Phil Starr

John, you got the MInimax then, I thought about buying it (I already have one but was looking for something to put into a combo). It went while I dithered. Well done, it was a great buy and good to see it has a good home. Ummmm that soil pipe looks .. well soiled really the speaker should be well damped! Good build, and good to salvage and use the grille, It's the bit of the build I never get round to doing and it will make the final combo look great. I hope it sounds great and if you wanted you could probably add Stevie's horn and crossover later. It isn't designed for that speaker but that means it won't be optimal not that it wouldn't work. Well done.

Hi Marty, this was all before Thiele and Small who developed the theories behind the current computer modelling. Over simplifying they treated the elements of a speaker as electrical elements of a tuned circuit. Before that we understood Helmholtz resonators and that was how they calculated the frequencies of tuned cabinets. The rest was little more than guesswork guided by experience. There were even designs with two different sized inside the same space, treating the ports as being independent of each other. these were the designs I first saw described as hybrid resonators from memory but I couldn't find a reference going that far back. The conventional double cavity speaker is so well known WinISD will model it for you.

And now the drawings, big thanks to @RichardH who did all the hard work, nb the port is 170mm and 100mm internal diameter. We hadn't settled on this when these drawings were made BC 110 T.pdf

Spooky, I actually typed this up a few hours ago and forgot to 'submit reply'. Anyway it must be true then

There are a lot of manufacturers claims that seem to defy the laws of physics. There's also very little new under the sun when it comes to speaker design. There were a lot of designs in the 60's and 70's which claimed to be hybrid resonators, resonating at more than one frequency. That's the earliest mention I know of the term but I haven't had a chance to look at the Barefaced design in detail so I can't really comment. As to books there's a couple I like: The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook by Vance Dickason is great but can be expensive unless you find an early version secondhand. The other I like but it's a bit technical is High Performance Loudspeakers by Martin Colloms. It'll be fine if you have A Level Physics or Maths. I hope they are both still in print Most of the actual design work is done by software nowadays. Most of us amateurs use WinISD which is a bit of freeware. It helps if you know a bit of theory when you are driving the software but it works pretty well if you follow the recipes.

I use a pair of RCF Art 310's with my duo, everything goes through them direct and they are absolutely fine. I use one of them alone for most rehearsals, I've had no problem with volume even with a drummer. I'd probably use the pair if we ever needed them at a gig but our drummer is stupidly loud at times.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes everyone. I not keen on fuss at home but on the plus side I did get a nice pair of closed back AKG headphones for practice and recordings. I'll miss the gaffa taped Sennheisers I've used for years but these are great

That'd be great, I'll pm you later. Hopefully I'll see you at the bass bash later this year

Thanks, can you pm me to get them across

Thanks to you and @Hellzero we are aware of the problems of compression but remember the recording will be just part of what we do. the advantage of our own recordings is we will know that they've been recorded with no fx or eq. Thanks to @stevie we can measure the frequency response of all our designs. We do road testing with our bands in normal times and we all play through the cabs when they are in development. The missing bit under lockdown is getting the cabs out to other players and then being able to give people who are interested a decent recording to listen to so that they can make their own assessment of the tonal qualities of the cab. Hearing other people play even from a recording adds a lot of extra information.

I think this shows all the signs of an immature market. The chipsets are pretty standard but the boards are either populated with substandard components or fiercely expensive. Meanwhile mid price manufacturers are increasingly producing perfectly acceptable amps at good prices with the chipsets available. Behringer/Bugera/Sampson/Wharfedale/ TC and all the badged OEM stuff from Thomann and the like. Unfortunately nobody seems to be making the mid priced reliable boards you'd expect with serviceable but well priced components. @Chienmortbb and I have been talking about the Wharfedale Wharfedale PSX112 350W Active PA Speaker - Andertons Music Co. it's rated as 250W and 100W for the tweeter (within the sort of parameters of the TDA chips John referred to above). The interesting thing is the the price; £114 for an active speaker! The whole package is cheaper than just a plate amp or even just the bare boards we are talking about. Have no doubts, Wharfedale are huge, not the Yorkshire company of old but a Hong Kong/Chinese owner of a whole load of older brands including Quad and Audiolab. Nonetheless if i could get a 250W plate amp or even a bare board for £114 with a power supply I'd take your arm off, the fact that is has a pre amp and all the connectors makes it an extraordinary bargain. I have a Wharfedale Titan here which seems to be a predecessor of this speaker. I think i might have to dissect it.

thanks to all of you, I'll respond properly tomorrow. today is my birthday and I've a three line whip to enjoy myself and not go on Bass Chat. How does that work?

Hi Steve, I've looked at those, well some of them anyway plus some of the YouTubers especially the ones who teach the bass courses. The big problem is that they are often not clean recordings and usually you have little idea of what eq/effects have been applied. There are also copyright problems. I'm thinking that a lot of Basschatters have home studio equipment and probably already have clean recordings of themselves playing bass.

