Phil Starr

You might be better in the Repairs Forum where the real techies hang out 😁

First of all you might want to consider improving your headphone practice with a Zoom B1-Four https://www.thomann.co.uk/zoom_b1four_bass_multi_effect.htm It's got a tuner and drum machine built in, emulates a variety of amps gives you a wide variety of bass effects and you can input songs to play along with via a mini jack input. The headphone amp is good and it runs off AA batteries, USB or a power supply. A lot of us use them for headphone practice -£85 new. You might even be able to pick up the Zoom B1ON it's predecessor used. I've given the advice before but avoid these little practice amps, they really don't sound good at all, even most of the brand name ones. There are hundreds of these around unused often sold as part of a starter setup given away for free or next to nothing with a starter bass kit. I think I sold my little Peavey one for £10 in the end. I doubt that anyone here has tried that Fazley so it could be the bargain of the century but probably not. You could pick up an old Hartke Kickback 10 for under £100 which will sound great and plenty of other small combo's are available too. Most of these will be 100W+ and that's where I think I'd try looking, not because you need 100W at home but because the 'practice' amps below this power have had no love put into their manufacture and almost universally fail to deliver. There are good sounding tiny practice amps but they cost at least as much as a bigger amp to make. You can save money by skipping this stage and going for something used.

Honestly? Don't do it, there's always been a market for these 'next step' combo's but they make no sense at all for a bassist. Essentially they don't sound much better than the tiny practice amps we all started with, you don't need the extra power for home practice but they are not loud enough to play with a band, specifically with a drummer. It's a bit like buying him a half sized hammer, it may look like the real thing but he'll struggle to bang any nails home and will ultimately be frustrating. Your son is probably ready to move on and practice with mates and needs something functional for that job that will also eventually get him to his first gig. Something that sounds great rather than just OK will also encourage him to ply and practice more. You probably need a combo like the Minimark802, CMD121 or Fender rumble 200 or 500 and these are double the price you are expecting to spend. Seriously talk to your son and go for something better second hand. it's also the nature of musicians to move on quickly as they find out what they want out of an amp and it's likely this too will be upgraded in a couple of years time (or less) and you'll take less of a hit on buying used gear.

Interesting, I've suspected that there is a reason Andertons and Guitar Guitar are discounting a lot of Behringer stock. It is looking like there may be some news coming out about a new range or possibly an update of their PA offer. There are rumours going round in the trade and you normally try to offload end of line stock. An updated X-Air range with a working router and more user friendly/intuitive software would be interesting as would using Turbosound's expertise to further develop their PA speaker offerings.

Greg it's a nice chance to say I quietly follow a lot of your lessons/transcriptions and I've learned a lot. This one clearly feels different and spending 5.07 listening to you playing and thinking of Herbie was time well spent

Hate is a strong word for something as simple as a song. I'll happily play most things if my bands want to play them and the audience want to hear them However there are a few songs i just can't bring myself to because of irrational lyrics. If you write a song called Ironic then there should be some examples of irony rather than just misfortune in the song. Carly Simon you can't write a song about someone and then call them out for recognising that you are pointing a great big finger at them. They may well be vain but 'probably thinking the song is about them' isn't the thing that makes them vain. This is my personal madness, my wife gets worked up at misplaced apostrophe's

Thanks Greg, nice one.

Rounded off it's 57 litres, I calculated based on 53 litres allowing 4l for the volume of two speakers and the port plus any bracing. I also assumed the wall of the port was 2mm. I also looked at the tuning with no port and the 75mm hole. It's tuned too high but you still have the problem of port velocity and it just changes the point where the cone goes into over excursion. Hence your experience just trying it as it is. Love this 😂 If you are playing with this cab at home and at reasonable volumes then just enjoy having some fun with it, try creating a cardboard or even papier mache tube of 35mm and listen to the difference. Just don't take it to a gig and crank it. If you decide it's your dream tone then the two port solution Bill suggested will give you that tone and probably will be reliable but you'll have to take a saw to the cab. You could add some bracing to it at the same time and experiment with damping, it's all good fun but it won't be as saleable if you do modify it. If you want to do the rice test you can also try putting a 50hz signal through the speaker with the volume right down and gradually turn it up listening to the noise from the port, you'll hear the port noise at a remarkably low power and that is effectively your new maximum volume.

