Phil Starr

15+6 is a classic combination, the idea of using a small speaker is quite a good one. It isn't necessarily to shape the mids, though it does allow that possibility but there are two good other reasons to use a small speaker. Large speakers cause cancellation problems when their size becomes close to a wavelength long. Straight on is good but when you stand to one side (or more probably above your speaker as a bassist) the sound from one edge of the cone arrives at your ears fractionally after the sound from the other edge and you get cancellation. What that all means is that mid frequencies are harder for you to hear and everything is a bit woolly and muddled, not good for your playing. Using a smaller speaker raises the frequency at which that happens and you will hear yourself better. The other advantage is that a lighter cone will move more quickly and will track your sound better at higher frequencies reducing distortion and making it easier to engineer something with a flat response. The advantage over a horn is that this small speaker will handle a lot more power and will allow a lower crossover frequency. One of the designs whose concept I really like is the Genzler 12-3 https://www.genzleramplification.com/shop/bass-array12-3/ The 3" drivers will go higher than a 5" driver (and higher than anything that comes out of a bass pickup) and having an array of four will shape mid/treble dispersion nicely. More GAS

Hi Al, this is right as you have noted. Beyond this it get's more complex where a number of factors come into play all at once, I'm more than happy to bore the pants off everyone but it's not likely to solve your practical problem of what to buy The practical observation is that two 10's have roughly the same cone area as a 15, everything else being equal it means they might well be equally capable of making loud bass, that will depend on which 2x10 or 15 you choose. The problem with mixing speakers is that you'll end up with something that isn't the sound of the 15 or the 10, and what you get isn't easy to predict. That becomes even more so if the speakers are different ohms and one is taking twice the power of the other. you've probably got a 50/50 chance of getting a sound which is 'more bassy' and even less of a chance of getting something you like. It's like throwing two dice when the one you've already thrown is a six. It isn't wrong but it could be an expensive gamble unless you can try out the combination you crave.

Watts do matter and so does sensitivity. Let's imagine your 2x10 has a sensitivity of 96dB for 1W and your old 15 is 98dB/W. If you ran 100W into your old 15" Trace, that gives you 20dB of amplification (20dB louder than if you only give it 1W) It's max volume will be 118dB. Now replace that with your 2x10. Because it's 8ohms and you aren't running it flat out the power will be almost exactly halved. 50W gives you 3dB less gain so 17dB of amplification. That means you will get 96+17dB or 113dB. That's 5dB you've lost probably the difference in turning down from 10 to about 8 on the dial and that you will notice. Both the amp and the speaker will have contributed. I'll make another guess too. I reckon that Trace has a nice lively 'smiley face' frequency response which punches out bass boom and a nice middy punch, a lot of old fashioned shouty sound. The Laney is probably better balanced but expects plenty of power to do it's thing. The trace speaker only ever had to handle 150W so it could be made shorter throw with a nice light cone and hence more efficient. I'd put the Trace amp back with the speaker it was made for and look for an amp to get the best out of the Laney.

They are great people and it's a very personal service, however they are limited in what Behringer make available for repairs and their after sales are what they really need to work on IMO It's complex for a techy like myself. It's hard to recommend a 500W amp advertised as 2000W without letting people know and I know from experience how hard it is to get spares and support so it is only fair to let people know that too. Equally I buy Behringer stuff because of the value and because it's the only way I can afford some items. I've had Behringer stuff that has gone on working for years and some that has broken down fairly quickly, there's little wrong with the designs given the price points. I'm sure there are people who look down on gear as you say but equally we have to challenge some of the advertising puff that is becoming common again. To be fair they've upped their game over the years and the quality of manufacture has improved,. It is still budget gear but it's a while since I've seen some of the really poor quality control.

