- Nov 24, 2008
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- Disclosures
- Owner & designer, AudioKinesis; Auth. mfg, Big E (Home Audio only)
Do you guys have any idea how hard it is to compete with Mike Arnopol's cabs?? Okay pardon the aviation analogy... I'm a frustrated aerospace engineer wanna-be who kept flunking Calculus...
At the tail end of World War Two, the Germans introduced jets... in particular, the Me-262 (which was such a cool plane that Blue Oyster Cult wrote a song about it.). The Me-262 was about a hundred MPH faster than the best Allied fighters in an age where speed was king, and it had a heavier armament than just about any other fighter (four 20-mm cannons in the nose). So, it's faster and hits harder. Now there were still things that a P-51 Mustang pilot could do to compete in some ways, so it wasn't totally "game over", but the game was definitely changed.
Mike's MVW cabs are like those early jets, and my cabs are like a late-model P-51. There are still a few things I can do to stay in the game, but the game has definitely changed.
I'm working on something that still won't beat Mike's cabs at what Mike's cabs do well, but will hopefully expand a bit on what my cabs have been able to do fairly well. Competing against him pushes me to try to improve what I do, and maybe I push him a bit too from time to time. Unlike the Germans and the Allies, Mike and I have secret treaties to discuss our best projects with one another and we do so all the time, and offer each other advice and encouragement and even assistance. (anybody catch what I did there?)
When I read this post, about how my 1505 was able to hang with the MAS112 in some ways at least, I went in and bragged to my wife about it.
Wow - thanks! I had been waiting for the day when you would comment on how the two compare. I would guess that the NV610 does some things better than my cab, and that it just plain sounds really good.
One might be tempted to say that resistance is futile, but my inner nerd keeps reminding that resistance is actually voltage divided by current...
The designer of the Subway series is really good, and his specs all look realistic and honest to me. I think he's using a custom Kappalite variant. I would guess that in raw performance the two cabs are in the same ballpark, with the Subway going a bit deeper (I trust their specs).
Very interesting. I had to think about this a bit.
One of the things I try to do in my bass cabs is, make the boxes just barely big enough to reach my low-end target. The TC112 is bigger than the Hathor 1203 for two reasons: First, it was originally designed for a custom Kappalite that needed a bit more internal volume than the stock Kappalite 3012LF. Second, given the dimensions of the woofer, horn, and ports, there's not much that can be done to further scrunch it. Anyway this approach means we get only as much output from the port as we need to nail that first overtone of low-B. You see, the more a cab "relies" on port output in the low end, the worse the low-end pitch definition tends to be.
Here's why: The Helmholtz box resonance decays slowly. Think of blowing across the mouth of an empty beer bottle. The tone actually continues for a little while after you stop blowing. So let's say a cab is tuned to 52 Hz, and you play an A (fundamental at 55 Hz). The 52 Hz Helmholtz resonance is strongly excited by the 55 Hz fundamental, so as the note decays, the pitch actually shifts in the direction that resonance. So with my cabs relying a bit more on the output from the front of the cone (and consequently not having as big and deep of a low end as some of their competitors), my cabs tend to have less energy coming from the pitch-shifting port... but, my low end isn't as big. Tradeoffs, always tradeoffs.
The above paragraph may describe part of what engedi1 observed, but I think there's a bit more to it:
You see, the Thunderchild 112 and Hathor 1203 cabs have significantly different tuning frequencies: Either 52 or 38 Hz for the TC112 (depending on whether two ports are open, or just one), and the single port on the 1203 tunes it to about 46 Hz. So, no matter what note he plays, the pitch-shifting thing is spread out and is therefore not as acute. So qualitatively, the whole may indeed be a bit greater than the sum of the parts, in this case.
Which makes me think that, for other cab combinations, it might make sense to at least try different port tunings.
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