Again Bill has got there first. I've just checked the port velocity, you aren't too far short of a sonic boom I was pushing it at 10cm.

Exactly this, without the parameters you are down to guesswork. There are drivers designed for ported enclosures and drivers that won't work well plus a few 'general purpose' drivers that will work in either, the problem is that without the specs you can't do the modelling. It's possible Ashdown didn't match their speakers to the cab but more likely that they did. The things that can go wrong with mis-matched drivers are well explained in the previous six pages of woe and blown speakers. Power handling is reduced in a mismatched cab. It could be OK but no-one can be sure so you'd be taking a bit of a risk. If you really want to do this then your cab is just over 50litres and 10CM dia port 11cm long would tune it to 50Hz. You might be better off selling the cab and buying one that sounds the way you want but if you are a tinkerer then I know no advice will stop you from trying it. Good luck, you might like the result but message me if you do blow the speakers and we can look to see if we can find replacements

Win ISD is found here http://www.linearteam.org/ It's a really good resource provided for free so well worth donating to

Hi Rich, without the Thiele Small parameters you won't be able to calculate a port length with any reliability and if the cab wasn't ported originally the speakers may not be suitable for a ported cab. Your best bet would be to simply cover the hole with a piece of plywood, so long as it is properly airtight the cab is restored to it's original design as far as the speakers are concerned. If you did want to port the cab I'd probably risk tuning it to 50Hz as the resonant frequency of the speakers will probably be around that area, no guarantee though. Ashdown are probably the best though when it comes to after sales and they might cough up the Thiele Small figures if you email them. Equally they might not want to share that information as it would be potentially commercially sensitive.

The secret of guitar amps is going to be more in the speakers than the amp itself. Guitar speakers for electric guitar are pretty much used because they are very coloured and designed to be so with a soft/thin paper cone which operates under break up creating a huge frequency hump in the 1-3,000Hz region. They are designed for high efficiency often reaching over 100db/W for a single driver and about 6db more than a comparable bass driver. They also have a higher resonant frequency as bass goes an octave lower. However both guitar and bass can sound great through the same speakers, which is what a good PA does. If you want to use the same back line for both you effectively need to think in terms of a PA on stage just for your back line. If your back line has no 'colour' you can add it in with eq and amp sims. If the sound is coloured to start with it is very hard to take it out. The easy way to do this is to go FRFR. If you are happy with your amp sims as you seem to be then you probably don't want to add too much extra colour from your cab, something with flat/neutral sound will be better. The Barefaced Big Baby is fairly neutral which is why that was successful for @Lozz196 even cleaner sounding is the LFSys Monaco and lots of people are doing this with active PA speakers with RCF and QSC being the go to cabs and a few Yamahas being used as well. You can then add in the tones you like for bass and guitar with multi-fx. I've seen people loading guitar patches onto their Zooms giving them a mix of guitar and bass patches to use in the same units.

Here you go

Following some of the discussions in this Forum a few of us are looking to run a PA shootout at the South West Bass Bash. It's in The Memorial Hall, Cheddon Fitzpaine, Rowford, TAUNTON, TA2 8JY just outside Taunton in Somerset, a few minutes from J25 of the M5. It's a bass bash so there will be lot's of lovely basses and bass gear but everyone is welcome and there might be people here who want to have a listen to some PA. I'll be running an hour's session just after lunch. It's a great day out and the lunch is wonderful, so far the furthest anyone has come is from Aberdeen! Since the debate here has been about how much power is needed, where to put subs, can you get away with little speakers if you have a sub, is there a system that will do it all the shootout will be comparing a pair of 15" tops, 10" tops with a sub and a 'stick' system. If I can get a second sub in my car I'll also try and demonstrate the power alleys you get when you put the subs under your tops. So the basic shootout will be: RCF 745's v's RCF ART310's +sub v's RCF Evox 8 v's Wharfedale Titans Details Here

When you can play one song all the way through. For me that was Gimme Some Lovin by Spencer Davis but there are plenty of really simple songs with straightforward rhythms and just a few notes. I was lucky that a few friends wanted a bass player for their hobby band and roped me in. I practiced my one song like mad and was as nervous as a kitten but the first time we got through the song it was an out of body experience. The sound of the bass thundering out behind me and realising it was genuinely me making it was just so exciting I was hooked. If you aren't so lucky then start haunting the open mic nights and talk to the host. You can just do one song and join in with someone else and most hosts are happy to guide beginners through their first few songs.

