Phil Starr

I don't see the problem either, a sealed cab will have a flatter response and may sound nicer, but that is to some extent subjective. putting these two speakers into a ported box that size won't get all the bass they could generate but it will still exceed them in a sealed box. You do get a 2dB hump at 100Hz so they will sound boomy (or punchy, choose your adjective based on your taste) but you will also get an extra 3db of bass down to 40Hz with a ported box. You maybe shouldn't have started here as Bill says, but it's not a disaster. Especially if you picked them up cheaply. If you are happy to bodge the baffle or make two then try both and choose the one you prefer the sound of.

[quote name='uncle psychosis' timestamp='1487016677' post='3236307'] At the risk of offending, I'm not sure that the demise of the pub band (as I see them, anyway) is necessarily a bad thing. Most of the "pub covers" bands that I see are, frankly, pretty dreadful. Too loud, no sense of dynamics, singing songs that are inappropriate for the singer's range, lurching from one style to another as little more than karaoke with instruments. Yes there are exceptions but I'm not sure there are enough exceptions to sustain it. All of the best cover bands that I've seen in recent years are those that put their own identity into the music - a duo of acoustic guitar and singer with cajon that had the dance floor at a mate's wedding filled all night playing everything from Abba to Bruno Mars to The Clash and another covers bands doing all the usual stuff but using their own arrangements in a soul style. So yeah, rock karaoke might be dying but great live music is still out there, you just need to try a little harder to find it. For those of us who have never been into "mainstream" music (try finding a band down the dog and duck who'll play Sonic Youth or Sun Ra) this is nothing new. You just have to look harder to find your fix. :-) [/quote] I don't disagree about what you say about a lot of bands approach to their repertoire but there is a knock on effect I believe. If their act is predictable and ultimately dull then it creates a shrinking audience for the venue and ultimately for the next band in. People decide that pub bands aren't for them and eventually the venue will close to music if they cant make a profit on the deal. An exceptional band may be bucking the trend on a particular night or for a one off gig, but we operate within a 'scene' which is beginning to atrophy.

bad luck, The truth is your amp shouldn't have blown your speaker and even if your speaker did short, which is extremely unlikely, the amp should have been able to protect itself.Without being there we will probably never know what actually happened. Underpowering is a bit of a myth. Without getting too technical an amp can produce a little more power than it's ratings under very limited conditions but that isn't going to blow your speaker. Your Burman is perfectly safe to use. It's not simple to be absolute about matching amp and speaker power. Amps are measured in terms of their electrical output with a test signal and speakers by how much power they can continuously take without over heating but music isn't a test signal, it has loud and quiet bits. The biggest variable is the person using it. If you turn your amp down a notch you are probably halving the power. Your 500W amp can be a 1W amp if you turn it right down. You've been using it without problem for years and with it mended nothing has changed. You can go on using it in exactly the same way without worries. There is one other possibility, It could simply be coincidence, your amp may have been about to blow anyway and the friend was just unlucky enough to be the guy playing when it happened. Broken amps can pump a lot of power into a speaker under certain conditions. It might well be bad luck and him paying half the repair bill a fair income. I'd take that for peace of mind rather than walk around feeling hard done by, especially since you will never knoe the truth.

Anything to do with the treble in a speaker system is a tweeter, the deep end is a woofer and the middle if you have one is a squawker though only older readers will have heard that one I guess. As you say it is advertising, the compression driver on the horn has a 1" voice coil, I don't suppose it has changed much maybe not at all which means if it was good before it still is and if not.. Anyway it's how it sounds that matters, I'd really strongly recommend you go and try it. 12's and 10's don't really have a sound which won't overlap a lot. It was easier in the olden days when everyone made a 4x10 and a 1x15 and pretty much tried to make them sound fairly similar. The reason for using 12's is because it is where the sweet spot is nowadays. Amps commonly output 300W into 8 ohms and 500W into 4. Put that much power into a 12" speaker and you'll typically generate just over 120dB which neatly matches a drummer. Most 12's will handle this power fairly well too. Take a second 12 and you'll have enough headroom to just about do everything you need given that at these sound levels you absolutely have to get the sound level on stage lowered and into the PA. I don't think you need to worry about it not being enough, choose on the basis of how it sounds. Obviously there are cheap 12's that won't quite work that well but once you are in the mid price bracket you'll hit the sweet spot.

