Speaker Terminal SPADE Sizes?

henryjurstin13 · #1 04-23-2011, 08:39 AM

Last night, I took apart my Roland Cube Bass 100 to checkout the guts... I noticed 2 different spade sizes, the HOT was the regular/normal size & the NEGATIVE was about half that size. Why? Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

I had been thinking about seeing what a speaker swap would do for this amp, but without having ever soldered a SINGLE drop on anything -- how hard would it be to change the spade size? Do they just crimp on the wires? And -- would it be ok to change the spade size? I guess it could be that way for a reason...

fhm555 · #2 04-23-2011, 08:41 AM

Just a guess, but maye the different sizes are to make it harder to hook it up backwards?

jnewmark · #3 04-23-2011, 08:44 AM

Yes, they do just crimp on when you change them. You can buy a little kit at Lowe's that has the different sizes of lugs, and the tool to change them out. Although, some Eminence speaker terminals seem to be an odd size, and I had to use a larger lug because the lugs in the kit were not an exact fit. Maybe that's why the Roland was different, or maybe they just ran out of that size and used a bigger one.

henryjurstin13 · #4 04-23-2011, 08:46 AM

It never crossed my mind that maybe it was done to keep the 2 from being confused... maybe it was a simple as whatever was in the parts bin...? Sounds like it would be easy enough to just crimp on a new spade. Maybe one day I'll get in the solder game.

billfitzmaurice · #5 04-23-2011, 08:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fhm555

Just a guess, but maye the different sizes are to make it harder to hook it up backwards?

+1. The people who assemble amps tend to be minimum wagers who haven't any clue as to polarity issues, and color coding tends to be overlooked on Mondays and Fridays (ask any production manager why).

will33 · #6 04-23-2011, 08:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jnewmark

some Eminence speaker terminals seem to be an odd size.

I've run into this before too, don't know if they were all eminence but maybe metric or something?

Sometimes it works to use a slightly bigger one and pinch it together with a pliers, or just cut it off and solder it to the speaker terminal.

seamonkey · #7 04-23-2011, 12:21 PM

You wan to change the driver?
It's a coax and Roland has Feed Forward Processing (some kind of feedback)
I don't think you're going to get anymore out of this design than Roland already has.

henryjurstin13 · #8 04-24-2011, 09:25 AM

I'm not saying I can "get more" of anything outta this box/amp, I was just curious about the tonal differences & experimentations of swapping cones... I don't even pretend to know what FFP is...

Electricblue · #9 04-24-2011, 09:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by henryjurstin13

I'm not saying I can "get more" of anything outta this box/amp, I was just curious about the tonal differences & experimentations of swapping cones... I don't even pretend to know what FFP is...

I doubt the 2-driver design is anything to do with whatever FFP is... I think its just to get a better frequency response out of the amp.

As you can see by the high-pass connected to the tweeter, thats all it is.

Ignore the FFP lark, change the speaker to your preferred model, rock out

Bare in mind, it would probably be better to just connect an external speaker, as the boxes on combo's are normally not optimized for the driver.

seamonkey · #10 04-24-2011, 12:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by henryjurstin13

I'm not saying I can "get more" of anything outta this box/amp, I was just curious about the tonal differences & experimentations of swapping cones... I don't even pretend to know what FFP is...

Experimenting never hurts.

FFP according to Roland is a form of feedback that I thought came from the driver itself. I was thinking servo, but If there's no extra wires on the driver to provide a feedback path, or an LED/reflector thing then they might be doing some standard marketing spew.

What's the impedance of the driver?
You got the box dimensions, port size you can run WinISD on some drivers with?

Is the inside of the box padded? Just adding this can help a lot with midrange problems.

Do you have some wider shots of the insides?

henryjurstin13 · #11 04-24-2011, 08:42 PM

Driver is 8 ohms, insides were covered in some sort of fluffy padding, specs are gonna be pretty close to the outside specs except for the amp itself... I don't know anything about the winISD anyways. Maybe someone else can chime in & help with that.

I'm outta town for a few weeks now & don't have access to the amp for more pics. I will post what I do have here tho: