Help a newbie with his speakers/drivers

[Chienmortbb]

[quote name='Phil Starr' timestamp='1414447874' post='2589471']
Fane describe the 10-300 as having a 'smooth' response and it is flatter than many 10's, most have a fairly prominent peak in the 1-4kHz range which gives the speakers colouration which sounds quite nice with bass, or maybe that peak is so ubiquitous we have just come to expect it.

My confession is that I'm going out with the SM212's which are fairly flat but my graphic looks like the frequency response you get from a cheap Eminence stuffed into a too small a cab. The 10-300's just didn't sound very interesting with bass. Nothing wrong but they just lacked character.
[/quote]My amp build will have both vaswitchable mid and full PEQ that way I can dial in old school but go flat if I want. It is harder to EQ out old school from a poor* speaker/cab combination than to dial it in from a relatively flat speaker system.

Re the Fane 10-300, I think you are telling me they are great for PA then. If you do not go for ultimate extension, they give a tiny cabinet even with a tweeter.

[stevie]

[quote name='Phil Starr' timestamp='1414254787' post='2587589']
Stevie strikes again

Now I'm going to have to run the models and investigate a bit more. I'd looked at Qts and Fs done a quick calculation of f3 the -3dB point and left it at that, dismissing a speaker that starts to roll off albeit gently at 150Hz ish. To a certain extent it depends upon whether you think 3dB is significant or not. I think it is, as I find in listening tests that the balance between high and low frequencies is something we really notice.

It's also true that the 3012HO has a gentle roll off due to a moderately low Q. Comparing it with another speaker would yield a different result. I'd also be interested to know what size box you modeled Stevie. I'm only getting a plot this shape for the Celestion in a fairly large box.
[/quote]

Phil, from memory, I used a 35-litre box for the 10 and a 50-litre box for the 12, both tuned to 50Hz. That's pretty close to optimum in both cases. The comparison wasn't with the 3012HO but with the 3012LF.

[stevie]

Anyone arriving at this thread at some time in the future hoping for sensible suggestions for repairing/upgrading their 2 x 10" cab is going to find a lot of conflicting and frankly erroneous information. I'd like to try to fix that if I can.

Let's quickly look at the three most useful suggestions made so far: the Celestion BL 10-200X, the Beyma SM110, and the Fane Sovereign 10-300. Each of these would meet the OP's requirements for a good quality, reasonably priced 10-inch chassis. I think £10 separates the cheapest from the most expensive. So the price is right and they are very close in terms of performance too.

If you model each of these in a 30-litre cab tuned to 50Hz (which is how I would expect them be used in practice) you get the following.
[IMG]http://i58.tinypic.com/np2m2u.jpg[/IMG]
I'm not even going to label the individual drivers - that's how close the small signal level performance is – at least below 200Hz where the modelling program is accurate. The reason the curves are different above 200Hz is that their sensitivities are slightly different. The Fs of these drivers is 43Hz, 58Hz and 73Hz, by the way.

If we compare the power handling of the three drivers, it is again very close, at least in theory. To be sure we are comparing like with like, xmax must have been measured in the same way for each driver. Like Eminence, Fane do not publish the usual figure for voice coil overhang, preferring instead to use the more generous Klippel-derived xmax. However, (unlike Eminence) they do at least state the magnetic gap depth and coil winding height, from which we can deduce that the overhang is 4mm – exactly the same as the Beyma and the Celestion.

In our test box, all three drivers need to travel 5mm to handle 200W of power.
[IMG]http://i57.tinypic.com/2wn0eg3.jpg[/IMG]
Given that a properly designed power speaker will cope with a signal that drives it 25% beyond xmax and that the signal from the bass guitar is not a sine wave anyway, I'd say that the two hundred watt drivers meet their spec. without too much problem and I wouldn't worry too much about whether the Fane handles 300 watts or not, as these speakers will be normally used in multiples anyway.

Each of these three has its plus points: the Beyma has a cast chassis, the Fane has a generous power rating, and the Celestion has a very smooth midband response. There is, however, one particular figure hidden away in the Thiele-Small parameters that would make me favour one of these if I had to make a choice from the spec sheets alone.

As for the two drivers Bill suggested, these are subwoofers and not suitable for use with bass guitar on their own. If you check out the manufacturer's curves you'll see that the midrange frequency responses looks like the hind leg of a donkey: that's because they were designed for maximum excursion at the exclusion of virtually anything else.

The Eminence 3010LF driver costs £200 - four times the price of the others. So it's hardly a fair comparison (let's not even get into the fact that the comparison is also based on two different xmax measurements with boxes tuned to different frequencies which skews the results). Two of these Eminence drivers will cost £400. Then you need a midrange driver and a crossover, which will add at least another £100. If you had £500 to spend on drivers, which clearly the OP doesn't, there are better ways.

My order of preference, having only heard the Celestion, would be Beyma, Celestion, Fane, although that could possibly change on audition. I hope that helps.