I don't know that particular amp and I may be teaching grandmother to suck eggs but two things I've found in the past. if the thing has never been apart before then glue used for the covering sometimes sticks the chassis in place if it a tight fit and a judicious wiggle frees it, Or a tap with a hammer if you use something to stop it marking the bit you whack, I use a rubber sanding block for that. Before I did that I'd remove the nearby corners and handles, the bolts/screws sometimes go right through the cab and screw into the chassis.

[quote name='fftc' timestamp='1486570058' post='3232886'] It was the mobile phone what did it! I'm not saying I'm a Luddite, but that is just too modern for me. Lots more to think about. I want an aux in for headphone practice, so I'm not worried about the sound through a cab. I know the Ampeg won't even play the aux through the speaker out. Not sure about the others. But perhaps from what folk are saying I should widen my search to amps without an aux and either use what I currently have, or get another similar thing that is separate from the amp. I was hoping to get something that will be a bit better for my silent practice,[i] and [/i]do the loud thing. I'm not in any real rush (apart from GAS) so I'll keep mulling over the options. Thanks for all the input folks. [/quote] let's face it GAS is fun, get the silent practice sorted then the real search and associated GAS can start. You can be practical, practiced and still dream

[quote name='LukeFRC' timestamp='1486507747' post='3232428'] So just the one big port? [/quote] I think it's a good decision Stevie found it was relatively easy to create chuffing in the ports with his test signal and multiple small ports. Since his main aim was to get the best out of this cab it made sense to address that. The aim for the first design was around making it easy to build and the ready availability of black downpipe and hole cutters that size drove a decision on multiple ports for my design. Our aim in sharing this stuff is to give people a design they can follow exactly if they want, with a guaranteed performance, but also to give enough explanation and data for anyone to modify the designs easily enough if they choose.

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1486558604' post='3232736'] Unless someone is going to be permanently collating the information into the first post of the thread, pretty soon it's going to be very difficult finding the info that you want from several hundred posts. Forum software isn't the best way of displaying this information IMO. Just have a look at the recommended luthiers and amp tech threads. [/quote] It's a problem of course but a fairly minor one. The nature of sudden changes at venues was that word got around in a few weeks anyway. It's in the first week or so that getting the news out makes a difference. In practice I found it only took one person to notice something was up and we'd all pretty much know who was there that week so someone would tip them the wink. I personally wouldn't want anything like a blacklisting of venues permanently up, it would be an impossible thing to police in practice. Just something where if a band were cancelled at short notice they could post it up to warn the next people there. Beyond that it'd just be nice to have all the threads about the ups and downs of playing live in one spot, to kind of make a community of gigging bassists chatting about the non bass playing parts of live performance. Much in the same way that bassists playing other instruments have their own little corner. Maybe it's just me though

There used to be a forum on Lemonrock where this sort of thing was discussed. I found it immensely useful not least because venues sometimes close suddenly or landlords are removed overnight by the pubco's who own them. Often in this case the bookings for bands are all lost and bands turn up to find another band booked by the new manager setting up or that the pub is no longer doing music at all. Word got around very quickly saving a wasted journey at least. Lot's of other practical things as well. Unfortunately Mac withdrew the whole forum, it wasn't his primary purpose and there were a lot of adverse comments about poor payers, unhelpful pubs and so on. Basschat isn't trying to sell membership to the venues so it would be less embarrassed about anything like that so long as it was fair comment. I'd love to see a whole sub forum dedicated to the practical stuff about gigging, everything from the PA to booking gigs. It often seems to fall to the bassist to sort out these things. The gig thread just seems to be 'we had a gig last night, we were wonderful'

Another vote for a separate mixer. That enables you to buy a practice/small gig amp without any restrictions so you can get the sound you want from that. Most bass amps sound pretty poor with an aux input because they are designed for bass not hi-fi. You can feed a mixer into your bass amp if you want to mix bass and an aux and hear it without phones anyway. Like quite a few people here I use a Zoom B1ON for practice. It is sold as a multi fx box but it has a tuner/metronome/drum machine and aux input built in and a good quality headphone output. It runs for a week on rechargeable batteries which I find useful for practising in any space I can grab. £45 new. It has extensive speaker and amp emulations built in too so the headphone sound of your bass can be what you want within reason. That leaves you with £150-250 for an amp with you free to buy what you want without being restricted to the few with an aux in.