Behringer are routinely quoting 4x the actual power across the range of their amps, so this is a 500W into 4ohms and probably around 300W into 8ohms amp. Behringer, or Music Group have fairly recently acquired TC along with Tannoy, Midas and a couple of other well known brands. It's too early for them to have incorporated TC's technology into this older design. They've owned Bugera for a while and increasingly seem to be using Bugera for the badging of their instrument amps. They seem to market everything on the three is better than one and 2000 is better than 500 principle and a lot of their stuff has a lot of features for the price. The other issue with Behringr is their quality, which has been improving and their after sales which is still poor in the UK. Parts and support for anything out of guarantee is almost non existent. Having said that a 500/300 amp at that price is a remarkable bargain. Reliability is better and with an extended guarantee it has to be tempting as a backup.

You've not been getting good advice from your shop. There seems to be something about shop assistants that stops them from being able to say "sorry I don't know" The only problem with bridge mode is that it doubles the minimum impedance you can use, That's just down to a simple current handling issue. Even then it's hard to think of an amp that won't have adequate protection circuitry built in to prevent long term damage. There's no halving of the life of the amp so long as you don't go below the manufacturers minimum impedance and even then you'd probably only suffer from reduced power availability or a temporary shut down.

I don't think you need to worry too much about brand when it comes to a power amp, the whole point of them is to have no tone of their own and just to make things loud and nowadays they all pretty much do that. I'd be looking for things like brand reliability. You are looking at weight already so you are looking for switched mode power supplies and mostly class D amps. The weight alone will tell you that and you won't hear a difference in practice so that's not an issue. It makes sense to match your amp to your speakers. If you are going for a couple of 12's, presumably 8ohms ea. then looking for something that gives roughly 300W RMS into 8 ohms makes sense. It'll get everything you can out of your speaker without risk of blowing it. Most of these amps will also give you 500W+ into 4 ohms so you'll have flexibility in how you set up your system if you swap speakers around. Look for something that will operate in 'bridge' mode. this is a way of operating both amps together in mono so it gives you more power. Look at the minimum impedance (the ohms) the amp will operate at though most bridge mode operations give full power into twice the impedance of the lowest the individual channels work at. So if you take the example above of something that gives 500W per channel into 4 ohms in bridge mode it gives 1000W into 8 ohms and wont work well into 4 ohms in bridge mode. If it operates into 2 ohms then it will be happy into see 4ohms in bridge. That Crown amp looks good for the money.

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." I had to look that up It's all in the fingers? Well that's metaphorical fingers surely, it's fingers plus everything between the ears and the fingers including the years of practice. It's going to be pretty obvious that someone playing a poorly set up cheap bass with a warped neck and twenty year old strings through an underpowered 1x15 combo is going to sound different to someone playing a nicely set up £2,000 bass played through top equipment. At some point the shortcomings might be enough to make me sound better than someone who actually knows their way around the fretboard. Most of us work somewhere in the middle though where the differences aren't so obvious, I doubt that anyone other than the bassist is going to notice the difference between a top range Squier P bass and a mid range Fender, or if we go for a 2x10 over a couple of 12's. As to whether it matters, well of course it does, it may not be obvious to everyone in the room but would my band sound better if Flea, James Jamerson or Victor Wooten replaced me, of course they would. Everything we do affects what the rest of the band play so the accumulated effects are far greater than just how good is our timing or was that an interesting fill. Just you and the drummer working well together will get most people in the audience talking about how tight the band sounds, and probably get more of them up dancing. The audience though is made up of individuals, often in different stages of inebriation. I've rarely played a pub and not had at least one person come up and say they are a musician, There are people there who love music and appreciate it well done and others who are just out to have fun in a busy pub and their levels of appreciation are going to vary. The psychology of groups is interesting and my guess is that the difference between a great gig and an ordinary one is quite slight. Carrying an extra four or five people with your performance will create an atmosphere the rest of the room will pick up on, so it pays us to care about the details. I know nothing about acting but when a moment or a delivered line stands out in a play or a film I suspect it's because all the people in the room at the time from lighting engineer to actor got their bits of detail right. We have to care about the bits we can control and I suspect it's the human condition in all walks of life, we all have an inner nerd and we should be proud of it.

