Cabs---Less power, more tone?

[JimmyM]

Exactly!

If you want to understand more, download some spec sheets from speaker manufacturers and then you can quantify what you're hearing. All these woolly terms of mass, stiffness and so on are dealt with in terms of quantifiable parameters like Mms, Cms, Rms.

These olders speakers to which you refer exhibit tons of distortion compared to many more modern speakers. You are obviously not hearing that as distortion but an interesting tone with a lack of boxiness, but nevertheless it is distortion.

Comparing old SVT cabs with new SVT cabs is sadly not very apples and apples because the old SVT speakers were very good for the time but the new SVT speakers are about as cheap as bass guitar speakers get.

Alex

You're definitely right about the newer SVT speakers. I know they used Edens as an upgrade speaker for a while, but I don't even think they offer an upgrade now. I don't think I'd have liked the Edens, though. I can't stand them in Eden cabs. All high end, no lows.

I don't get what you said about hearing distortion in older speakers and translating that as interesting tone, though. Even if you don't push them at all, they sound more interesting, so how are they distorting? If they're made well, they're made well, regardless of when they were made.

The TS parameters, that's for greater minds than mine to deal with. I deal with "sounds good" and "sounds bad." And if my impression of high powered speaker cabs was limited to the SVT, I might agree that I'm not making a fair comparison. But I haven't heard any that sound as open as their lower powered counterparts. Heard a few that do pretty well, but never as good.

 

[JimB52]

My Musicman Audiophile cabs are rated at something like 350w and 600w RMS, and sound great driven by a 100w tube amp or a 300w tube amp. Maybe the good tone is in the tubes breaking up and reproduced by a driver that doesn't have to work very hard. (sorry about the english I just woke up)

 

[12bass]

I don't get what you said about hearing distortion in older speakers and translating that as interesting tone, though. Even if you don't push them at all, they sound more interesting, so how are they distorting?

Distortion is what you have when the output is different than the input. Speakers naturally produce distortion at orders of magnitude higher than most amplifiers. My guess is that you just happen to like the distortions that certain speakers add....

Here's a definition from Invalid Link Removed

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Distortion: Any difference, apart from level, between an original signal and one that has been processed. One cause may be the overloading of the input stage of an amplifier, but many other forms of distortion, such as harmonic distortion are common.[/FONT]

In the case of a speaker, you can change 'processed' to 'reproduced'....

 

[Bassmec]

You're definitely right about the newer SVT speakers. I know they used Edens as an upgrade speaker for a while, but I don't even think they offer an upgrade now. I don't think I'd have liked the Edens, though. I can't stand them in Eden cabs. All high end, no lows.

I don't get what you said about hearing distortion in older speakers and translating that as interesting tone, though. Even if you don't push them at all, they sound more interesting, so how are they distorting? If they're made well, they're made well, regardless of when they were made.

The TS parameters, that's for greater minds than mine to deal with. I deal with "sounds good" and "sounds bad." And if my impression of high powered speaker cabs was limited to the SVT, I might agree that I'm not making a fair comparison. But I haven't heard any that sound as open as their lower powered counterparts. Heard a few that do pretty well, but never as good.

That engineers modified their analysis tools and start trying to find out "possibly using the human ear as well" why it is that a particular vintage cabinet with "less competent speakers" sounds more agile with distinctly warmer resonance's and a feeling that they are somehow more directly in contact with your instrument. My old SVT cab died in a garage fire and so I tried a new one. It felt very odd in the shop, I put it down to the speakers not being broken in and took it home to give it a chance, OH and to meet its relations, thats when things got nasty.
I plugged it up next to its Tin badge 2x115 relations and **** all was coming out of the 8 X 10, I checked to see if it was an impedance thing but no it didn't improve with age and now my rig looks a cock up cos the only thing that keeps up with the old altec SVT 115 Cabs
at the moderate volume I play at is an Eden 8 X 10 LXT but its not the right hight. Still a 1 U flight case is all u need to stick on top of the Ampeg Cabs two bring it level.
Big ports and ducts and the ingress of rodents ?
Cant we take this into consideration, some of us live in the countryside
and rehearse in barns, put a grill on the cab so things don't live in it.
Was fun though! if you where real quiet you could plug up flick standby off hit b and the mouse would come out the bottom port of the Eden as if propelled by a rocket. It was a very thick mouse cos it kept coming back, well, till we put down loads of poison then we didn't see it again,
its little skeletal body is still probably in there.
Is there loads of lagging in these eden cabs. Is that to make a nice comfy beds for mice?.
You are right it has no bass at all but it adds good definition to the old fifteens which of course have.