[quote name='Dan Dare' timestamp='1486389020' post='3231309'] Phil's correct - probably a bad connection, although I don't think there is any "almost certainly" about the cap being used to prevent low frequencies from reaching the horn. It will be. That looks like a simple first order crossover with a resistor. As Moon says, a cap won't give you a reading like a resistor or an inductor will. If you have 2 PA speakers, try swapping the drivers between them and seeing if any have failed. [/quote] I think that's almost certainly right but it's such a basic crossover that it might just be a series circuit, though I haven't seen one of those for over 40 years. It would be very unlikely but I've seen very old crossovers where they used this to reduce the size of the inductor.

What is actually wrong with the Speaker? The capacitor is almost certainly being used to stop bass reaching the tweeter so if that was broken it would mean the bass unit would still work the white 22ohm resistor will be part of that circuit too. The coil is to stop treble going to the bass unit. If nothing is working then the fault lies between the crossover and the amp or in the amp itself. Start off by checking your leads and then the sockets.

[quote name='TimR' timestamp='1486369619' post='3231074'] What are you practising? [/quote] That's the best question so far Practice needs to be focussed, it will vary over time but you need to have a clear idea both of the short term and medium term gains you want to make. My practice for the last few months has been dominated by the demands of a new band and completely new set lists. I've got 50 new songs to learn so I've just divided them up into digestible chunks and head down and get on with it. My practice would be very different if I was working through exam grades or trying to learn a new technique on bass. I don't think anyone can really concentrate for more than 15 minutes, the research I read as a teacher would indicate that it is much shorter than that. The solution is to break each hour down into several activities and switch them around. Maybe attack four or five areas an hour. For example I've five songs I'm working on concurrently. Spending no more than 15 mins on any one combats boredom, one of them is in 6/8 time, something I've never played before. I'm going to put in some 15 min sessions with a drum machine in amongst sitting with chord sheets and the incessant repetitions of songs I'm at various stages of 'knowing'. You will almost certainly have different aims but you can always break down tasks into small blocks and then rotate them to avoid getting stale. The other thing is about regular breaks. Learning only puts things into short term memory initially, unless it is something with very high emotional impact. We all need a period of assimilation for it to be incorporated into long term memory. Taking short tea breaks will help that process. Once your short term memory is effectively full you wont be doing an hours practice you'll mainly just be over-writing the memories you made earlier. Everyone is right, little and often is best.

Wish I'd started with floating thumb, just for the string damping. One day soon I'm going to have to start to retrain myself to use it but it's always difficult to break years of muscle memory/bad habits. Given your early stages I think going for this is good advice.

Another vote for Studiospares, I have four of them, they are pretty much clones of the K&M at a fraction of the price. Not as good next to them but very functional.

You are keeping it a secret, no link to it here. It would be good to look as we might be able to see how you are advertising yourselves. You can spy on me if you want, I've spied on Hobbayne. Do you get approached by venues from Lemonrock? We got about half our leads to new venues from Lemonrock, once you've got the first gig you have to follow it up within a day or two of the gig for repeat bookings. If you don't get them then whatever they say to you you weren't good enough or maybe just wrong for their venue. Once you get, say, four venues that book you three or four times a year you'll find other venues interested. The savvy venue owners trawl Lemonrock to look at who gets a lot of bookings and go for those bands. You can do the same by seeing who books bands like yours and targetting them. I've been involved in a lot of start-ups and the first few bookings are tricky, you have to be prepared to put it about a bit. I've played for half price to get the first booking and would be happy to play for free if it got me the first gig. Then you've got bookings on your website, video of you in action etc. Most of the reviews in Lemonrock and everywhere else on the web are from friends of the band.Some even from the band members themselves

Two things primarily affect panels of the same dimensions, mass and Young's modulus (the bendiness) you'd be better off sonically with heavy MDF which is also self damping to some extent. Obviously if you start off with the idea of light weight then heavy panels aren't an option. That means extra bracing. The main reason that I recommend battening all the panel joints is for ease of construction and increased strength of the final cabinet. The screws draw the joints together whilst the glue sets, the battens hold everything square and they also double the glue area. There will be a little bracing effect and some damping of panel resonances but that is incidental if I'm honest. As you observed John, all speaker design is a bit like squeezing a balloon, an advantage gained somewhere almost always leads to a cost elsewhere. That's what makes it interesting

I have some wooden crates from the 70's, they have more heft.