Badmaieff and Davis pub 1966, I've got a copy in front of me, my first speaker book I built a few near copies of the Altec A7 from this and I have a collection of old books from the pre Thiele and Small era. Happy days

Go on give the family a trip to the countryside

The tweeter does so much more, but depending upon how it is implemented. That depends to a certain extent on the crossover used. The Crossover shares the sound out, highs to the tweeter lows to the woofer. It might be wortwhile checking that the crossover is disconnected in your cab, if not it might be stopping the highs reaching your woofers and killing your sound. There is a reason why tweeters have a poor reputation; many older cabs had tweeters added as an afterthought. Frequently they were poor quality and simply added on to an existing design with a simple capacitor to protect the tweeter as a 'crossover' instead of a properly designed system. Worse still many of the add ons were super cheap piezo tweeters which did away with crossovers altogether and in any case didn't have a very flat response. Simply adding high frequencies simply doesn't work well creating lot's of unwanted noises and sharpness whilst messing up the crucial mid range. Bass guitar doesn't really need high frequencies there is nothing there above roughly 6,000Hz depending upon which pickups you use and in any case these frequencies are lost once you are playing within a band, the crucial frequencies are from roughly 80-4,000 Hz, give or take. Speakers with big cones start to beam (narrow the dispersal of sound) when their dimensions get close to the wavelenghts of the sound they are producing, 10" speakers start to beam at around 500Hz and beaming is significant and unpredictable above 2kHz and big heavy cones don't produce high frequencies well anyway. A well designed horn system will fix a lot of problems the small driver will produce cleaner high frequencies and the horn will guide the sound in a predictable fashion so people to the side of the speaker will hear more or less the same sound as people in front of the speaker, That includes the bassist who rarely has the speaker pointing at anything other than their legs.

I must admit that £5 off the Sennheiser and Shure radio gear hardly counts as a discount But, there's a lot of Behringer digital mixers with much bigger discounts of around £100 or more which makes me wonder if behringer are about to upgrade their offerings. Over the years a lot of the Andertons bargains have been end of lines, and I've bought a few bits of bargain kit off them.

I've always loved the look of this @Pea Turgh I'm a lazy so and so when it comes to finish and the corners and handle set it off really nicely reminding me I really should take it more seriously. You've even made the round grille look like it belongs rather than the afterthought it is on my cabs

Sound enginers have sometimes had a bad rap on Basschat but there are some great ones out there too and a good monitor engineer just gives you confidence to play your very best. Here's to Dave and all the others like him 🍾

Yes, I use the same few bits of music to test speakers but a lot of it is classical music which is very demanding of any speaker but not familiar to everyone. I use Western Highway by Maura O'Connell as a test of the midrange, a lovely clean recording of two acoustic guitars and two female vocals that is really revealing of any crosover artefacts. @stevie uses Smooth Operator: Sade which has some nice percussion up-front as his go to. I'm guessing though that a majority of us are playing some form of rock so something well known and well recorded might be better and I'll need CD quality. I've also got some Hi Fi Choice test recordings somewhere.

OK I wanted to do the PA shootout anyway so I'm proposing to do that in the main hall after lunch. I'm going to bring my 15" tops to compare with my 10" tops used with a sub, @Woodinblack is bringing his Evox system, all these are RCF Active systems and roughly in the same price range so its a reasonable comparison of big tops, little tops plus sub and a stick system If I can fit everything in the car I'll bring my old Wharfedale PA so you can see what a cheap old system will do and I can demonstrate the power alleys you get when you have the subs placed under the tops. I'll also attempt another cab build in the side room at some time in the morning demonstating the 'Easy Build' technique and showing off the new BC 8" cab design. I'm happy to take suggestions about what we might add to the PA shootout to help anyone thinking of buying PA gear in the next couple of years. Any suggestions though are welcome.

The problem is pretty well known but I've never seen a band address the problem before and to be fair not very many venues. Full marks to you for thnking of the solution and finding the right product. 6db extra headroom before feedback will make a difference.