 

[fdeck]

I don't get what you said about hearing distortion in older speakers and translating that as interesting tone, though. Even if you don't push them at all, they sound more interesting, so how are they distorting? If they're made well, they're made well, regardless of when they were made.

Perhaps the issue is that "distortion" is not meant as a pejorative, but is being used as a purely technical term for anything that the speaker is "doing" to the signal.

On the other hand, "what your speakers are doing, is caused by what your speakers are doing" is a non-answer. That's why people are trying to drill down to possible root causes, which include both nonlinear effects and variations in frequency response.

 

[BillyRay]

There's maybe some amount of "mystique" that's involved also. I remember when Jimmy put up three clips and asked people to find wich one was the swr, vintage B15 and Markbass. Not many people guessed all three right. So there might be some placebo or psychological effect associated wich using gear we are familiar with.

We see the Ampeg logo on that old 810. We know how these sound thus we are happy. That's not to say the new ones sound like the old ones, but there might be some "screwy" stuff going on the old brain when we play through a rig we like and one we dislike. I know that Jimmy likes old-school tones due to the music he plays, so it figures that he would like vintage gear more. This means it sound more musical to him. To people who play world music/fusion and use the new speakers, more musical might mean what they hear coming from Schroeder, Eden, etc.

I also happen to agree that I like more speakers that are driven harder than one speaker that can handle gobs of power. I like to have a little resistance there. To feel the cab working and straining a bit (not much though, I dislike hearing any farting). But I also like the tone of very high spl speakers when they are EQ'ed right (the response is nothing like the old designs) and are in tuned cabinets. This might be where the old boxes outperforms some new ones on some aspects.

Many were in sealed enclosures. We know that this colours the sound.


With all the attention that is given to speaker's wattage rating, it comes to mind that other specs that might have been researched more closely in the past (the actual sound that they produce) might take a backseat nowadays. Thus sound quality might suffer.

Sorry for rambling.

 

[LiquidMidnight]

Interesting thread! I can't really argue either way for the hypthoses proposed here, because I really don't know much about speaker or cabinet engineering. I do seem to agree that I like the sound of a speaker system being pushed a little bit. Then again, any audio system, whether it's a boombox or a PA system, needs a certain threshold of gain going through it to sound "good." I do agree that many of the uber-higher wattage cabs I hear don't sound as good to me as stuff more moderately rated (with the exception of Eden, which has some serious power handling and sounds good to me). I always figured that it just had more to do with the quality of drivers being used, though, rather than the actual power handling of them.

In my experience, I'd rather have a 500 watt cab with a sensitivity rating of 103 db than a 1200 watt cab with a sensitivity rating of 98 db.

 

[12bass]

Perhaps the issue is that "distortion" is not meant as a pejorative, but is being used as a purely technical term for anything that the speaker is "doing" to the signal.

On the other hand, "what your speakers are doing, is caused by what your speakers are doing" is a non-answer. That's why people are trying to drill down to possible root causes, which include both nonlinear effects and variations in frequency response.

Right.... perhaps some think of distortion as necessarily related to something like amplifier clipping, but it isn't. More strictly speaking, whenever the input and output of a given system are related in a non-linear way, distortion exists in the transfer.

In the case of an amplifier driving a speaker, we are changing electrical energy into mechanical energy using transducers which are generally far from linear in their response; hence, they exhibit distortion at their output - and in that scenario, 'distortion' can mean changes in frequency response, phase response, dynamic response, etc.... In other words, whatever aspect of the acoustic output of a speaker which is not directly representative of the input signal represents a type of distortion of that signal.

 

[bilson]

I think so. I think the trend with building bigger cabs to handle gobs and gobs of wattage has contributed to poor tone in them. It seems that speaker manufacturers now cater to the players who want to use excessively high wattage power amps and drive the crap out of equally high wattage speakers without blowing them. Which is fine if that's what you're into.

