Phil Starr

I think that's what it is, personal preference. I haven'd had a chance to stand the two cabs next to each other. I just formed an opinion over time that the horn/compression unit in the K12-2's had a few resonances roughening up female vocals a little and making cymbals sound a bit harsh in the mix. Nothing extraordinary and something I could have lost with a better mixer but this was someone else's PA. The QSC was the go to speaker at the time so I got to listen to a lot of other bands and that sound was always there for me. The midrange is important to me and getting a great sound for vocals and acoustic instruments is my thing and I think the 912's edge it in that area. If I already owned QSC's I wouldn't think it an upgrade but a sideways move and vice-versa. I'd spend my money on better mic's or a new mixer in preference, whatever was the weakest link in the chain. We risk sidetracking @Hamster in his quest for new PA speakers. I think the general message is that either of these speakers would do him proud and his band would sound as least as good as they do with a couple of tatty K2's. We are in danger here of splitting hairs in looking for differences, the QSC, RCF, FBT and also the Yamahas are all proper 'grown up' speakers and I wouldn't hesitate to use any of them.

I used K12-2’s with a previous band. Never gave us a moment’s problem. Sound was excellent but some slightly harsh upper mids. The two speakers we’re looking at would be of comparable quality. QSC make good kit but like a lot of US stuff it is not cheap over here.

Hi @Hamster I wonder what your old PA tops are? I'm a little concerned about the description of these speakers as 'budget' which would for me cover things like Alto, Thomann's own brand The Box and such like. I'd think of both of these speakers being in the well made family saloon bracket, the VW Golf of speakers if you like. I'd think of these as at least mid priced speakers for the average pub band. Both can sound magnificent in the right hands. The Jefferson Archive ( @skidder652003's band) are a great band with a wonderful vocalist and sounded fabulous through the FBT's, really loud too. I'd spotted the 1.75" horn drivers on the RCF, in theory this should mean they carry a bit more of the mid range and this would help the sound of vocals. In practice RCF have really sorted out their crossovers with phase correction applied so the midrange is especially good. There's no mention of phase correction in the FBT speakers so no assumptions about how they might sound. I believe in the past FBT have used RCF drivers and I would suspect these speakers would be very close in sound. I wouldn't expect a huge difference in toughness between the cab in practice, My 10 year old plastic RCF 10" cabs have a few scuff marks from being used as floor monitors and carried without covers but nothing structural has broken. Any wooden cabs I have of that age would have similar scuffs if painted or small tears in the vinyl if covered. FBT also talk about internal stiffening of their wooden cab which is encouraging, it isn't just a box and they have at least put some thought into it. I'd anticipate a slightly tighter bass from a well built wooden cab and a clearer midrange from the bigger horn driver but The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Hi Steve, thanks for that, they did sound great. Hope all is good with you 😀

No direct experience with this model but I quite like what FBT are offering. It’s nice to get a wooden cab at this price. If you are looking at this the RCF 912 is around the same price and has a similar spec. Definitely worth a look as well. Generally speaking I’d say RCF are the ones to beat at the moment, both make fantastic speakers. I think @skidder652003 was using FBT’s when I saw his band in Sidmouth a few years back but that may be a false memory.

I don't think Dan was talking about the relatively small differences in quoted power that you can get by using different criteria when measuring. For example you can inflate the power rating by measuring at 10% distortion rather than at 1% but it won't be hugely different. Wikipedia quotes a variation of 10-20% between power as measured to EIA and FTC standards. That's confusing for many consumers but not actually dishonest, especially if the measuremnt criteria are disclosed. I think Dan was simply warning the OP who is not a technical person that sometimes advertisers tell lies. A good example of that would be Bugera who rate their BV1001M at 2,000W when it actually measures in at just over 700W into 4ohms at the point it starts clipping.