As many of you know I've been building speakers and sharing the designs on BassChat, many more to come I hope. My problem is that I'm not the worlds best bass player and me giving a cab a work out is about as testing as if I went in the ring with Anthony Joshua. Pre Covid I took the cab to people I knew could play and then I also got a good chance to listen. What I need is a few good recordings (at least CD quality) of bass played fingerstyle, with a pick and slap which I can cut down to 10-30 second clips. They'd need to be recorded straight from the bass with no eq or fx and clean of any other sounds, just bass. Ultimately I'll use anything longer for the speaker development process and the clips to demonstrate the speakers. I suppose that if I put the test track up here we could also put up recordings of everyone's bass rigs with a dedicated BassChat test track So if you are stuck at home bored but with decent recording facilities I'd love to start putting this together. All donations gratefully received

You are asking for a splitter. Many DI boxes will do that for you, even something as simple as this.

I can't hear the sound of the Behringers fans over the sound of those in the Peavey Minimax Mind you I can't hear much of anything once our drummer starts shed building.

@Chienmortbb knows much more than I do, I'm a bit analogue class D and switch mode supplies scare the hell out of me.The problem with a lot of this stuff is price. That EV plate amp is £200 and the ICE Power amps are around that just for the board. There are a limited number of chipsets that are widely used and you can buy Chinese made boards for peanuts, but by and large the ancillary components aren't up to spec and they won't be reliable. the suspicion is also there that if they are using substandard components that there will be little or no quality control. John is currently looking for some of the longer established Chinese companies products. The Behringer NX3000 uses the same amp module as the Bugera Veyron as far as I can tell, though the Veyron uses it in bridge mode for more power. I'm using the predecessor iNuke for speaker development at the moment but I've never had a problem with the Behringer PA amps. Pulling apart Behringer stuff it is quite nicely made, very nice considering the price. I 've been wondering about seeing how easy it would be to just rip out the innards of one and install it into a cab. Or looking for a Behringer with blown speakers but a working plate amp.

It's a good example, and she did that right from the start pretty much, her first performance on Jools Holland was an acoustic version. Jessie J - Price Tag (Live on Jools Holland 2010) - YouTube she was called in at the last minute without a band and the rapper on the recorded version. Lucky for us really as the rap on the recording would have sounded really odd with a bunch of pensioners and a West Country accent. We copied the audience participation bit she used instead of the rap and did very nicely with the song for years.

We've been looking into a powered version with John @Chienmortbb doing all the work on amps, I'm sure he'll be along soon. One option I've been trying is using a Behringer PA amp with the DSP as a crossover. that saves you the cost of the crossover too and you can tailor the response with HPF on the bass driver and dynamic limiting for speaker protection. I've toyed with the idea of building the amp straight into the cab. In any case the zlx amp is split between a class D bass amp and a smaller powered class AB for the tweeter with a crossover built in. It won't work with the passive crossover in the BC design. The Inconvenient Truth about your Electro-Voice ZLX-12P & ZLX15P amplifier - YouTube

If you are an originals band I think you really don't have to worry, you'll be playing to a completely different sort of audience to a covers band. The choice is your own, keep to the spirit of the original or make it your own. The only thing is to take it seriously and play it the best you can with the line up you have. Audiences respond to enthusiasm, confidence and commitment as much as anything. Have fun with them.

To be fair most of the original bands aren't going to match their own songs playing live either. Some of the tribute bands are outstanding, but that is a different skill altogether.

Hi Everyone, I hope you've now got pretty much everything you need to get building. It would be great if someone could use the instructions I've just put up and get back with questions. It's hard to know how much detail to put in and I'm bound to have missed a lot. When we've had a couple of builds and I've got the drawings back from RichardH I'll go on and put up a tidier version as a completely separate thread. All comments and suggestions welcome and though I don't promise to answer everything you tell me it will all be read and taken seriously. Don't worry about the previous three posts, I've dragged some of Stevie's pictures down to be added to when I get the cab back. I'll add some text too but later.

These are the measurements Stevie made with the crossover sorted. the bottom graph is the one to look at. It's very flat across the frequency range with the dip showing where the crossover sits, around 2.3kHz. That dip is normal for most crossovers.

Ok this is the crossover circuit. You can ignore the 1W power amp and I have no idea why there is an exclamation mark in the tweeter. We've kept the crossover as simple as possible, just a high pass filter to stop the bass reaching the tweeter. the Pulse bass driver rolls off naturally above 2kHz and the components are chosen so that the tweeter takes over at that point. they've been carefully chosen to match the two Celestion units we've used. Other drivers will roll off at different frequencies and at different rates and may be louder or quieter than the pair we chose so if you go and swap things it will almost certainly not work as well. Keeping to just three components keeps the cost down and you don't even need to solder the crossover together. The speakers can also be connected without solder if you use crimp connectors. The wires are going out of the port because at this stage Stevie was still designing the crossover so it started life outside the box to enable modifications to be made without removing the baffle every time. Notice the blob of red on the wires. Speakers have a plus end and minus and must be connected the right way round. They will be marked with either a plus sign or a red blob on the speaker. The plus is connected to the tip of a jack or the +1 on a Speakon.

Nothing new under the sun is there John? It's so similar in concept to my House Jam Combo and your After Eight. Sounds like mine too a little.