Re: Revealed: Re: Audio Shootout - Aluminum vs. Paper Cones

Mike Rieves wrote:

"Les Cargill" <lcargill@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:45f327c2$0$16749$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Mike Rieves wrote:


"Brian Running" <brunning@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:VQVHh.290$Qw.86@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Like other have said , the design of of the box plays a bigger role
than the driver itself.

It plays a big role, but a well-designed box won't make a bad driver sound good. The driver is the fundamental part, and it's the most important part.

Can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear.


There are bad speakers out there, but there's also a huge range in specs of good drivers. Assuming that the driver is decent, the cabinet has just as much to do with bass response as the driver does, if not more. The enclosure must be carefully matched to the speaker, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to enclosures. The best driver in the world won't sound good if it isn't in a properly matched enclosure.

If people are interested in digging a little deeper, the
sofwtare package WinISD helps a lot.

http://www.linearteam.dk/default.aspx?pageid=winisd

To use it, you'll need the Thiele-Small parameters for a given
driver ( Carvin publishes the TS params of thier
drivers on their website, and makes good raw drivers of
you're thinking of building ).

If you can get the TS params for the driver used in a given
cabinet, you can verify the design of a cabinet you're thinking
of buying. *Many* commercially available designs simply aren't
any good, especially of 4X10 and 2X10 cabs. 1X15 and 2X12 tend
to be better.

--
Les Cargill


Many, if not most bass guitar cabs aren't designed for optimum flat response in the bottom end, they're designed to emphasize the range that a bass guitar produces.

Right. And that is the wrong thing to do.

I suppose there's a class of bass players who like
the amp to be part of their sound, but what I
hear on recordings tells me that this is not
the absolute norm.

I play in bands that generally do not mic up. Vox
only through the PA. This means the bass must be as
clean as possible. If the bass is ugly onstage,
the stage levels will not be under any sort of
control at all, the bass will be obnoxious onstage and
the overall sound will suffer.

I hear this all the time.

This lets them work more efficiently in that range,

No. It means that a relatively un-flat amp will generate heat and
muck in the ranges that are deemphasized. That's why I'm posting
about this.

The amp will emit those frequencies, but the cabinet will eat them,
and the artifacts from them being eaten will result in a much
less clean signal.

If we filter those frequencies at line level, much less heat gets
generated. The cabinet is far too big to be a good
filter. The heat is a rough analog for baad sound, as it turns out.

requiring less EQ boost and less amp power for a given output level.

For normal electiric bass, a little parametric @ 100Hz and a little
2 or 4 k is the usual. Cabinet design can't help much
there - although you can get some extension ( a bump @ 100Hz )
by building a much bigger cab. But you wouldn't know that
without the software.

Designing for compact cabinet size, max efficiency, max output capability , and best low end response require compromises, any advantage in one area requires sacrifices in the other areas.

The thing that almost always gets traded away is low end
response. Bad low end response eats power and will cause
ugly low frequency phase distortion.

> Speaker cabnet makers must choose
the combination that they think is most important to those who will be buying and using the cabinet.

I really don't know how to design a quick experiment to show this, but
years of experience have told me that flat is just the right answer.

I *thought* I knew better when I designed a pair 'o cabinets
to roll off below 50 Hz years ago, but I realized the error of
my ways when I discovered speaker design software. That inspired
a year or so of hunting, and resulted in a much better bass sound.

The problem is that we ( at least I ) think in terms of frequency
response, when the phase response of the cab is more important
to acheive a clean onstage sound.

If the audience mainly hears bass thru the PA, you have significantly
more options. If the bass amp has to do both onstage and mains work,
it's harder.

There are quite a few programs available, some free, that will give reasonably accurate bass response curves if you know the Theile-Small parameters of the speaker, cabinet volume and port area and depth, but unfortunately, they will only predict what the speaker/enclosure combination will do in the bottom two or three octaves, the response above that will depend on many other factors.

I am not so sure of that. Most drivers don't depend *as much* on the cab
above say, 80 Hz.

Using software like this will allow you to eliminate some cabinets, but the only way to really tell if a given enclosure will do what you want it to is to try it out with your bass guitar and amp.



Right you are! But I happened to learn a lot from integrating the software into a cabinet search.

--
Les Cargill
.

Relevant Pages

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