Really interested in your experience. Declaration here: @stevie is a friend and we've shared ideas on the home build designs we've published on Bass Chat. Two or thre years ago at the SouthWest Bass Bash I took along a pair of new designs of my own for people to have a look at. I'd been following a discussion here on amplifying double bass and I thought one of them in particular would work well for DB. I ran live sound for a couple of years a very long time ago so I know all about the problems. Well I grabbed a DB player and got him to try my 8" design which did work well reinforcing the sound without overwhelming it and making it sound like a double bass. I was fgeeling pretty pleased with myself but we also had a prototype Monza there. Effectively the 10" version of the Monaco. I knew about the highly damped bass response and all the care that had gone into the crossover design and horn and driver selection and been there when some of the frequency plots had been made so I suggested we try that with the DB. It blew my little 8 out of the water, absolutely gorgeous. I know the response of the BB3 too, it isn't as flat as the LFSys and the drive units aren't as sophisticated. Keeping any resonances controlled and reducing them by 3db will give you 3db extra headroom. I'm not saying how much the difference will be in practice but I'm not surprised from the measurements that you've found it works that way. Equally the magnet systems in the Faital drivers Stevie uses are unusually powerful and keep the cone movement well damped reducing the bloom you get in a lot of commercial bass cabs which contributes to bass feedback. The price difference is irrelevant to the performance. The Monaco uses better components than the Barefaced and is a bit of a secret bargain if FRFR is what you want.

First of all I agree with Dan. I'm not sure quie what you expect to gain from this, a few more details would help. £130 isn't much money so you are looking at used or possibly building something yourself which is a nice project. I've a collection of small cab designs which have been published here on Bass Chat if you fancy a build project. BC 110T would be within your budget and they sound great.

😮 They should last a while but I hope we both out live them

Happy retirement. I quit my covers band of 6 years last autumn, I was a little bored and wanted to chase other projects and the band was gradually winding down as well. I kind of miss the regularity and the friendship though. As Joni said "you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone". I hope it's all sweet for you.

Good to hear it's working out. I wish a few more people would let us know how they get on, it's a learning curve for all of us and we tend to hear more about problems than when it goes well. I guess with 10's, 12's, 10's with bins and 12 with bins you've got most gigs covered.

Reading between the lines it sounds like the mates and working together was a big part of the fun, being creative too. So far you haven't mentioned gigging. I've never been a bedroom player so I get that playing along with records or acquiring new skills with no end point doesn't work for you. No judgement on bedroom players there, I've friends with way more skills than me who love nothing better than to go off on their own and improvise over increasingly complex chord sequences. Playing alone just isn't for me, it's the joint enterprise and playing for an audience that hit's my particular spot. If I'm 'between' bands the enthusiasm evaporates and my personal practice time just withers away. If metal is the draw for you there are loads of sites where people are looking for metal players. You need new people to go with your new bass. Or you might find that the band itseelf is the stimulus you need, the joint enterprise, the shared feeling. maybe try joining a band even if it isn't playing exactly what you want and trying that on for size for a few months.

I've had exactly the same thing but probably worse, we've played the first number and finished to no applause and puzzled looks from the audience and then "we can't hear the singer" The sound for the band has been magnificent, loud and crystal clear in ou IEM's but I've forgotten to un-mute the FOH! The only thing the audience have heard is the guitar which is miked up before feeding to the PA. One of the things I love about British audiences is that ironic cheer when sombody c*cks up I've earned that twice so far! That's the hazard of decent IEM's, you forget they are there.

