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AudioKinesis Cabs Part VI...

#6,101
DukeLeJeune said:
So is that pronounced "do que" or "due que"??

I think the word for Nostatic's cab is overdue... like that never happens...



Isky, welcome!

My thanks to JimmyM and lo-freq and slagheap and 4StringTheorist and MarkA for your excellent responses! Thanks for filling in for me!

The switch on that cab rolls off the top end of the horn north of about 3.5 kHz, rather than turning it all the way off. So you might engage it to reduce string noise, or if you plan to use a lot of distortion, or if you're going for a more "old school" vibe.

The Thunderchild 115 is voiced "smooth and even", in part because back then I did not know how to voice a cab to "sound good on electric bass". Fortunately "smooth and even" works, and for some bass players it works very well. You'll probably find that the cab takes EQ well, and is pretty good at letting you hear changes that you make elsewhere in the chain. Imo the horn in that cab is not your "average" bass cab horn.

Mike Arnopol made that ultralight fiberglass/foam sandwich enclosure, he probably made a couple dozen or so. That makes your cab is a rare beast, with a pretty good power-to-weight ratio.

A bit of trivia: An award-winning studio designer designed a pretty fancy studio for a rock star and specified a pair of Thunderchild 115's for the tracking monitors. Unfortunately the contractor in charge of building the studio decided to play it safe and went with JBLs, which I'm sure work quite well, but I was THIS CLOSE to having my cabs in the studio of someone I first saw in concert in 1977 when I was in high school.
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Contractor fell victim to "judging a book by its cover" me thinks!
 
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#6,102
John D Harris said:
Contractor fell victim to "judging a book by its cover" me thinks!
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You're probably right. The only studio monitor gigs I've gotten have been when the studio owner was making his own decisions and was cost-conscious enough and open-minded enough to be willing to stray from the beaten path based on his acoustician's recommendation.
 
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#6,103
4StringTheorist said:
When you unplug a port, remove the entire plug, both the orange plastic and its rubber gasket. If you leave the rubber ring in, you're altering the properties of the port.
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Just for information,
on my TC112V1 i even like to leave only one of these rubbers in one of the two ports, sounds a little bit different (and better to me) than fully open. On a boomy stage i add a full plug in the other port. Even more possibility..
 
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#6,104
John D Harris said:
Contractor fell victim to "judging a book by its cover" me thinks!
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I have a feeling this happens all the time to those who own Duke's cabs. Just happened to me a couple days ago with this cover band I started playing in.

We have had a few practices and were asked to play a really low profile gig for some friends of the band leader. It's rough. These guys are in a way different place than I am in life and with music taste, and they've all played with each other for years.

Anyways, the bandleader was talking about how the entire gig was going to be backlined with "really professional stuff"

"Yeah, they're going to have a custom Pearl Drum set, and hey, remember that Bass Player in Jodie's band? That is the bass rig that is going to be there."

[He looks at my Darkglass 900 and Hathor 1203 judgingly and says] "Luke, you're definitely going to be able to keep up with us using the rig that will be there. It's a real, professional rig."

I wanted to say "Dude, my Gain is on 5, my Master is on 2, and I have all the EQ flat. I have the port in on the Hathor. You really have no idea what this rig is capable of. She ain't even barely opened up yet!"

But alas, it's not worth it. Not with these guys. The moral of the story is that I will probably be playing some kind of Ampeg fridge or something next Saturday, a real bass players rig.

BARF!!! Lol
 
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#6,105
I use that same cab (non-composite) ...used it just last night in fact. You've gotten great advice here already. I find 2 diagonal plugs more or less the default, and keep the horn on. However, just last week I was on a monstrous outdoor stage with a concrete floor where the low end was lost and the horn sounded like gravel - just plain strange acoustics. Out came the plugs and down went the horn switch. ...stage sound peace restored! ...and we had a great PA, so there's that :). Don't be afraid to try things your ears suggest and learn the cab's tricks. Fortunately, it takes only seconds and is totally reversible.
 
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#6,107
John D Harris said:
Port to taste, especially in boomy or semi-boomy rooms:: more plugged ports yields less boom = tighter sounding low frequencies.
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I've been fighting room boom on a wooden stage for an upcoming theater thing. The port...I forgot about the port!?!?

DukeLeJeune said:
someone I first saw in concert in 1977 when I was in high school.
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?

cassidy.jpg
 
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#6,114
Marial said:
Hey Duke, what do you think of this design? Seems interesting?

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The following is just my opinion, and I invite correction from Brad Johnson or Drue or anyone else who knows more about these cabs.

I'm not sure of everything that's going on internally with the cab, but I think the enclosure is in effect a (rather innovative) ported box, and I think the slotted chamber down at the bottom that the downfiring woofer fires into does double-duty as part of the port. Imo that's pretty darn clever!

I think the downfiring woofer will reinforce the front-firing woofer in-phase at long wavelengths (low frequencies), gradually transitioning to approximately semi-random-phase at short wavelengths, because of the path-length differences that the geometry causes. In English, the down-firing woofer will reinforce the lows more than it reinforces the mids.

The lows will be omnidirectional regardless of where they exit the box, but the mids that exit the side-slots of the down-firing woofer will of course be dispersed to the sides. Imo this is a good thing, though I would guess they'd still be down in volume quite a bit relative to the omnidirectional lows.

The chamber that the down-firing woofer fires into probably has two effects that I can think of: First, it probably rolls off the upper mids to a certain extent. Second, it increases the effective moving mass of the downfiring woofer by "coupling" the air within the chamber to the woofer cone more effectively than if there were no chamber present. This would slightly reduce the broadband efficiency of the woofer, but at the same time the bottom end would "fatten up" a bit.

The internal volume looks like it's smaller than one might normally use for two woofers. This will reduce the output down low (relative to a bigger box), but will also tend to reduce cone motion, so the excursion-limited power handling is probably pretty good.

I like the tiltback baffle with tweeter down low, which puts the bass player less off-axis than a vertical baffle would.

Imo that cab is a very interesting and creative juggling of the tradeoffs involved in bass cab design. It packs a LOT of SPL capability and muscle into a small package and uses what might be called "acoustic filtering" (rather than electrical filtering) so that the down-firing woofer reinforces the front woofer's lows considerably more than it reinforces the front woofer's mids.

I prototyped a cab that had one front-firing and one down-firing woofer about six years ago and decided not to continue in that direction, but perhaps with different woofers and/or different goal posts I'd have reached a different conclusion.
 
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#6,119
nutdog said:
Why? Did you get into a duel with one before an ill fated canoeing trip?
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no, but I have squealed like a pig from time to time - for other reasons.

Just a personal bias since I play banjo. I don't think they sound right, and to me it is "cheating."

Learn to play the damn proper banjo. The kid on the porch did!
 
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