AudioKinesis Cabs Part VI...

[steubig]

wow.

glad to hear you're basically okay

 

[fnordlyone]

Glad your safe, Duke. I once had to (try) to drain a Chevy sedan gas tank in order to drop it and get to the broken fuel pump inside (nice design, Detroit). Let me tell you, it looks a lot easier in movies/tv. Any tool is better than a hose. Gas supplies will get better soon. For once south LA was pretty much spared and after Houston took in many Katrina/Rita refugees... Cajuns don't forget... and love to go on boat rides!
f

 

[Kirk Bryant]

Stay safe Duke! I'm old enough to remember the gas crisis in the early 70's. I was about 20 and was stranded for a couple of days until I got a hose and stole about five gallons to get me home from a truck parked down the street from my girlfriends. Seems worse now than it did at the time. I'd only done it once or twice and didn't have it down to not get a mouthful of gas. Lol

 

[emjazz]

Super happy to hear you're out of danger, Duke. My sister-in-law is in Katy, just outside of Houston. She and the kids just moved within Katy a few weeks ago. She can't get anywhere but they didn't get flooded, however their old place is flooded everywhere. They got lucky.

 

[Altitude]

I have an old friend who lives in the Woodlands. She is OK, but her parents live in Kingwood and they were evacuated from their home in a boat on Tuesday. Astounding.

 

[N. Kentucky Bass]

Now that the Birdhaus cabs have been out for a while, can any of you using one in an acoustic band setting provide impressions of how it sounds with acoustic bass? I'm particularly looking for impressions on how well it conveys the intrinsic sound of acoustic bass "air" and upper harmonics given the lack of a tweeter. I've gigged Crazy8s and Crazy88s, which sound great with acoustic bass but they have a tweeter.

Duke and I traded some email about adding a horn and crossover to the Birdhaus 48 but it would have become a very expensive 50 pound, 27" high cab which is too much for me to lug to a barebones acoustic gig.

How well does the Birdhaus 46 hang volume wise say with a couple of acoustic guitars and lightly amplified vocals?

The main attraction is lateral projection with the side speakers. Especially for outdoor gigs! I'd be using it with acoustic bass guitar. Thanks.

 

[srcTW]

I have an old friend who lives in the Woodlands. She is OK, but her parents live in Kingwood and they were evacuated from their home in a boat on Tuesday. Astounding.

I live in The Woodlands and our home was spared.

The last two days I've been assisting in teams that are demo'ing houses that were impacted. Today we were in a house that had 5 feet of water during the flood. We took the entire first floor to the studs. The amount of garbage, drywall, appliances, and furniture on the streets from all of the houses was astounding. And I can find this sort of thing pretty much wherever I go. It's bad.

Please consider donating to relief efforts and offering prayers or thoughts depending on your persuasion.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

 

[DukeLeJeune]

If any of you guys know someone who lost their cab(s) to Hurricane Harvey, who needs a cab for gigging and tunes to low-E, you might take a look at this and see if you think it might work for them:

Free to a good, soggy home [Hurricane Harvey related]

 

[steubig]

you're a good man.

 

[Dee-man]

How well does the Birdhaus 46 hang volume wise say with a couple of acoustic guitars and lightly amplified vocals?

The B46 would easily be able to hang under those circumstances, especially indoors, and would disperse the sound as advertised. Based on a half dozen or so living room acoustic jams and one outdoor gig at a local farmer's market (after I turned up to around 11:15 on my amp, a guy sitting at a table 50 or so feet away had no problem hearing me in the mix). Guild BC4E ABG into Lightning Boy Op-2 Comp into a WW Blue light. And my B46 is still in the break-in phase, if that still applies with 6's.

I can hear the "acoustic" difference when I'm using my Guild vs, my fretless 4-string (with a foam mute), and there's plenty of high end/open-ness for me, but that's obviously not an upright.

 

[bassasaurus]

No post activity for awhile. Duke, everything good post Harvey on your end?

 

[McFarlin]

Well, if it's post activity you want, I'll happily report that a down payment was made for a 1533 to accompany and occasionally cuddle my 1203.
I'm already .

 

[DukeLeJeune]

No post activity for awhile. Duke, everything good post Harvey on your end?

Harvey never made it far enough inland to get us when it was along the Texas coast. When we were looking at moving to Texas a couple years ago, I was vetoing anything that looked vulnerable to flooding.