Confusing isn't it? The simple answer is that most amps nowadays are using pretty much one of two or three power amp circuits and just about every manufacturer offers a class D amp which gives 300W into 8ohms and 500W into 4ohms. They don't all sound the same but all of them will be loud enough into almost any but the smallest speakers and most speakers will be able to handle that power. The straighforward answer is that you can choose from any one of those amps and you wont break the 4x10's you are using in the rehearsal room. When you get to gigging any one of them will do the job with 90% of the speakers on sale. If you are using a Peavey 4x10 you don't need to use a Peavey amp, any brand will do. I like and own a Peavey Minimax whch has a good range of sounds but the best thing you can do is try a few of these amps out and see if you like them. We all have different tastes. If you want a simple version of the technical stuff then try this. Some speakers are much louder than others with the same amp. This is measured in how many decibels of sound you can make with one watt. Most bass speakers will vary between 90db/ W (not very loud/efficient) to 103db/W (loud) Each extra watt can only add to that sound level, ten times the power adds 10db and doubling the power adds 3db, so a 100W amp with add 20db to whatever the one watt figure is and 200W will add 23db. To work out how loud a system will be you need to know the power of the amp and the efficiency of the speaker. Either on its own won't tell you anything, you need both numbers.

That's brilliant, I hope it works out for you. The perceived wisdom is to always have spare channels but sometimes a tool is just right for the job. Behringer are a funny old company. They still make a lot of stuff they've been producing for years and I think the Flow is made to replace their analogue desks but it does knock up against the X12 price wise. The X Air 12 does offer a whole world of extra capabilities but has the same learning curve as the x18 mixers and the same lack of physical controls. Not everyone will want to develop the technical expertise to run the X-series of mixers and I suspect that there would be a real market for replacing all their small analogue mixers with a Flow version. I think there is a lot of merit in simplicity and it is one of the joys of playing with a duo or trio to go in with a simple set up and just get on with playing.

Ha ha, caught me out there Funnily it did occur to me that you might have done this on an analogue desk, but I ploughed on anyway. It sounds like it was a bigger desk than I ever took to a gig. Most of the analogue desks I've used have been limited to four busses. 18 in and 18 out with flexible routing is almost standard now for jobbing pub bands if they go digital. That's another game changer.

Practice may not make us all perfect Tim but just about everyone improves with the opportunity to learn. When I used to teach photography My students got bogged down in technicalities. Even with decent cameras getting them to concentrate on on composition was a struggle. A roll of film was expensive to use and it was rare for anyone without a professional interest to use multipe rolls every week. Even then you had to take the film in to be developed and printed. Few people got to experiment in the darkroom and even then it was time consuming. Phones allow us all to take hundreds of shots a day all properly exposed and focussed with images stabilised. Crucially the feedback is instant as to what is a good shot and what doesn't work. That the photos the kids are taking are better than 90% of the black and white pictures my generation took is more of an observation than anything. You of course may disagree. I think your assumption is that there are more cloth eared guitarists than serious musicians who have craved access to all the features now available to them? My experience is that most are serious about getting the band to get better, have a good idea about the sound they are trying to achieve and liberated by having the tools to do a better job. Not all musicians are cloth eared even guitarists

Hi Leo, a 4x10 is likely to be pretty efficient (loud) depending upon which model it is. Back in the day they packed lots of cheap but efficient speakers into big cabs to make lower powered amps loud enough to be heard over anything. You could almost certainly use a 100W amp and get away with it so the likes of the TE Elf, Warwick Gnome or tc BAM would probably be enough for rehearsal and are also cheap and fit in a pocket (OK a big pocket but they are tiny and fit in a bass case.) If not then go for one of the 300/500W amps, you really don't need the Minimega a Peavey MiniMax would do but just about every brand does an amp of this size. If you want something cheap then the Bugera Veyron works well.

It's one of the joys of a digital mixer that you can set this sort of thing up at home then store it and try it out at rehearsals and gigs without having to risk losing your tried and tested set up. Just as phones have trained us all to be better photographers I think digital desks are going to train us to try things and become better sound engineers as a result. Imagine setting this up on an analogue desk and having to physically recall settings with bits of tapes stuck to the input strips

