fEARful 15/6 vs. Mesa Boogie 2x15

[jdegrassi]

Hey, I'm new here and I'm hoping to get some advice.

Due to a recent back injury, I'm looking to upgrade my current rig to something more lightweight. I'm all but settled on an Orange Terror Bass 1000 and a fEARful Nidacore 15/6. I'd love to get a 15 sub on top of those, but that's out of my budget (for the time being).

I've been going through as many of the existing fEARful threads as I've had time for, but, unfortunately, I'm not too technical and I'm still unclear on a few things.

1. I've reviewed the fEARful FAQ's section on min/max wattage and I'm not sure how to interpret the excursion chart. What do the numbers on the unlabeled X- and Y- axes represent? Does 794 wattage number of the 15/6 represent the max number of watts that design can handle? I'm thinking I have to be wrong on that because it seems like plenty of people are pushing more than that.bo
2. The FAQ also mentions how, with a lot of watts a 15/6 can get as loud as a 6x10 pushed to it's limits. Any idea how many watts that would take?

My current rig is a GK800RB with a 2x15 Mesa Boogie cab. When other TBers have asked about volume and comparing their current rig to a fEARful, I've seen greenboy and Bill recommend comparing woofers. Unfortunately, I bought my Boogie used about 15 years ago and I can't find any info on it on Mesa's website. It basically looks identical to this: Music Go Round

My old rig was just about enough to keep up with my guitarist's Sovtek half stack and our very loud drummer. A lot of folks in the fEARful threads are saying that a 15/6 are plenty loud enough to keep up with such a set up, but I just want to be sure I'm putting the right rig together since this will be a significant investment for me. I'm basically trying to figure out if I should go with the Terror Bass and 15/6 and then invest in a 15 sub in another year (if needed) or so OR consider going with a 12/12/6 to get a bit more volume. I do like 12's, but I love 15's.

So, sorry for the length of this post and my noob questions. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Nightlyraider]

Well if you are still somehow managing your 215, a single 15/6 in BB or Arauco would be much lighter and competitive sound wise, while being much cheaper than a fiberglass cab.

I am basing this on the only pricing i've seen posted here for the nidacore cab, and I got more than 2x the cab for my $, but I'm young and willing to lift 5x lb cabs with comfy big inset handles (I wouldn't like these with the spring loaded version).

I love the punch of the mesa 215, but a fearful is big in it's own way. Not as focused a punch, but it'll shake your gut.

[dug dog]

I just realized that I've forgotten which axis is x and which is y. Ouch. At any rate, the vertical axis in the graph is SPL and the horizontal is frequency.

794 watts is the amount of power required to bring the 3015LF to the limit of its useful travel, known as Xmax. As I understand it, when a speaker exceeds Xmax, the speaker cone travels further but does not get louder and will distort (known as "farting out").

To give a rough illustration, I'll use another 15" Eminence driver, the Delta 15. It is rated to handle 400 watts continuous before the voice coil melts, but a signal of roughly 40 watts at 80 Hertz will cause it to exceed its relatively limited Xmax. You can feed it more power without wrecking the driver, but the signal at 80 Hz won't really get much louder, if at all, although there will likely be some additional distortion which is often perceived as being louder.

The 3015LF, on the other hand, will keep getting louder and will remain relatively free of distortion until you exceed 794 watts. (That would be at 60 Hz, but that should give you the idea.)

[tombowlus]

I've got one of each. Hopefully, I'll have some time this week to compare the two and report back.

[dug dog]

A couple of additional thoughts.

The 3015LF is thermally rated at 450 watts continuous, so if you were to send it a constant signal of 500 watts (maybe a sine wave from a synth or an extremely compressed bass signal) you would melt the voice coil. However, due to the nature of bass guitar signals having quite high transients, it would take a lot of power to do that with a bass guitar.

[thudfromafar]

Originally Posted by dug dog

A couple of additional thoughts.

The 3015LF is thermally rated at 450 watts continuous, so if you were to send it a constant signal of 500 watts (maybe a sine wave from a synth or an extremely compressed bass signal) you would melt the voice coil. However, due to the nature of bass guitar signals having quite high transients, it would take a lot of power to do that with a bass guitar.

Yeah as far as I understand, it's 900 watts "program" which means that it will take peaks of up to 900 watts (or more). People run 1,000+ watt amps for clean headroom, so they don't have to worry about clipping the amp. Then they can get up to those 900+ watt peaks.

Another note. I have a feeling the 15/6 at 8ohms will not be nearly as loud as the mesa 2x15 at 4ohms running the same amp. My guess is the 15/6, at 500++ watts could defeat the 2x15, but no less. I'm sure some others will be able to help a bit more with this.

[rpsands]

Remember with the thermal limitations of a fEarful that a sizable portion of that energy goes to the midrange as well.

[::::BASSIST::::]

TBer "Deb" has a nidacore 15/6... maybe PM him and pick his brain a bit. My nidacore 15/6 will be arriving in less than 4 weeks hopefully.

I honestly cannot every see needing more than a 15/6, but my bands are not blasting loud. YMMV. At a rare opportunity I have driven mine (my LDS 15/6) hard with a 1000w when I had to really crank it at a large club with a weak PA system. It was REALLY loud, and the cab handled it no problem.