This is kind of interesting, Music Group (Behringer) are gradually accumulating a lot of other companies. Bugera, Turbosound, TC, Tannoy, Klark Technic, Midas and so on. A lot of these companies have good reputations for quality products and Behringer basically don't. In practice the reliability of Behringer has been improving and was always patchy, some of their stuff has always been reliable. For me the big downfall has been in after sales, I recently had to repair a Behringer stage monitor which failed just out of warranty, it was the devil's own job to track down spares. It isn't a 1000W amp. The 2000W Bugera Veyron https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/331141-nad-bugera-veyron-bv1001m/ turns out to be a 500W amp so expect this to be a 250W amp. The Turbosound speaker may be a Turbosound but as this is also owned by Behringer it is their right to call any speaker a 'Turbosound' though they may be using the Turbosound technology. In any case 12" speakers are limited by their nature to around 300W maximum so you know the amp won't be more powerful than that. The controls look like the Veyron BV100 so they've used the front end of that amp. Maybe they've just used the same board but tweaked the DSP to make sure the power doesn't blow the speaker. So this is probably a 250W 1x12, music group have no technical details on the Bugera website other than the bonkers advertising claims. This is an incredibly cheap combo, you've effectively got the speaker thrown in for nothing. The Behringer I repaired was really well put together for the price though the cab was a bit heavy, made of MDF. I'd hazard a guess that this is the same. Reliability for Behringer is getting better. I've no idea if they use the same after sales for Bugera as for Behringer if so you'd better hope it's one of the good ones. It's going to be interesting which way Music Group go in the next couple of years. According to Wikipedia they are retaining the European staff at most of the companies they are taking over and they may give them some independence in design and development, but I've noticed the Midas 18 digital mixer comes in an identical case to the Behringer XR18 with the same specifications at a roughly £100 premium. It may have detailed improvements but nothing in their literature details any. It's great value for money, it'd be really interesting to get it next to the Fender Rumble 100 or one of the other 12" combos like the Hartke KB12 both of which are more expensive. If it is basically the Veyron with a Turbosound speaker it could be a real bargain but if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.

The capacitors shouldn't cost much https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Qty-10-Bipolar-Non-Polar-Electrolytic-Capacitors-Reversible-NP-Cap-Various-/120859793251

You shouldn't have a problem as a load with the cab in parallel with another presumably 8ohm cab at all. The only situation I can think of where I'd worry would be using the cab on it's own with a valve amp and your cab presenting a high impedance within the amps pass band. Even then I wouldn't expect a problem but I'd want to investigate, it's early 50 years since I've used valve amps so it's beyond my pay grade to offer advice about that.

It will filter as you say as a first order filter, 6dB/octave and as such will offer a small amount of protection from over excursion for your 10. Usually you'd want a much sharper cut off as 6dB down at 60Hz isn't going to give you complete peace of mind, though you could model it in WinISD easily enough. However you will still get interference between the two speakers from phase differences and you will hear the combined frequency responses of both speakers at most frequencies. In a way you are doing the opposite of what Barefaced are doing where they allow the speakers to double their output below the crossover point though in this case it isn't really a crossover of course. Your combination is going to sound bass light with a bit of a bass shelf below 120Hz. 3dB down at 80-100Hz is going to be quite noticeable. The advantage is that it is a really cheap fix and you can try varying the value of your capacitor to see what sounds best. I personally tend to roll of below 100Hz in most venues so it could be a sound you like but the only way you'll find out is to try it. You might be better off just building a smaller cab for a second SM112, In a really small cab power handling wouldn't be much of an issue and you'd have the same frequency response above 200Hz so you wouldn't need to re eq when adding the second speaker. It depends upon just how much you want to experiment though. I quite like the SM110 on paper and I can understand the appeal of constant experimentation, it's a sort of intellectual GAS