But not all of us are into it. Some of us play at very moderate volumes, and even the ones who use the high wattage rigs mostly use them turned way down. Even if they play loudly, most high-wattage players don't use a quarter of what's available to them. And the cabs designed to handle them all sound boxy.

I believe it's because you have to make high-wattage driver cones too stiff and thick to have good tone. The cones need to vibrate, but to vibrate at 1000w and not blow up, they have to be made very heavy duty. But if you run them at 50w worth of power, they hardly move. I think this is why smaller single speaker cabs built to take more than a couple hundred watts can sound stiff as well. But take a cab like an SVT 810 with some vintage drivers in it that are rated for 300w and it sings like a big fat bass bird. And while the Eminence Delta 15A in my Fliptops B-15N cab sounds very good and handles way more than the vintage drivers they used to come with, stick a 100w JBL from 1966 in it and it really comes to life.

SO I'd like to see cab makers make cabs with drivers that may not be able to take as much punishment but will vibrate in a more toneful manner. I'm not saying get rid of high power speaker cabs, but make lower wattage versions as well. I don't need manufacturers to protect me from myself with cabs that won't ever blow in a million years the way I use them. I want tone, and those of us who treasure tone over wattage don't have near enough choices.

At least that's the way I see it.

Jimmy, ever since I have started playing with my Basson 8x10 I've really picked up on this. The 4x10 and 1x15 set up I had before just seemed to have more tone to it. More roundness, more fullness, more punch. The Basson 8x10 is certainly one of those high powered cabs you're talking about, and I do need the volume since I'm rarely backed by a PA, but the cab needs at least 2000 watts, or else the amp will clip. Right now I'm running 2500 watts through it but for the longest time I had to wrestle with the eq to get the tone and punch I wanted out of it and I'm still not so sure I'm happy..

 

[seamonkey]

It's either frequency response or distortion. Those are pretty much your choices. Distortion can be at a low level where we would not characterize it as "overdrive," yet it could be producing the effect that you perceive.

One could speculate all day about the root cause. Drilling any deeper requires measurements.

+1

On another note, new modelers do take measurements of existing cabinets via Impulse Responses (IR) which actually may be a frequency sweep. (even at different volume levels)

There may be a big push these days for restoration, but preservation by saving impulses could help to see if there really was something special with some of these cabinets. And maybe restore a cabinet to what it should sound like.

We all can't afford or physically find every cabinet out there, and if they're old they may not have been stored or treated the same over the years. Maybe an average or impulse of several is needed.

 

[seamonkey]

Distortion isn't necessarily heard as clipping. Any deviation from the input waveform is a form of distortion - it could be artifacts from compression when you stress the drivers.

+1
Good point.

Something else I recently played with. Distortion at bass frequencies isn't heard as much as distortion that creeps into voice frequencies range. Say anything below 300hz (YMMV), it's tough to hear as distortion, well distortion in the way "driving" distortion we tend to thrive on sounds.

 

[fdeck]

+1

On another note, new modelers do take measurements of existing cabinets via Impulse Responses (IR) which actually may be a frequency sweep. (even at different volume levels)

There may be a big push these days for restoration, but preservation by saving impulses could help to see if there really was something special with some of these cabinets. And maybe restore a cabinet to what it should sound like.

We all can't afford or physically find every cabinet out there, and if they're old they may not have been stored or treated the same over the years. Maybe an average or impulse of several is needed.

Going even further, I think it would be beneficial to archive some measurement data from classic amps as well, including waveforms below and above the clipping threshold.

 

[morebass!]

jimmy - I agree with your hypothesis. I suggested the same thing a few years here on TB and didn't get much of a response - you descrbed it much better. My MOA is a B-15N that I've been trying to duplicate at a louder level for years. My current stage rig is an SVT Classic with a NV425. Very nice, but not the same thing. The B-15N seems to have a quickness and low-mid punch that kicks like no other. Perhaps the only answer is four B-15Ns!

