New BassChat 8"Cab design

[rwillett]

Dave

 

Let me dig them out and I'll send them down. DM me your address please

[rwillett]

Started on the second cabinet today. 

 

This is a dry run fit, so no glueing. 

 

So much faster when you have done one before. The panels were all cut a few weeks ago, though I found one end was at an angle. Suspect the circular saw was poorly setup by some idiot.

 

Rather than cutting the batons in advance, I cut them as I needed and used a mitre saw and block rather than a home made table saw. This was a far better way of working and wasn't much slower. This means I cut to the right size as things may be out by 0.5mm or so. 

 

Just under two hours to get to this, I do now have frostbite, but well on the way to getting a second cab, so completely worth losing a finger or so, who needs a little finger for playing bass.

 

 

 

Front and rear faces are also cut and fit, but I haven't done the holes for the speakers, handles etc yet. 

 

Rob

 

 

 

Edited 3 hours ago by rwillett

[Stub Mandrel]

Coulx you pop round and finish my aquarium hood? When you've got a minute.

[rwillett]

5 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Coulx you pop round and finish my aquarium hood? When you've got a minute.

No problem at all. Be happy to, whens good?

[rwillett]

Is there any benefit to putting this speaker on poles at all? I happen to have a pair of Quickset Hercules tripods for astronomy use. These will easily take 40Kg each and probably closer to 60Kg without breaking sweat. 

 

No idea how to, but thats a different problem to solve...

Rob

 

 

 

[Pea Turgh]

Fit a “top hat” to the underside.  Sorted.  I’ve got one I’ll never use if you want me to pop it in the post, Rob.

[rwillett]

@Pea Turgh 

 

Thats kind of you. At the moment, I'm just wondering it it makes any significant difference for the better to put them on top of something. I have a recollection that somebody said they should be on the floor in a corner but can't find the comment.

 

If I had the "top hat", I'd still have to fashion something to attach to the tripod. Yet another adapter

 

Hold off for the moment please.

 

Rob

[LawrenceH]

Raising a speaker creates position-dependent dips in the frequency response where the reflected wave at a given frequency combines out of phase with the direct wave at your ears. Walls and ceilings also do this. Hence in-room response measurements can be pretty crazy.

 

But it has the advantage that it puts the mids/highs a lot closer to your ear! Sometimes that matters a lot more in practice. It depends if you want more note clarity (raise it up) or girthy bass (shove it on the floor next to the wall if not in a corner)

[Stub Mandrel]

1 hour ago, rwillett said:

Is there any benefit to putting this speaker on poles at all? I happen to have a pair of Quickset Hercules tripods for astronomy use. These will easily take 40Kg each and probably closer to 60Kg without breaking sweat. 

 

No idea how to, but thats a different problem to solve...

Rob

 

 

 

 

Dedicated speaker poles are so cheap it's not worth making an adaptor and riskinc a nice astro tripod.  About £20 on Amazon. Gorilla only £24.

 

 

[rwillett]

1 minute ago, Stub Mandrel said:

 

Dedicated speaker poles are so cheap it's not worth making an adaptor and riskinc a nice astro tripod.  About £20 on Amazon. Gorilla only £24.

 

 

Didn't realise they were that cheap. The 'adapter' would be metal rod or a piece of wood and the tripods have already been adapted. They came with the slo-mo heads on and I took those off made plywood plates to fit various EQ heads. They are rather battered from before I brought them, but were probably very expensive as they were made for Hollywood type film cameras . I know the model or or two up from mine was $12,000. That's mine below.

 

 

[Phil Starr]

17 hours ago, rwillett said:

Is there any benefit to putting this speaker on poles at all?

 

16 hours ago, rwillett said:

I have a recollection that somebody said they should be on the floor in a corner

you'll find that speakers sound very different up on poles. any hard reflective surface will reinforce the bass frequencies in particular and you'll get an extra 6db for each reflective surface. Spacing something away from a surface creates two paths to the ear and you'll get a time delay between the reflected sound and th direct sound from the speaker. That creates points in the frequency response where you get cancellation.