The nidacore route is not cheap, but to me 34LBS is just too good to pass up. Its likely the last cab I buy for quite awhile. One thing I do highly reccommend is getting a true spec Greenboy version fEarful. Dont lower your standards. Might as well get the best designed cab there is!

[Foz]

794 wattage number of the 15/6 represent the max number of watts that design can handle?

794 is not a magic number - use the information in context to narrow your question.

fEARful™ FAQ



At 100 Hz it takes a impulse of about 800 watts [794 - more or less] to drive a 15/6 to its "excursion" limit [the edge of "fart out"].

This does not mean you need 800 watts to drive the cab - rather, over-excursion failure will arise with about 800 watts @ 100 Hz while yielding about 126 dB of sound pressure.

Nor does this mean you could never benefit from an amp rated at over 800 watts into 8 ohms - amps are not rated at a single frequency, and even if they were rated for single impulses at 100 Hz [just to follow the excursion example described above], an amp rated at more than 800 watts would allow clean headroom / no clip, all the way up the excursion limit and be able to do its repeatedly for a longer duty cycle and perhaps with less distortion... etcetera.

FWIW I have an 800RB and have run a 15/6+1 with it [bi-amped] and it works just fine, but you are leaving a lot of cab on the table if that's all you got. The 800rb has neither the watts or the low frequency output to push the cab to anywhere near its limits.

====

A fEarful 15/6 [+1 add a horn ] with one of the new ultra lightweight Peavey IPR 1600's [7 lbs. / will bridge 1050 watts into 8 ohms] plus a light weight pre-amp [tons of choices] or pre-pedal [Aggie tone hammer, Sansamp VT maybe?] will smoke your old rig.

Similar performance could be had with a Carvin BX series amp or similar [BX1500 is something like 10 lbs. / 900 watts into 8 ohms] and are said to be quite versatile.

Either of those configurations would please your ear and you back IMO.

[jdegrassi]

Thanks very much for the responses. They're very helpful. I'm starting to make some headway into understanding all of the SPL, Hertz, Watts stuff, but I admit this is all new to me and I was only a simple English major in college. If anyone can recommend any threads on these topics for the layman, I'd be much obliged. I've searched around a bit and some stuff, but the threads seem to get very technical, very quickly and I need to bone up on my basic understanding on what all this stuff means and how its all related.

That said, I'm interpreting what I've read here so far as meaning that, if I plan to move forward with getting an Orange Terror Bass, I can either go with the 500 watt version and live with not using the fEARful 15/6 to its maximum potential OR go with the 1000 watt version to get more headroom and then use clipping as an indicator that I should adjust my volume/gain/EQ accordingly or risk damaging the cab's speakers.

Is that an oversimplification? How does playing style fit in here? The project I'm talking about is very riff oriented hard rock played at very punk rock-ish tempos. We play in drop d and I play with a pick. I imagine this has some bearing as well in terms of clipping?

@tombowlus That side by side comparison would be awesome, if you have the time. Thanks very much. I'll also reach out to Deb at @::BASSIST::'s suggestion.

Thanks again for all the help.

[::::BASSIST::::]

Get the 1000 watt version for sure.

[singlemalt]

All the techie stuff goes over my head for the most part but, I can relate my experience because we're close on gear. Short version, the fEarful will give your GK a total makeover: bigger bust, longer legs, better hair, whiter teeth, puffy lips and a "let's get it on!" attitude.

I've been running a GK 1001 rb 2. It worked well with a 2-15 cab, 4 ohm, similar to your Mesa configuration. Mine was an older, beefy Peavey cab loaded with EV Force 15's. So far so good.
Upgraded the drivers to Eminence 3015s (full range, not the LF's). Better, but they needed more box, more air space. I did lose about 20 lb going to neos, so the 2-15 cab was easier to move.

Then I put the 3015's into a pair of TL 606 boxes. Better still, and a more flexible rig.

When you hook into a fEarful 15/6 it's going to be a whole new ball game, you haven't heard everything the GK will do for you. For me it was getting a new amp with the fEarful deal. I use the CBG crossover for the main cab and run the GK's high section into the horn. With a mere 460W @ 8 ohms pushing the main section of the 15/6, I'm sure not getting any requests to turn up the bass. My master volume rarely tops the 9pm position, if I put it at midnite, I'd crush everybody.

I'm taking the long route here just to relate how things evolved around the GK. The thing has more balls than I ever would have suspected and I've played it through lots of cab configurations. Nothing comes close to the fEarful.

I suggest landing the fEarful and dialing it in with the amp you already know. You will surprised at what you already have. Then test any prospective amps through the fEarful, if possible, or make sure they have an easy return policy.

Not to say I won't flirt with the idea of more power for the ever improving setup. But for now my budget is going into more fEarfuls, I'm not maxing the power I have.

As for clipping the GK's input, that's totally up to what you are putting in to the amp, not what's hooked up to the out's. If you have a bunch of stuff on the floor before the GK, those are the levels you want to look at. It's easy for me to clip the GK's input. depending on what my stomp boxes are doing.

The fEarful will handle all the drop tuning and extended range you want to throw at it.