Beyma drivers

Don Oatman of LDS has made a couple cabs with these drivers (the coax 15), and is pretty blown away by them. They are expensive, but not that much more than the B&C Neo Coax models.

This is NOT helping my DR bass cabs GAS!!!!!

Beyma and B&C make premium drivers. They are in Europe, so prices are premium to start with, then add more for shipping to the US.

Car/Home Theater subs routinely have Fs below 28 Hz. For 12" drivers, the median Fs=37 Hz, and Average Fs=39 Hz. Low Fs drivers are designed to be inefficient so they can produce sufficient bass from small sealed boxes. The tradeoff is the power required to make noise with them.

I have four Rockford RFR-2215 15" subs that I used for a long time. These have Fs at 20 Hz, and are flat to 24 Hz in 6 cubic feet. They also have an SPL around 89, so they require a LOT of watts to make any appreciable noise.

Big boxes and low output is a useless combination. If I have to pack 12+ cubic feet, I'm much better off with a T48 bass horn than produces 105 SPL 1w/1m, than hauling around car subs and a 3,000 watt amp. The single bass horn is +10dB more sensitive (you hear as 2x as loud) at 1 watts, plus the horn makes far more total noise at maximum power.

Vic said:

This is NOT helping my DR bass cabs GAS!!!!!

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I don't know anything about these cabs... never have known anyone who gigs one. However, that 1580 with a neo Beyma driver in 4ohm version looks like it might kill. I'm not sure about the quality and tone of their crossovers, etc., though, but the cabs look really nice.

Don is building a box right now very similar to my Ultra Light 112 Coax with the B&C driver... in a 15" Neo coax version, I believe with a 4ohm 15. I'm not sure if it's done or if it has shipped yet, but that sure has peaked my interest. I love the small footprint and also the very even projection that these coax drivers achieve.

Edit: However.... it always kind of worries me when manufacturers swap different drivers out with the same cab. It seems you would have to vary the crossover of tuning... I wonder if the Dr. Bass cabs take this into account?

Rob Mancini said:

So what do we think? Are they worth the price? Do they really put out what they claim? Or are they an excuse to charge a lot for a speaker?

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Don't just look at the headline figures - model the response, look at the plots and compare these to other speakers. They definitely make good speakers but like all speakers they follow Hoffman's iron law - small, loud or low, pick any two.

Alex

Talking about speaker brands is like talking about pickup brands. It means nothing unless you are referring to a specific product that may wear a badge. No two Dimarzios or S Duncans are the same as no two Beymas or B&Cs are the same.

synaesthesia said:

Talking about speaker brands is like talking about pickup brands. It means nothing unless you are referring to a specific product that may wear a badge. No two Dimarzios or S Duncans are the same as no two Beymas or B&Cs are the same.

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Makes sense... I'm only somewhat familiar with the 12 and 15 neo coax...

This makes the Dr. Bass thing even more suspect to me, since you can specify a wide variety of Eminence or Beyma drivers in what looks like the same box.

alexclaber said:

Hoffman's iron law - small, loud or low, pick any two.

Alex

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Awesome!

KJung said:

This makes the Dr. Bass thing even more suspect to me, since you can specify a wide variety of Eminence or Beyma drivers in what looks like the same box.

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They must have a ready market taking to 'choice'.

The consequence of swapping any Beyma vs Eminence, or for that matter any other similar sized driver would result in a sonic change. To the initiated, this is not technically 'optimum' design...viz. a box/driver design works with a driver with certain parametric specs. be it one brand or several meeting this specifcation for the driver, assuming the box specs remain locked.

To the average punter who chooses drivers like they might swap pickups, a choice of variable speaker drivers for a fixed box represents some expression of transformed value for them regardless whether it is 'optimum' design or 'optimus prime'....

It's my understanding that Marc tunes the boxes. The outside dimensions are the same, but the tuning differs per driver.

I don't know whether or not the crossovers are different when using Eminence and Beymas. I do know that he was using a beefier crossover in his CS series. He is probably using those crossovers in the Beyma loaded cabs.

I've been thinking about a DR Bass 3 way cab. I want the Beyma neo upgrade but why put Beyma speakers in w/Eminence mid drivers. To get every thing out of the Beyma loaded cab you would need to upgrade to a Beyma mid in a sealed compartment in the box.

So I'm actually looking at a DrB212DV (vertical alignment). Basically build two 112LF's together w/ maybe 2 soft dome tweeters. If you're going to spend $200 more per speaker it should be giving you a good mid rich sound inherently/hopefully IMHO.

Blues Cat said:

I've been thinking about a DR Bass 3 way cab. I want the Beyma neo upgrade but why put Beyma speakers in w/Eminence mid drivers. To get every thing out of the Beyma loaded cab you would need to upgrade to a Beyma mid in a sealed compartment in the box.

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It doesn't work like that. That's like saying that all your floor pedals must be BOSS and a proco RAT will stink up the signal chain.