[quote name='T-Bay' timestamp='1486106132' post='3229220'] Thanks for all the replies, I am more than happy to keep practising hard but from reading the replies above it does seem I am probably playing 'too hard' so will try the advice and see how it goes. [/quote] I wonder what you mean by "practising hard". You say you are new to bass and I wonder if you might be over-practising or doing the wrong practice. When I used to run, or train for cricket, it wasn't difficult to go from nothing to very heavy training/running, over doing it and then suffering after. The trick was to have light training days and to vary your training schedule. Similarly it might be worth mixing up your practice schedule. Cramps are caused by electrolyte (calcium, potassium, sodium and magnesium ions) disturbances and the accumulation of lactic acid unless you have some underlying medical condition, which is less likely. In the end this is about blood supply. As well as building up muscle training improves the blood supply to the parts that are being exercised increasing the supply of food and oxygen and removing waste. Try this little test, clench and unclench your hand as quickly as you can for 30sec with your hand down by your side. Rest and then try the same thing with your hand held high above your head. You should feel the same 'cramp' as you do playing bass. In this case it is entirely down to accumulation of lactic acid due to blood flowing downhill easier than it does uphill. Developing stamina is a slow process and it will just come, even now if I have a couple of weeks with little practice I lose stamina, when the band are gigging regularly it comes back. It takes time to grow and develop new blood vessels. It may be worth massaging your forearm where most of the muscles that operate your fingers are which will push fluid back into your bloodstream and remove some of the lactic acid. Just relaxing will help too as will a proper posture and well adjusted guitar strap, loose muscles will help your blood flow.

I buy fuses in batches, you do get the occasional dud and it's easy to blow them when swapping around and fixing things. Is the fuse working in your speaker? You could swap it back and that should work but then you are back where you started. It would be highly improbable that your amp would go wrong just when you replaced a fuse so it is almost certainly fitting, unless of course you blew the fuse when you swapped them into the speaker and now have two blown fuses. If you have a meter it should be easy to check the fuse is working.

Yes, we originally planned a slot port and I built one and showed it around to a few people. It did look nicer than the round port version. The problem was twofold, the design was meant to an easy build for someone at home, I found I needed no fewer than eight clamps whilst glueing up which I didn't think most people would have to hand. Without extensive clamping the round ported cab was an easier build. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly putting the slot in meant the speaker was effectively operating into a square space and we got an unfortunate and clearly audible resonance on some notes giving a slightly artificial sound (I quite liked it, but that's just me). We killed that in the end by putting a big slab of wadding on top of the port shelf. It wouldn't be a problem with a 2x12 as you wouldn't have a short squat cab any more. If you want me to talk you through a 2x12 version I'm happy to do so at the cost of asking you to post up your progress on BC

If it is the power transformer then it's a special one for that amp, I've just looked at the circuit diagram. Might be worth contacting Hartke directly but I imagine it would probably cost in the £50-100 bracket then you'd have to pay a couple of hours labour for fitting it. Of course once it is replaced there's possibly something else wrong that overloaded the transformer. As you've realised a second hand amp is a cheaper option. DIY is only an option in any case if you are a competent engineer as you are messing around with mains voltages and high capacity condensers. Bad luck

It wasn't fair, you had Thiele and Small on your side!

[quote name='Chienmortbb' timestamp='1485870960' post='3227339'] The beauty of having both Stevie and Phil contributing is that they come at things with a different perspective. Rather than causing conflict this means each stage is scrutinised and challenged. I am learning an awful lot and hopefully others will too. [/quote] Stevie may not remember it but he picked me up on my maths a few years ago. He was right. We've been 'exchanging views' ever since

[quote name='hrnn1234' timestamp='1485868263' post='3227295'] I went through the thread a couple of times already and I found only that one drawing. It actually has all the information needed, although much of it just implied. I think you won't need anything more. [/quote] Sorry about that, life really has thrown the kitchen sink at me in the last few months and is continuing to do so, the cost of elderly parents not to mention that my kids don't still have their moments. So yes I have the detailed instructions in draft form and some photo's of the construction process but just haven't got round to typing it all out and investigating why my ancient computer doesn't seem to want to upload photo's If anyone want's to build the original version I'm happy to email a word file and a link to photobucket or similar. PM me if you are interested And all the dimensions are on the original thread so you should be able to build it from that, well people already had. John you used the h**t word!