chorus. I find it starts becoming difficult when it steps outside that general rule of thumb - for example "Place your hands" which is all over the place and which you have to remember bit by bit.

I feel the pain, though as you both say it makes for a more interesting song but I curse when someone wants you to play one of these with a couple of days notice. One thing that always trips me is where there are maybe only two or three chords and in just one or two parts of the song where the chord sequence changes but the rhythm doesn't.