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


"Les Cargill" <lcargill@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Mike Rieves wrote:

"Les Cargill" <lcargill@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Mike Rieves wrote:


"Brian Running" <brunning@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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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 don't disagree, and it's one of the reasons why different bass rigs
sound so different.

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.

Since most bands record the bass direct, vs guitar, which is almost always
miked from the amp, I would say that most bass players agree with you.

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.

Correct, but designing a hump in the response in the bass range does allow
them to play louder with less amp power in that range.

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.

Not exactly, but the ragged response curve often results in what you're
describing.

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.

I'm not sure what you mean by "heat", as you're using it here. If you mean
actual heat generated in the amp's output circuit, that isn't correct unless
the cabinst's impedance curve has a big dip at certain frequencies, which
isn't a problem in most cabinets.

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.

Actually, you'd usually get the 100Hz hump by putting the speaker in a
smaller than optimum cabinet, not a bigger one, especially in ported designs
Believe it or not, a larger than optimum cabinet usually does allow the
speaker to reproduce lower freqeuncies, but at lower output levels, the
result being low end extended a bit but rolling off more quickly compared to
an optimum cabinet. Oversize cabinets also tend to reduce the speaker's
power handling capability.

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.

It often results in the second harmonic (an octave above the fundamental)
being as loud as or even louder than the fundamental. It's difficult and
relatively expensive to design a cabinet that will accurately reproduce the
bass guitar's bottom octave at the sould levels necessary for live
performance and still sound good at the top of the bass guitar's range as
well. That's one reason why PA subs don't make good bass guitar cabinets.

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.

Depends on your preference in sound, the room you're playing in and many
other factors, but
most bass guitar cabinets are designed with at least a bit of a "house
curve" built in. Truely flat bass guitar cabinets are rather rare.

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.

With a single driver, phase response usually isn't an issue unless really
weird things are happening with the speaker cone.

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.

I agree.

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.

You're right. other than edge diffraction effects at the highest
frequencies, but this is precisely why those software programs don't tell us
much at higher frequencies. The Theile-Small parameters tell us (and the
software) nothing about how the driver will react at higher frequencies.
Response in the higher frequencies is dictated by other factors. You might
have two drivers with the exact same Theile-Small parameters but one will
start rolling off steeply below 1000Hz, while the other one will go up to
3000 or 4000 Hz before response falls off steeply. Generally smaller drivers
will have better high-end response that larger ones, but depending on the
design, this isn't necessarily true. I have a pair of 10" car audio woofers
that start rolling off at about 500Hz, for example.

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.

Provided that you can get the speaker parameters, cabinet volumes and port
area and depth, you're correct. If you're designing and building your own
cabinets the software and the driver manufacturers' response curves will
allow you to narrow your driver searech to a few that will do just what you
want.


.

Relevant Pages

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