Speaker Sizes

JohnnyCNote · Sea Monkey Joined: 13 Feb 2003 Posts: 11

When I had my band in the 80's, I grew tired of bass players who almost always had amps that were not powerful enough to keep up with my own 160 watt Peavey head. Don't get me wrong, some of these bassists were very good, and I can't hold it against them if their financial situations didn't allow them to purchase larger amps. But the fact remained that we needed someone with a big amp.

Finally, after receiving a nice little windfall, I decided to solve the problem by buying the most powerful amp I could find, the Peavey Maxx. For those of you who don't remember this beast, it was essentially an 800 watt RMS (400 X 2) stereo power amp in a flight cabinet with a front end and a variable crossover. The speaker cabinet had 2 10's and, what I really grew to love, 2 18's (all Black Widows). The cabinet had 3 inputs, one for a combined input, and one each for high and low end in bi-amp mode.

In bi-amp mode, if the crossover were set to a certain point, the result was 400 RMS watts of subaudible bass coming out of the 2 18's. Unfortunately, this fed too much low end into the 2 10's, so we only experimented with it rarely. What we needed was a 2nd cabinet with 2 15's to share the load on the 10's. The effect was quite unlike anything else I'd experienced in bass amps. You could feel the bass more than hear it, but the effect was great.

However, I eventually moved from San Francisco back to Florida, and sold the amp, much to my chagrin. Nowadays, I've been looking for something that would produce a similar effect, but I'm surprised to see most cabinets come with 10's. I've been out of playing music for a while, but my brother, who plays bass, and I are plotting a *Baloney Pop*. I want to make sure his amp is powerful enough to keep up with my 2 160 watt heads (I got a 2nd head when I got the old bass amp in '86).

I know that the venerable Ampeg SVT does a phenomenal job with it's 8 10's, but I'd be interested in hearing what the consensus is these days. I want DEEP bass. Are 10's capable of doing the same job as the older 15's that used to be so common?

What's the deal these days?
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Mkuk0 · Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 8:05 am Post subject:

15's are common enough here in UK, I'm running a Laney combo with a 15, plus a 4x10 cab, only about 350 watts though. Which is just about enough for what we play, my guitarist is only pushing a 50W Marshall through a 4x10 marshall cab
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Greasy Lil · Kitten Joined: 05 Sep 2006 Posts: 129 Location: UK

10's can be very good if you set them in the right cabinet.

If you're up for a bit of DIY building, go and have a look at Bill Fitzmaurice's forum/website for some of the awesome cabs you can build.

He's an American cab wizard.
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tyrebyter · Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 6:42 am Post subject:

Forgive this intrusion by a hobbyist and feel free to thrash these observations. Deep bass from 4x10 or 40x10 given the current trend in design is not possible. The modern designs seem tuned for large quantity of mid-bass as reflected in recent recordings and live performances. When setting out to find a rig that would faithfully reproduce the low E on my bass, I was underwelmed. I have no idea why anyone with a five string buys what is now available. I started researching available drivers to build my own and the landscape wasn't much better. My old favorites, Altec and JBL were out of the running quickly. In fact, all the drivers I could find that should have been optimized for bass guitar could not hold the line below the A sttring. Don't get offended; it's just math. A few drivers could be forced into an alignment to give a 3dB down point around 40Hz but output would be severely limited by over excursion. I briefly considered hi-fi drivers but they generally don't care for the abuse and can't match the output of pro units. The only driver I found that will meet my specs is the Eminence LAB12 though I'm sure there are others I just haven't found yet. It was designed for a rather elaborate horn loading but I've got a simple vented box in mind. As with any vented design, you'd better have a steep high-pass filter in place or things will get ugly in a hurry. Anyone out there built with the LAB12? Anyone have an alternative.

JohnnyCNote · Sea Monkey Joined: 13 Feb 2003 Posts: 11

Thanks for the info! That's what I have suspected, that the current drivers would not be able to produce truly DEEP bass. For a good example of what I mean, listen to some of the live material from Fields of the Nephilim. At least in the recording, the bass sounds pretty deep. Another, more classic, sound can be heard on any of the first few releases of old Black Sabbath. Or even many of the old R&B artists from the 60's, e.g. the late, great James Brown.

I have heard some impressive sound from an Ampeg SVT and the 8X10 cabinet, but it's been a while since I've heard one. I wonder if the desired results could be obtained from using a PA subwoofer. If it were connected to a power amp slaved off of a bass amp head, it might work....
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peterbright · Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 3:21 pm Post subject:

A 21" won't do it for you?