There is a whole world of PA that sits in between the higher number RCF cabs and upmarket line arrays and those Behringers and at your budget that's where you should be looking. The Behringers lose out because of the speakers, I've had cause to pull some apart recently and they have very small magnets. They are a wonder of engineering to a budget and they sound good for the price but those tiny speaker magnets mean two things, they don't handle bass well and they won't go loud without distorting. If that's all you can afford then they are remarkable for the price but they aren't an upgrade to anything. If you are fairly technical and don't mind a slightly fiddle set up then there are some real bargains out there with used passive PA systems. Everyone is moving to lightweight active systems with mega powered class D amps/switch mode power supplies/Digital processing for convenience and there is suddenly a lot of older good quality PA on the market. You could probably pick up a pair of the old Yamaha Club series PA speakers for £150 which would blow the Behringers away. Look for S112V's or S115V's You'll obviously need a separate power amp. Old passive Electrovoice (EV) JBL and so on are all worth a listen too. Avoid the old passive Peaveys, super reliable but the vocal sound is really not great, they never really sorted their horn drivers/crossovers. the bass bis are OK if you go down that route. If you want to go down the route of active and bought new then the Wharfedale Titan 12's (£200ea) are great value so long as you keep the bass out of them, the vocal sound is excellent and sax and guitar will sound great but the cab is a bit resonant at lower frequencies. For everything else they go loud and clear. You could look to see if the RCF 310 mk3's are still on offer at Thomann (I paid £250ea recently). Stunning quality but again they won't really do bass for a band, this time because they are only 10's. If you don't mind weight you might pick up some used Wharfedale EVP's at a good price but they really are quite weighty. If you want to try some stuff out then PM me.

I just meant why not ask matrix if the amp you have will work with 6ohms. It has a class A/B Mosfet design so depending upon the current handling of the output transistors and the protection circuits it may be fine. They will be able to tell you. It's not a huge miss match.

Why not email Matrix http://www.matrixamplification.com/

I started playing at the age of 55, still loving it and learning loads 10 years later. If I had one tip it is to play whole songs. It's amazingly satisfying and more importantly it makes you learn the difficult bits, and the bits you thought were easy but teach you so much about how songs are structured. I'd recommend the Hal Leonard books. They are well written and thought out, easy to understand and come with a CD so you can hear what you are trying to achieve. Finally you really should play with other people. Bass really comes alive when you play with others, particularly with a drummer. A lot of what we do is shaped around what the other instruments are playing and it is such a buzz. If you remember back to the first time you drove without thinking about the controls? That's nothing to the feeling you get when you realise that sound driving the band along is coming from your fingers without you having to think about it.

There's nothing in the bass above 7k that anyone should be very interested in unless your band have a very odd set up. How much does your guy know about sound? It's often left to a band member who is the only one who knows how to wire the PA up and becomes the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. He may be complaining because he is panicking about the lack of 7k+ without truly knowing what that means, or it may be a taste issue, he wants to hear a traditional P-bass with Rotosounds and you are using tapewounds. He's never going to get that from your current set up. The first thing I'd do to resolve this is to spend some time at rehearsal sorting the sound with him, you need to get out into the FOH area and listen to your bass tone with the band going, a couple of long leads with a jack-jack joiner will sort that. Are you getting your tone? Are you cutting through? If you are happy with your tone then he is going to have to trust you, I don't suppose he'd be happy with you adjusting his guitar tones so put it to him that this is the tone you are aiming for and he is doing a good job, not to worry. If you have a way of doing it you could also record a performance I do this for a lot of gigs and it helps you be objective about what you are doing as a band. It can be a painful experience though, there's no hiding place Maybe there is room to compromise though? It's slightly worrying that you don't want to compromise your monitors for FOH though, that kind of says the audience experience is less important than yours. I'm sure you didn't mean it like that but it's worth a couple of minutes thought.