I shipped several bass cabs in the past few days, but right now I need to switch over to home audio mode to do crossovers for a speaker system that will be shown at a big audio show in Denver in three weeks. An opportunity came up: Totally out of the blue, the director of the show is giving me and a colleague a room, designated an "innovation room", so I'm scrambling to turn a hopefully innovative idea into a hopefully innovative speaker! Fortunately my colleague has taken responsibility for providing the enclosures (which were already in the pipeline) and the drivers (which includes some really cool Beryllium-diaphragm compression drivers). I did the enclosure design and now I'm working on the crossover.

One of the limitations of home audio is that our home listening rooms are pretty small, and super-impose their "small room signature" atop the acoustic information on the recording. So we can spend big bucks on a stereo, but the small room signature is still there. I've found a way to address that. Briefly, by carefully managing the radiation patterns, it's possible to trick the ears into thinking you're in a significantly larger acoustic space (no multichannel needed - it works with ordinary stereo recordings). In a larger acoustic space, it's easier for the acoustic information on the recording to dominate, so this is also perceptually a step closer to hearing "more of the recording and less of the room".

In the hotel room we're going to have a remote control setup that allows listeners to toggle between "normal" and "bigroom" modes from their seats, and come to their own conclusions about it. Well only one person at a time can operate the remote, but everyone in the room will be able to hear its effects. If nothing else, show-goers will hopefully find it an interesting departure from rooms where there is essentially no audience participation.

So we hope to live up to the "innovation room" mandate that the show director has given us. Okay that's enough of a break for now - gotta get back to it!

 

[wagdog]

Duke, do you find there is much crossover between your home audio and bass designs?

 

[DukeLeJeune]

Duke, do you find there is much crossover between your home audio and bass designs?

Yes, especially with the Thunderchild series. Here's a picture of one of my home audio speakers... Kappalite 3012LF, same Pyle horn as my first-generation Thunderchild cabs, different compression driver, but what you don't see is a rear-firing tweeter, same as in the "acoustic friendly" versions of the Thunderchild cabs.

So there are some specific similarities, as well as some conceptual ones, such as placing high priority on the radiation pattern in an effort to minimize the spectral discrepancy between the first-arrival and reverberant sounds. The rear-firing tweeter in particular plays a role in that.

There are differences as well. For instance, the radiation pattern management technique alluded to in my previous post for tricking the ear/brain system into thinking the room is bigger than it really is, well that's not something that has a place in live sound; reality needs no such enhancement.

High-end audio has been frustrating for me. One of its dirty little secrets is that most audiophiles listen primarily with their eyes. Most also subscribe to a set of cherished beliefs that work against what I do, such as "horns honk" and "big woofers are slow". Bass players on the other hand tend to be far more results-oriented, and to get over their prejudices very quickly. Audiophiles as a group claim to be consistent in their likes and dislikes, but then their assessments are all over the map as if each speaks his own dialect, such that one audiophile seldom really trusts the descriptions of another. On the other hand bass players openly and freely have huge differences in their likes and dislikes, but their assessments are very consistent - they speak the same dialect! - and therefore they tend to trust one another's descriptions a lot more than audiophiles do.

 

[Type-55]

Good description of the high end audio world.

 

[nutdog]

We're training a new sound guy for our weekly, volunteer event of which music is a vital part. He fancies himself an audiophile with the requisite dedicated room of tubes and vinyl.

The sound system is old and poorly designed. We were discussing ways to improve it. He recommended a power conditioner because when the drums, bass and guitar all played at once the amps couldn't get enough current. The power conditioner would store power needed for the peak draws. It would make an audible difference.

 

[ahc]

We're training a new sound guy for our weekly, volunteer event of which music is a vital part. He fancies himself an audiophile with the requisite dedicated room of tubes and vinyl.

The sound system is old and poorly designed. We were discussing ways to improve it. He recommended a power conditioner because when the drums, bass and guitar all played at once the amps couldn't get enough current. The power conditioner would store power needed for the peak draws. It would make an audible difference.

What he really needs is this:

 

[mngnt]

/tangentOn

Not to derail the thread, but as I've recently purchased a "fancy" set of headphones and an amp/DAC for listening (not playing), I've been reading a lot from "audiophile" sites and it's mostly nauseating....

Except I also discovered an interesting somewhat "anti-audiophile" forum. While they can be a bunch of jerks, they seem to be on the reasonable side of things. From their "About Us":

The evolution of the original irreverent and irrelevant and non-authoritative site for headphone measurements, i.e. frequency response graphs, CSD waterfall plots, subjective gear reviews. Too objective for subjectivists; too subjective for objectivsts.

They talk speakers too, and if you want some high-end audio talk it may be up your alley.

Super Best Audio Friends

/tangentOff

 

[bonin in the boneyard]

Too objective for subjectivists; too subjective for objectivsts.

That's a motto if I've ever heard one.