Turn rolling rack into cab??

[JACink]

Hi Guys,

My stupid question of the day is...

I have a 16U (good quality) rolling rack that is sitting around, and will probably end up in storage when I move home this next year, and I was wondering about the pro's/con's (mainly con´s) of turning this into a cab.

I have tried to find something like this, searching both TB and Google, but with no luck. I can´t turn it into a 4X10 obviously as it won´t fit, but I thought maybe a 1X15 or a 2X12.

What do you guy's think?

(I also have a spare 600W QSC amp that I could mount, and turn it into an "oversized" combo)

[icks]

You can rackmount some sort of front pannel that will hold the speakers. The Pro are that is will be solid as a tank. The con are that no matter what speakers you will put in, it won't sound as good as you hope. Because a basscabinet is designed around the speakers used, the cubic volume and the tuning of the wood box are not chosen so easily.

[lowfreq33]

A better option would be to sell it and put the profit into a new cab. Enclosure volume is pretty critical to the performance of any speaker cabinet, and it's unlikely that your rack would happen to be just the right size to function well.

[Clearwave]

Back in the day, peavey made a rack-mounted speaker.

[jungleheat]

It's a COOL idea but probably not a GOOD idea.

But not for the reasons stated. A 16 space rack is a pretty good size and probably sufficient for something like a 1x15. BUT, it's probably made of molded plastic which is probably really resonant (unless you're talking about the kind that is more like a frame, which would have its own challenges). So you'd have to damp the resonances of the "cab". Might be possible with some dynamat or something on the inside panels, and possibly some bracing as well. If it's got rack rails on the back as well, it would be pretty easy to do a basic mock up. Just cut a front baffle and screw it to the front rails, and cut a back panel with a jack and screw it to the rear rails. it might be tricky to get everything sealed up properly (even in a ported box, you want everything but the port to be sealed). Might make things easier to do a shelf port at the bottom which is one of the areas I'd imagine that sealing might be hard.

So yeah, it could be done probably, but it'd be better to just sell the rack to someone who could use it as it is and build a separate cab if that's something you want to pursue.

[dmusic148]

What Jungle said. Even if it's wood, it's probably too thin to work without substantial bracing.

[JACink]

Thanks for all the input guys! I guessed there would be more con´s than pro´s!!

But before I give up comlpletely, how about a 1X15 cab, built to 19" width, making the whole cab (wood and all) rackmountable? Would this solve the resonance issue?

I can´t post a pic of the rack as I am not at home, but it is a good quality (Middle Atlantic, if I remember correctly) rack very similar to this one:

[jungleheat]

Definintely seems like more trouble than it's worth. You'd effectively be making the rack case into a flight case for a cab you would build just to use the rack case for something.

So unless you tour a lot, it seems kind of unnecessary. if you want to do it, your motivation should just be having a kind of weird unique cab.

[will33]

Originally Posted by jungleheat

Definintely seems like more trouble than it's worth. You'd effectively be making the rack case into a flight case for a cab you would build just to use the rack case for something.

So unless you tour a lot, it seems kind of unnecessary. if you want to do it, your motivation should just be having a kind of weird unique cab.

+1

You need crossbracing to stop the resonances. The thing would be uneccesarily heavy and awkward and probably leaky and not work very well.

I'd either sell it to help fund a proper build or strip it of hardware and use some of that on a new cab built the right way....meaning you select a driver that has the performance you desire and design a box specifically for that driver, not the other way around.

Hell, I'm rebuilding my own big rack just to make it into 2 smaller, lighter, better racks that will stack and fasten together. The "everything in one big rack" way of doing isn't much fun to move when you're dealing with multiple lead-sled poweramps.