stevie

I had a Weller soldering station for several decades. It worked and lasted well but you will need spares if you're a heavy user - and you can now buy a quality soldering station for the cost of their replacement heating element. Which is what I did.

I'd expect the 2x10 to be stacked horizontally - most people do it that way. But stacking it vertically will certainly help. Getting the hearing aid sorted would probably be the most useful course of action here.

It could be useful to consider what’s actually going on here and why the OP can’t hear his backline properly. It’s a common problem directly related to the dispersion of the speaker cabinet. It’s been covered here many times, but it’s worth repeating. The speakers used in bass cabinets start to become directional at about 1kHz. This means that if you’re standing above or to the side of your cab, you won’t hear those frequencies very well. The higher you go, the worse it becomes as those mid/high frequencies start to form a very tight directional beam that goes right past your ears. The frequency band between 1 and 4kHz is critical to audibility. It’s the area where consonants occur in speech. When you’re unable to hear them properly, you can’t understand what people are saying. It’s just as important for the bass, as that’s where you get your information on tonality, and more importantly, pitch. So if you can’t hear those frequencies, you’re going to struggle. The usual solution is to point the cab at your ears, either by tilting it up or standing it on another cab. That works – until you move to the side of the cab. Also, because of its directionality, the average bass guitar cabinet is incapable of ‘throwing’ midrange/high frequencies very far. So the muffled sound that the player hears when standing off-axis is generally what the audience hears too. This is why the ideal bass guitar cab needs to combine the characteristics of a PA with those of a stage monitor, with a coverage pattern capable of directing the full frequency range of the bass both to the player and to the audience.

Found this right away. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/144194452700 And this: Ebay item no. 374282855101

You can order it with the recommended power supply if you want one - they're about twelve pounds. But it uses a fairly common type of power supply and many people already have something suitable. There's also a mains-powered version with a built-in power supply.

Everything is ready to go, @tubbybloke68. I'm just waiting for the woodwork. I'll post pics as soon as I have a production model finished, but it's basically a scaled-down version of the Monaco. So the appearance and cosmetics are the same - it's just smaller.

If you want a professional quality iron, check out the Quicko T12-942. It's a copy of the Hakko and uses the same bits. They're available on Ebay, although you can buy them for less on Ali Express. You'll need to add a power supply - anything from 15 to 24V is OK. You might have an old laptop power supply in a drawer that would work. That's what I use. I've been using two of these for the past 12 months and they've been great. They replaced a Weller soldering station.

+1 I believe Mordaunt-Short used a lot of Audax tweeters. As Matt P says, take a photo of the tweeter from a few angles and post it up here. Alternatively, search Ebay for parts for your specific model.

It sounds like a ridiculous amount of work. Let's hope things pick up - you certainly deserve it.

So how many great tribute bands are you actually in?

I used to own a cable manufacturing company and still have some cables that are over 20 years old. Instrument cables in particular have relatively thin central conductors that are constantly flexing. So you can't expect them to last forever. I did have one cable fail (it became noisy) at about 20 years. I certainly wouldn't want to rely on a cable that old. How long they last obviously depends on how much they are used, but I'd suggest you've had your money's worth after ten years.

It's an imperial vs metric thing. We used to use gauges for wire diameters in the UK but it's still used in the US. It saves having to use weird fractions of an inch.

A1. He's your man for everything connected to cables.

The Celestion K series, as far as I can remember, was a budget range of PA speakers. One of my databases gives 1.5mm as the xmax for this driver. Even taking into account Celestion's more conservative xmax specification, it would be OK in a PA cab (with a sub) but would not go very loud in a bass guitar cab - certainly compared with more modern drivers. It's also got to be at least 25 years old.

There's currently a demo Monaco doing the rounds - the one that @GlamBass74 reviewed in a parallel thread. It's being put through its paces in Edinburgh at the moment and we'll no doubt be hearing more soon. So, if any players in and around that lovely part of the world would like to take it for a no-obligation spin (especially at a gig), please PM me and I'll set it up. You'll just need to collect from a local address.

I've been asked regularly if I could supply ready-built crossovers for the BCIII and have always had to say no. The original hard-wired crossovers I supplied with the kits took me about half a day to build, and I don't have that many half-days available any more. The good news is that I've now invested in high-quality fibreglass PCBs for use in my LFSys cabs that can be repurposed for the BCIII design. So, if you have the woodworking skills to build a BCIII and would like me to supply a ready-to-install crossover, just send me a PM.

Thanks for a very informative review, Mike. I'd just like to comment on one small section of the review, if I may. A common query you'll see in this part of the forum (check out the Orange thread currently running, for example) is "my cab isn't cutting it, what should I do?" And the most common advice you'll read is: "add a second cab of the same type". It seems to have become accepted wisdom. In other words, if you have a mediocre cab, you should add a second mediocre cab to create a louder mediocre pair of cabs. Mike has pointed out some of the benefits of ditching two average quality cabs and investing in a single, high-performance solution. I hope it's provided food for thought.

I'm not sure how aware the average bassist is of speaker dispersion. Not everyone reads reads Basschat and not every member reads this section of the forum. Dispersion is an issue no matter what the size of the driver. I remember using an 8" midrange a while back (in a 15" cab) and finding the dispersion inadequate until I added a compression driver. If you're using an HF horn to complement the main bass driver(s) and cross the horn low enough to obtain a smooth off-axis response without any mid suckout, the size of the bass driver doesn't matter much. As @chyc points out, PA speaker makers like RCF do this as a matter of course. But you need a decent compression driver and horn to cross over at around 1.5kHz (or lower), which is what's needed with a 15.

I'm a big fan of 15-inch drivers. There are some amazing products out there that haven't found their way into bass guitar cabs. 15s do seem to have dropped in popularity over recent years, however, at least if the word on Basschat is to believed. So the question is, when buying a larger-than-compact cab, do people want a 15, a 2x10 or a 2x12?

Thanks, Jeff. There are quite a few LFSys cabs in the pipeline. The next one will be a 1x10. So, yes, it's reasonable to expect a 2x10 some time in the future.

I've never heard of Cioks, but that's great customer service for sure.

It's a nice idea but, unfortunately, there's more too it than sticking a driver in a cab. The problem is that the nice flat response of your full-range driver will stop being flat as soon as you put it in a cabinet. The baffle step will rear its ugly head and the overall sound will be very middy - and not at all hi-fi. I've designed this kind of speaker in the past and sometimes you can get away with just a passive notch filter to flatten the response. Sometime you''ll need more than that. But you won't be able to design the filter unless you can measure the results.

LFSys speakers were designed principally for use with bass guitar, but I spent a lot of time developing the crossovers, testing and retesting, and making sure that the LF and HF drivers worked seamlessly together. This involved many hundreds of frequency measurements of different types, although the acid test of any of the various designs was always how well they reproduced male and female voice. I hadn't thought of these cabs as something for acoustic guitar but I can see why they would work. I do know they sound great with keyboards and as an FRFR cab for electric guitar. I guess they could well be a one-cab solution for multi-instrumentalists.

Very impressive piece of work, @ChrisDev

I've always had the impression that shopping sites wipe the contents of your basket after a while - not just Blue Arran.