Oh Look it's Bartleby's tone settings

Thanks for joining in. I tend to agree with you about no need to be switchable, why would you want stuff that you can only hear because it messes up the vocal mic's and sets off room resonances? Maybe that's just the sound engineer in me though. Actually I really doubt that there are any bass specific amps out there that don't have some sort of filtering. It's pretty hard to design an amp where there isn't some need to decouple different sections of the chain to stop stray voltages getting through, even if that is only on the input from the bass. Just deciding on the size of the capacitor in each link means you have to have a design goal in mind before you do the calculation. It isn't really an option to switch that out of the circuit. Anyway good to have you on board and if you can tempt Mark Bass or even Marco himself to comment.

Hey Steve, I think you do need new ears, or if not you soon will. Seriously as a friend you need to think about this. The 310's claim 127dB @ 1metre, that's in the over inflated peak values that PA cabs usually use but they will still consistently produce levels of around 120dB+. These are the WHO figures for what sort of exposure is 'safe' ie unlikely to cause permanent damage to your hearing. 'Normal' levels for a rock band are around 100dB for everyone except the drummer. People here won't know that I know your band, an excitingly loud three piece rock band with a full blooded, head down, showman lead guitarist. I know you've had trouble blowing speakers in the past too. You seriously need to consider using in ears. I don't play at anything like your volumes and I thought I was invulnerable but I now have tinnitus and struggle to follow conversations in noisy environments. Something is wrong if you can't hear those 310's flat out they will cause permanent damage in (checks chart below) ….7secs. Maximum Recommended Noise Dose Exposure Levels Noise Level (dBA) Maximum Exposure Time per 24 Hours 85 8 hours 88 4 hours 91 2 hours 94 1 hour 97 30 minutes 100 15 minutes 103 7.5 minutes 106 3.7 minutes 109 112 seconds 112 56 seconds 115 28 seconds 118 14 seconds 121 7 seconds 124 3 seconds 127 1 second 130–140 less than 1 second 140 NO EXPOSURE

That's really interesting, they've clearly chosen a roll off with a -3dB @ 40Hz which makes sense in terms of letting everything from bottom E upwards through. The roll off is about 12db/octave too. I'd go for your setting, lots of added warmth around the crucial octave 80-160 to boost the second harmonic and a roll off to clean out the mud and protect the speakers below40Hz. I also dial in a bit of extra 1-3kHz and roll off the top end. There's potentially a lot of energy though below 40Hz which could threaten a lot of speakers if anyone became heavy handed with the bass boost.

with a valve amp you have successive stages of the amp connected by capacitors, each of these would act as a 6dB/octave filter, most stages would filter at similar frequencies and this would determining the roll off of the amp. Most class AB solid state amps would have similar decoupling capacitors. In fact very few audio amps will go right down to DC. They pretty much all roll off the bottom end at some point.

If it is for just your own monitoring the Behringer B205D is a really good bet. I had the chance to compare it with the Mackie and there was little if any difference. I 'upgraded' to the TC Voice Solo ad wish I'd stuck to the Behringer. Without a band around yout the TC sounds much better but in a band situation the Behringer gives no real highs or lows just lots of mids so it cuts through and gives few feedback problems unlike the TC which sounds brilliant but feeds back far too easily. I've used the Behringer F1320D which sound great. but I've upgraded to the RCF 310 mk3 which Thomann are selling cheap. I've also used the Wharfedale Titans and the EVP's are my main PA speakers. That EVP looks a great buy for an active speaker. The advantage of a 'proper' floor monitor is that the rest of the band will get more vocals, if that is what you are trying to achieve.

It's the rectangular hole in the bottom of the cabinet. It's used to tune the cab to the speakers and at the lowest frequency it is the air that vibrates in the port that makes the note not the speakers. That's a very small port for a 4x10. It may create some distortion and wind noise at high volumes. You may not notice though and there are a lot of commercial designs with over small ports.

My HA3500 is still my best sounding amp if a bit unreliable nowadays, and yes 30hz right the way down and 64Hz half way up with a bit of mid boost. A nicely judged graphic, but no HPF information as far as I can tell.