Are 15's too slow....

[CL400Peavey]

Doesn't FOH usually have 15" or 18" bins to fill out the sound anyways? i prefer 10's for the speed n clarity i get behind me.

 

[BassmanPaul]

To answer the question in the thread title: NO!

Just listen to a JBL 15.

 

[10cc]

I'm gonna be slow getting here, be about fifteen.

 

[Joedog]

My wife says mine is too FAST!

 

[Ross W. Lovell]

...for punk/metal???? I'm still trying to decide what to put under my Avatar 2x10 Delta and I'm just wondering if an Avatar 1x15 would be to "sloppy" during our speedier songs??

I think 12 5" speakers will work just fine.

Just get good ones though.

The response is so much faster than your actual fingering and the cheap ones play the wrong notes.

Don't forget to get rid of wired cords. The latency is really noticeable with cable which is why I only use a solid copper buss.

Could have sworn this was covered in the FAQ section many times before.

 

[JimmyM]

Maybe so, but I think in this case it's accurate. 15"s do feel like they respond slower than 10's to me. I don't know what causes it and frankly I don't care. It's in the way the note blooms (there's another good technical term there). Like it takes just that little bit of lag time for the note to reach its fullest potential as opposed to the 10's, which seem to hit it right away.

And then three years later I got my B-15 fixed up with a good speaker, and I realized Bill was absolutely right!

 

[beans-on-toast]

I certainly slow down after moving a lot of heavy equipment.

 

[Jim Carr]

fEARful 15/6/1 cabs are too fast!

 

[rodl2005]

Shirley it depends on which hill ya roll em down?

 

[Solarmist]

^ ..... and don't call us Shirley.

 

[timsmcm]

The speed that a cone moves in a driver has more to do with the dampening factor of the amp to oppose the forces of a well made and designed cabinet to the forces of the spider, the surround, the motor (magnet), the voice coil, and the weight and flexability or stifness of the cone. You don't see the dampening factor talked much about in guitar amps but you will see it very much in high end home and car audio. But you can really tell when the right amp meets the right speaker cabinet no matter if it has 15s or whatever. Dampening factor is the power to control (or put the brakes on in layman's terms) the moving part of the driver. Love me some high end 2 channel audio.

 

[agedhorse]

And because damping factor is a highly over-touted spec., it often finds its way into the marketing of the high end audio and especially the car sound industry where the buyers do not understand what it means, nor its impact on the reproduction system as a whole.

 

[Rick James]

We haven't come very far in the last 11 years, have we.

And because damping factor is a highly over-touted spec., it often finds its way into the marketing of the high end audio and especially the car sound industry where the buyers do not understand what it means, nor its impact on the reproduction system as a whole.

+1. The same uninformed buyers who think damping factor is significant also think that a $20k tube power amp is the holy grail, even though it might have a damping factor of ten or lower. The usefulness of damping factor was dismissed long ago. For instance, read this:
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Pierce wrote this in 1994, but he essentially just rehashed what had been explained by Theile and Small 20 years before that.

 

[Gatlin]

I once played through 15s that were so slow that by the time I'd finished the song they were only at the first chorus.

I almost injured myself laughing at this comment. In the words of Larry the Cable Guy "I don't care who you are that's funny right there".

 

[BassmanPaul]

My wife says mine is too FAST!

You’re being naughty Joe.

 

[chadds]

My wife says mine is too FAST!

Bragging about speed in that arena?

 

[Al Kraft]

Given the speed of sound in the typical environments we play in, I can't see "fast or slow" being even slightly detectable to anyone or scientifically valid. A driver either generates a sound wave when it is so commanded or it doesn't...if it is "slow to respond relative to the input signal", the frequency/phase would be off...just doesn't happen IME.

I can certainly see how a driver with more of a mid frequency focus could sound "faster/tighter/crisper" as perceived by our ears, but the speed of sound would remain the same provided the medium it's travelling through remains constant. If a 10" driver sounds faster/tighter/crisper than a 15" driver I would chalk that up to the focus of the frequencies generated and not the size of the driver. Clearly there are a lot of other design variables in play besides driver size, but altering the physics associated with the speed of sound is not one of them IMO.

 

[jbd5015]

These threads are always an interesting read.

The day i learned what speaker size meant for sound was the day i fired up my freshly rebuilt B15 through 2 freshly re-coned CTS 15's.

Speaker size means, what size the speaker is. If it sounds poopy, blame the cabinet, blame the manufacturer, blame the amp or your bass, or the speaker itself. Don't blame its size. Don't have preconceived notions about the size of the speaker.

All of the 15's ive played through have had SIGNIFICANTLY better mids and highs than ANY of the 210s or 410s ive played through.

 

[Feral Feline]

The nice thing about 15s is that eventually they turn 16 and, with luck and diligence in studying, aren't as slow as when they were 15.

 

[agedhorse]

The nice thing about 15s is that eventually they turn 16 and, with luck and diligence in studying, aren't as slow as when they were 15.

They are even better when they turn 18