[Phil Starr]

Stevie may not know it but he is probably designing the new Basschat 2x10 for us.

Looking at those frequency plots I'd say from that information alone these three speakers would sound significantly different. Interesting not knowing which is which. It's a kind of blind audition. The yellow trace is fairly flat at about 95db across the frequency range, down to 94 dB @ 80Hz and with maybe a 1dB hump just above 100Hz. The green trace is around the 91db point at 80Hz rising gently to 100db at 2000Hz.

That's going to mean an audible difference. I'd really expect the yellow speaker to sound more bass voiced and the green speaker to sound louder and 'lighter'. Which isn't to say one is better than the other or that the difference is going to be dramatic. Green speakers long gentle bass tail off might even be useful in not exciting room resonances in some gig situations.

So, yes, I'm happy that the Celestion models better than I expected. I'd still choose the Beyma personally but I did dismiss the Celestion too easily and maybe Stevie we can test one against the other sometime.

Interesting

[Beer of the Bass]

There's some interesting reading here. Alongside the low end response, I'm curious about the sort of colouration Phil refers to earlier which the SM212 and 10-300 apparently lacked. I'm another player who enjoys speakers with that peak around 2-4K and will often try to EQ it in if it's not there. If this does become another design diary thread it might be useful to suggest driver choices to bring that colouration alongside the flatter options. Would I be right in thinking that the Celestion has the most of this among those three?

[yorks5stringer]

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' timestamp='1414356538' post='2588636']
If you do you'll have something to fall back on when your playing days wind down.
When I played bass five nights a week this is what I drove from gig to gig:



I don't gig much anymore, but I play golf seven days a week, and this is what I drive to and from the course:


[/quote]
How do you get on with the right hand drive and UK registration plates in New Hampshire..... ?

Edited November 3, 2014 by yorks5stringer

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

[quote name='yorks5stringer' timestamp='1415011014' post='2595501']
How do you get on with the right hand drive and UK registration plates in New Hampshire..... ?
[/quote]That's my spare that I keep garaged in St.Andrews, for when I visit to play a few rounds.

[Phil Starr]

[quote name='Beer of the Bass' timestamp='1415009480' post='2595481']
There's some interesting reading here. Alongside the low end response, I'm curious about the sort of colouration Phil refers to earlier which the SM212 and 10-300 apparently lacked. I'm another player who enjoys speakers with that peak around 2-4K and will often try to EQ it in if it's not there. If this does become another design diary thread it might be useful to suggest driver choices to bring that colouration alongside the flatter options. Would I be right in thinking that the Celestion has the most of this among those three?
[/quote]

Cones need to flex to reproduce higher frequencies and a flexing cone has its own resonances so once it ceases acting as a pure piston it is hard to control the frequency response. Most guitar and bass speakers have peaks in the frequency response above 1kHz up to the 3kHz region, which also corresponds to the point where our hearing is most acute. At the very least we are very used to this classic guitar and bass sound as most of the recordings in the formative years of pop and rock used these speakers and generally we quite like it. Ironically I run through mainly flat speakers but dial up the classic weak bass, bass hump, and 1-3kHz hump of cheap speakers on the eq because I like the sound.

Both the SM110 and the Celestion exhibit this 1-3kHz peak but the Fane doesn't. The SM212 is an odd one because although fairly flat it gives a substantial output up to over 5kHz, -10dB is 6000Hz ish from memory giving almost an extra octave. I'm hoping to try the Eminence Beta in the 12" cab to try an old school sounding speaker.

[LukeFRC]

[quote name='Phil Starr' timestamp='1414344915' post='2588471']

Funnily enough I was drawing up a shortlist for a 2x10 today and thought the Legend BP102 worth a second look, I also thought the Basslite S2010 looked interesting but is likely to be expensive over here.
[/quote]

hey! you 3 haven't even got a photo up on the 1x12 design thread yet and you're moving onto 2x10s??!!!

[yorks5stringer]

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' timestamp='1415020207' post='2595653']
That's my spare that I keep garaged in St.Andrews, for when I visit to play a few rounds.
[/quote]
All that sea air is bad for a garaged car, do you want me to take it out for you whilst you're away? Just send me the keys to webuyanycar.com.....!

[Phil Starr]

[quote name='LukeFRC' timestamp='1415055555' post='2596303']
hey! you 3 haven't even got a photo up on the 1x12 design thread yet and you're moving onto 2x10s??!!!
[/quote]



don't know if it is a function of the Y chromosome, my natural nurdiness or being a bass player but sticking to one thing???

I've got two basses I love and don't spend enough time with, that didn't stop me buying a third yesterday on a whim.

There are photos of the prototypes on the thread somewhere, I haven't built the final versions yet, restoring my house, my new band and the death throes of my old band have absorbed so much of my time recently. I've vowed to get something out by Christmas.