 

I use the same speakers up on poles as PA and on the ground as floor monitors with one of my bands and DI the same bass signal into both. I don't use backline. I have to cut the bass to the monitors by at least 6db or the bass frequencies just drown out everything else on stage, the same signal is crystal clear out in front of the stage. Whether that bass reinforcement is good depends upon what you want to achieve/like. The 8" cab you've built gained a lot of love sitting on the floor but you can experiment with it on a pole. The best stand of course might be your other 8. maybe a stack of four would sound good

 

I've used my 6" cab for open mics. It doesn't have the bass of the 8" cab so I tend to find a corner or a rear wall position for it so I can use the bass reinforcement. It's good to experiment with where you put your cab and you can learn to use the reinforcement as an extra tool. it's free bass boost if you need boost. A real nuisance if you don't.

 

You can also buy tiny speaker stands NJS are one brand currently on offer at UKDJ for £17

Edited 3 hours ago by Phil Starr

[rwillett]

Thanks for the comments. I'll have a think what to do. I could easily add an external bottom plate onto the speakers for stand mounting purposes. It would be external rather than internal. I've a number of decent stands I could use for testing other than the Quickset to see. I could strap the current one down to test it out with zero changes.

 

Might do that next weekend and see. If I like it I'd put a couple of big t-nuts in the base of the speaker to allow a plate to be bolted in just in case. I wouldn't do an internal adapter as it would change the internal volumetric measurements of the cab. No idea how much would make a difference but not wanting to trash a cab to find out. 

[Phil Starr]

Rob you might be the first person to try two of these cabs and just stacking them will change the off axis angle between your head and the cab on the top. What you'll gain will be subjectively quite dramatic and most people see it as a big improvement. The most significant is a 6db increase in sound level, even when you turn it down the speakers will be working over the more linear part of their travel so you might hear a reduction in distortion and power compression depending upon what level you were operating at before. Secondly you'll hear a clearer sound as you are closer to being on-axis and you'll also have some mid bass losses from the top cab but reinforcement from the bottom cab.

 

For me a pair of these would be a really viable gigging set up. My current drummer is properly trained and his dynamics control is excellent I was using the 8 last night at rehearsal and it was fine in terms of volume. A pair would have given me plenty of headroom for a noisier gig environment. I'm dying to see what you make of a stacked pair

 

You can already test how the cab will sound on a pole at home. Just stick it on a shelf or a table and sit down with your head/ears at speaker level.

 

One reason I chose the Fane is that the off axis response is better behaved than many speakers of the same size. Speaker cones aren't rigid pistons but flexible bits of paper so off axis response is complicated. In any case the higher frequencies don't disappear off axis, mainly they just fade a little and eventually lobe, this is more of an issue with larger diameter speakers too. Small speakers have an advantage here with the cost being lower output.

 

If you look at the chart below you can see that the reponse dip is dramatic at 60deg but minimal at 10-20deg. Bass guitar doesn't really have much content above 4kHz so the 8k line isn't really relevant.

[rwillett]

1 hour ago, Phil Starr said:

Rob you might be the first person to try two of these cabs and just stacking them will change the off axis angle between your head and the cab on the top.

 

Wow, back on the bleeding edge of tech again  More incentive to finish the second cabinet then. If I had a free day or two, I could get them finished for the weekend, and even painted but sadly paid work has to be done this week and I have a show-stopper problem at work to resolve. 

 

I only have a Warwick Gnome V2 which apparently puts out either 280W or 300W at 4 Ohms, I assume this is enough to drive both speakers?

 

Local temperature had moved up to the giddy heights of 7C so I might have some time later this evening to do the routing for the handles and SpeakOn panel. Lots of small things to be done before I glue it back together.

 

Rob

 

 

Edited 11 minutes ago by rwillett
Talking crap about something and was wrong