Your only problem is that at least one of your instruments will need a line level output, you won'e be able to just plug it in or mic it. Apart from the lack of gain on inputs 5/6 and 7/8 they are also not really high impedance at 10kohms unlike the Mohms of the combi inputs for guitar. This won't really be an issue if one of your guitars uses fx as many processors will give you a fair bit of gain and don't need impedance matching. If your db uses a pre amp that will probably work too but you'd need to check. It'd be a bit annoying if you saved money and space buying the Flow8 only to have to buy another piece of kit to get your third instrument connected. Have you seen the offer at Andertons

There was a time when Mackie 450's were the go to PA tops. People still talk lovingly about the 'made in Italy ones. I think the newer ones are still decent speakers but for some reason Mackie became unfashionable. New I think you can do better for the money but a pair of used Mackie's are still a good choice. Even the Mackie Thumps which used to not sound so good have been considerably improved in the latest models. I've never understood how there can be 'fashion' in PA or even bass speakers, but then my wife will tell you I have no sense of fashion in anything

I'll hazard a guess that the "resonant boominess" that you get is a room resonance. That's unless you are getting it at the same time in the same song at every gig. Obviously that resonance is being set up by something and that can be by the guitar and bass producing the same frequencies. You do hear it in recordings sometimes so it can be a deliberate effect.. I see HPF as being something on the mixer which cuts hard at 24db/octave a real shutting down of power compared with a tone setting which will normally be around 3-6db/octave. Most tone controls will work at a max of 12-15db/octave but you don't usually turn them up to full boost or cut. 150Hz is too high to cut off the guitar that sharply. You can't really use the same calculations for guitar or vocals as you do for bass or kick. Our ears are nearly completely insensitive to quiet sounds at 50Hz so you don't miss them. You can clearly hear 150hz where our ears are much more sensitive and the guitar or vocal will lose all the 'body' from the sound. I HPF guitars at 80Hz, maybe a touch higher if I have an acoustic guitar giving me bass feedback issues. What you can do is try to locate the frequencies that are giving you concern and try to filter them using a parametric eq. Find the centre of the troublesome frequency, cut that a few db and then try widening or narrowing the width of the filter to make the cut as unobtrusive as possible. If it is only happening in some venues then you would probably be better doing this on the output stages. Also be aware that the boominess might just be on-stage if you aren't all using in-ears. The sound might be good out front. Check if you can as you don't want to be cutting the bass if the mix is just right FOH.

It's one of the advantages of a digital mixer isn't it? You can save settings however complex and then refine them over time as you get the chance to listen to the band. It's been an intersting question for me to answer because I've kind of had to re-imagine what I did four years ago when I first got the mixer. I have to admit I probably never set up in as logical way as I pretend online, it's probably more suck it and see Most of the settings on the vocal tracks aren't really eq which I tend to leave more or less flat. I use fairly heavy HPF on all the mics except for the Kick drum (not used much as I've only worked with eDrums for the past few years) I roll off the highest frequencies above 10-15kHz depending upon the mic mainly to reduce the chance of feedback. Then most of what I do is set a noise gate, reverb and delay. I don't use compression for live work, limiting sometimes for more erratic vocalists. I think I eq more for the vocal mics rather than the singer but thats about it in advance. We mainly use Sennheiser E935's with my female vocalists who have all 'borrowed" mine and then bought their own. I have one singer who uses a Shure Beta58 and that's been the one I've eq'd. It's hard to remember as these have all been tweaks carried out over a couple of years of gigging.

yes

Great advice ^^ When I was mixing FOH back in the dark ages I pretty much always used headphones on the vocals, and any other channels that I was having problems with. It gives you the best starting point and helps you 'understand' the voices. With the XR18 you have the possibility of recording whole gigs giving you access to both the isolated vocals and the rest of the band. I've never found a vocalist who can really give their gig voice on demand so this is a way of collecting the vocals as they are in a real life situation and you can play them back over and over. Remember that just like any instrument the equalisation that sounds good isolated is often not great when mixed in with the band at a gig.. The bass isn't the only instrument that sounds best isolated when it has a mid scoop, the opposite of what you need at a gig.