Just because your woofer and midrange are the same brand does not help. In an ideal passive single box solution the drivers have chosen matched sensitivity response or the crossover attenuates the more sensitive driver to match the lower one, in an ideal case.

synaesthesia said:

It doesn't work like that. That's like saying that all your floor pedals must be BOSS and a proco RAT will stink up the signal chain.

Just because your woofer and midrange are the same brand does not help. In an ideal passive single box solution the drivers have chosen matched sensitivity response or the crossover attenuates the more sensitive driver to match the lower one, in an ideal case.

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I should rephrase then. If you're going to go with a premium high end speaker you would want to use a high end mid and tweeter to get the most out of the speakers.

So why use a Beyma speaker and a relatively mid peaky Eminence?

And any Beyma mid range is not going to be mid peaky? And you know this purely because it is Beyma?

synaesthesia said:

And any Beyma mid range is not going to be mid peaky? And you know this purely because it is Beyma?

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I've read Bgavin's posts on the difference between a closed back Eminence, and the open back Beyma mid that needs it's own box. I think he said smoother, sweeter w/better off axis response IIRC.

Bgavin care to add?

Blues Cat said:

I should rephrase then. If you're going to go with a premium high end speaker you would want to use a high end mid and tweeter to get the most out of the speakers.

So why use a Beyma speaker and a relatively mid peaky Eminence?

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When I ordered my Dr Bass cabs I talked to Marc about this. He said that doing the Beyma upgrade on the 12 or 15 produced a substantial improvement in sound that was worth the price of the upgrade. With the mid and horn upgrade there was a slight improvement in sound but nowhere near enough to make it worth the price of the upgrade.

Blues Cat said:

I've read Bgavin's posts on the difference between a closed back Eminence, and the open back Beyma mid that needs it's own box. I think he said smoother, sweeter w/better off axis response IIRC.

Bgavin care to add?

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This conversation is pointless as the points of reference are the brand names, not specific drivers. You need to identify the specific driver made by whichever company for this to make any sense. A box is tuned to work with specific driver parameters and NOT the brand. Beyma makes a lot of drivers for various usages and applications, so 'Beyma' means nothing unless you identify which driver it is.

lowmid1 said:

When I ordered my Dr Bass cabs I talked to Marc about this. He said that doing the Beyma upgrade on the 12 or 15 produced a substantial improvement in sound that was worth the price of the upgrade. With the mid and horn upgrade there was a slight improvement in sound but nowhere near enough to make it worth the price of the upgrade.

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I am deeply suspicious of a small company that obviously does not do Behringer sales volume offering a speaker product that could be 'upgraded' for better sonic performance. Are they taking advantage of a less than informed market? Are their cabs designed by sight rather than engineered for optimal performance? Are their components picked out by chance from a catalogue? Is the sonic consequence of their design a chance happening?

Certainly 6 string guitarists swap speakers in their boxes for tonal colouration -i.e. how a speaker breaks up when the coils are overdriven might sound more pleasing to the ear or not; and the top end roll off of various guitar speaker drivers vary a bit from 2.5 to 3.5khz. The bottom end roll off seldom matters as most of the guitar cab boxes roll off most the low end below 100 hz anyway by the way they are designed.

If you are talking about bass cabinets, this sort of tonal swapping I suppose is possible if you are dealing with single speaker distortion and the limitations of a single driver in a box. In a multi driver box like the Dr bass 3 way cabs, this sort of 'let's hear what it might sound like' empirical approach doesn't really lend any confidence.

Any driver in any box will make a sound if you feed a signal strong enough to drive it, and you may even like it, but it does not lend the manufacturer any edge with regard to knowledgeable design. Certainly swapping drivers will change something and you may even like it, and describe it with lyrical prose, - it would be better to know what is happening. Fitting a more sensitive mid driver will mean more mid output in a 3 way passive crossovered design, and a less sensitive mid driver a mid dip, one situation may be more useful for fretless expression and the other for slap bass. I don't doubt the sincerity of the people in the company in servicing the muso's needs but what they do and how they do it certainly adds more mystery and misunderstanding to the process of selecting cabs.

Whether they benefit commercially from exploiting the mystery i do not know, ... my guess is they would benefit commercially if there was less.

Schroeder certainly benefited from the mystery mojo around his cabs and I think his was largely an empirical process. I understand they offered a tweeter upgrade. When a manufacturer does this, it must be that they are not convinced about an identifiable sonic goal in technical terms but they are just aiming at getting to a ballpark, sometimes getting there, sometimes justing getting to the carpark outside the ballpark.

There is no need for a manufacturer to necessarily know more than their customers, but if they don't know what they are doing in technical terms, and their customers don't know what they are doing, it makes for a very confused situation. You pays your money and you gets what you want and when you do this maybe reflect that bass players probably deserve better than staring at the moon for cheese.