 

[denton57]

jimmy - I agree with your hypothesis. I suggested the same thing a few years here on TB and didn't get much of a response - you descrbed it much better. My MOA is a B-15N that I've been trying to duplicate at a louder level for years. My current stage rig is an SVT Classic with a NV425. Very nice, but not the same thing. The B-15N seems to have a quickness and low-mid punch that kicks like no other. Perhaps the only answer is four B-15Ns!

Sorry to derail this thread, but have you tried a vintage SVT in ch 2, morebass? Isnt it the same pre as a B15 but with a 300 watt power section?

Back to the subject...I love the inferior CTS speakers in my 8x10 too, Jimmy.

 

[JimmyM]

There's maybe some amount of "mystique" that's involved also. I remember when Jimmy put up three clips and asked people to find wich one was the swr, vintage B15 and Markbass. Not many people guessed all three right. So there might be some placebo or psychological effect associated wich using gear we are familiar with.

We see the Ampeg logo on that old 810. We know how these sound thus we are happy. That's not to say the new ones sound like the old ones, but there might be some "screwy" stuff going on the old brain when we play through a rig we like and one we dislike. I know that Jimmy likes old-school tones due to the music he plays, so it figures that he would like vintage gear more. This means it sound more musical to him. To people who play world music/fusion and use the new speakers, more musical might mean what they hear coming from Schroeder, Eden, etc.

Forget SVT cabs for a while. I don't think there's a cab alive that couldn't benefit by lower power well-made drivers. A Schroeder cab that sounds as it does with (for example) 800w handling power would sound even better with lighter duty drivers. And if you need the extra handling, you can still get it. I just don't see why more cab companies don't offer options like that.

 

[LowBSix]

I like HEADROOM and a fat/smooth/punchy piano string type tone as my "normal" sound.
I've found I need plenty of power and a speaker that can handle the power of the complete dynamic range... ppp to fff to speak in "musical" terms.

The ppp (real quiet) still requires bottom and fundamental note.
the fff (reallllllyyyyy loud) still requires all the same.

Meanwhile never to sacrifice tone...

IME, anything less than 300 watts amplification does not provide enough HEADROOM for my personal tone... Small footprint speakers that are efficient like the SCHROEDER 1212L or 1210L are perfect with 300 to 800 watts...

I don't understand so many players wanting to duplicate so-and-so's tone, etc. IMHO, everyone should develop a tone that is recognizable and unique... Otherwise y'all sound the same... In the 80's there was a movement to get away from that "same old slick LA/NY studio sound" People were creative and came out of that with personality to their sound... I hope I'm not off the subject, but I think it ties in.

EFFICIENCY with HEADROOM & DYNAMICS!

 

[alexclaber]

Forget SVT cabs for a while. I don't think there's a cab alive that couldn't benefit by lower power well-made drivers.

The amusing thing about your theory is that thermal power handling is the least relevant spec of any bass guitar speaker!

By the way, have you read any of the posts explaining why you may prefer the tonal difference of older higher distortion speakers?

Alex

 

[JimmyM]

I don't understand so many players wanting to duplicate so-and-so's tone, etc. IMHO, everyone should develop a tone that is recognizable and unique... Otherwise y'all sound the same... In the 80's there was a movement to get away from that "same old slick LA/NY studio sound" People were creative and came out of that with personality to their sound... I hope I'm not off the subject, but I think it ties in.

I agree 100%. But what does it have to do with liking the sound of lighter-duty speakers? Are you saying I'm copying and you're not? This is the kind of thing you post in the Basses forum, not here

 

[LowBSix]

It all ties in... Efficient speakers with appropriate power for personal sound reproduction.... I love lightweight efficient speakers, but IMHO, plent of power is still required IMHO IMHO IMHO IMHO IMHO

 

[JimmyM]

The amusing thing about your theory is that thermal power handling is the least relevant spec of any bass guitar speaker!

By the way, have you read any of the posts explaining why you may prefer the tonal difference of older higher distortion speakers?

Alex

Of course. I wouldn't solicit answers and not read them. A lot of it goes over my head, though. It's pretty interesting to see the scientific logic behind my completely non-scientific preferences, even if it it flies right by my head. So what are the most important factors or measurements we're looking at when analyzing why we prefer some drivers over others?