given all that you have posted, a Faital or 3015 loaded dually is more up your alley. It could feasibly cut your packspace some while cutting the weight in half and increasing output over your current 2x15... Those speaks are more efficient then their LF cousins(emi). Going smaller then that, will cost you sensitivity and potentially tonality. The 12" fullrange speakers are not as universally loved.
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Finally Played One and It Was Terrifying. ;)
- Thread starter SRCRS
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given all that you have posted, a Faital or 3015 loaded dually is more up your alley. It could feasibly cut your packspace some while cutting the weight in half and increasing output over your current 2x15... Those speaks are more efficient then their LF cousins(emi). Going smaller then that, will cost you sensitivity and potentially tonality. The 12" fullrange speakers are not as universally loved.
Keep in mind they are way more efficient than Acme's, but not as efficient as Schroeders, for example. And unlike Acmes you can push them hard without blowing the speaker from mechanical failure. And unlike Schroeders they aren't just "cut-through-the-mix" mid voiced either. IMO they are somewhere in between regarding efficiency where bass players need it the most. If you go with the 18Sound mid driver you will NOT lack for mids. Guaranteed.
I've kept up with some pretty loud rock bands using only my 15/6 and a 400 watt head. Been a VERY long time since I've used a head with less watts so I can't tell you how they are with smaller wattage heads.
Efficiency is commonly measured as the decibel reading 1 meter from the speaker when driven by 1 watt of power. 100dB is very efficient, etc.
Speaking in extremely imprecise language, there are at least three things going on:
1. How much stuff (power, voltage, whatever) is going into the speaker
2. How much stuff (power, SPL, whatever) comes out
3. How loud it is, which has no units of measure
The relationship between 1 and 2 is the "efficiency" or "sensitivity" of which folks typically speak. Folks talk about it, in order to guage what they can expect from different speakers when fed by a given amp, or what different speakers might be able to do when each is driven to its limits. But these are crude gauges because of:
The relationship between 2 and 3 is extremely complex, poorly understood, and probably not captured by any equation or meter.
In practical terms, we can use things like power and sensitivity to guess which speakers are likely to meet our needs, thus making them worth trying out. And they are things that can be captured as design goals for engineers. But the final judge of tone and even volume is our ears.
Totally subscribed to this thread.... I've been gigging a 410 for years now and am ready to make the leap into something different. Last night at practice for the metal band my lead guitarist was complaining about the 5th harmonic on my opened dropped-D being extremely prominent and distorting my tone. At first I didn't know what he was talking about, but after some quick ear training, I could hear what he was talking about. It was as if my low frequencies were dissipating shortly after the attack, leaving the harmonics bare. No wonder pushing my 1000W B4R at 80% still wasn't cutting through the mix!
fEARful cabs definitely seem to answer a lot of my tonal problems (clarity and presence for metal, tight LOW lows for reggae). I'm most interested in a 1212/6, but the 15/6 sure is getting a lot of love. I'm pretty slap happy (go figure), and sometimes like to dial in some bite, so would that require a tweeter? Thanks!
fEARful cabs definitely seem to answer a lot of my tonal problems (clarity and presence for metal, tight LOW lows for reggae). I'm most interested in a 1212/6, but the 15/6 sure is getting a lot of love. I'm pretty slap happy (go figure), and sometimes like to dial in some bite, so would that require a tweeter? Thanks!
scottfeldstein
Roots and fifths and a little extra.
- Mar 8, 2011
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It wouldn't 'require' a tweeter in that the tweeters are crossed over fairly high...I usually recommend them since the added expense and weight is quite minimal. If it doesn't work for you all the time you can always pad it back or turn it off, but you can't have something that isn't there
I like leaving myself options for different styles, different sounding rooms, etc.The reason the 15/6 is the biggest selling fEARful is strictly a 'sound per pound' kinda thing. A 3015 LF actually costs slightly LESS than a 3012LF (something I'll never understand) and gives more SPL which makes it a no brainer for some. The advantage of a 1212/6 is a little more SPL than a single 15 and the coupling effect of two woofers does tend to make for a more 'enveloping' kind of feel/sound. In the end, a lot of people wind up going with a 12/6, or a FEARLESS112 and a 12sub. The 12/6-F112 will actually handle all rehearsals and small to medium size gigs way better than you'd imagine, then the sub can be brought out for the loud gigs, Dub gigs and outdoors. If you want the most extreme 'dub heaven' rig, the 15/6-15sub is insane, IMO...tons of deep true lows and Huge SPL potential.
I probably just muddied the waters more than I helped!!!
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Is a tweeter necessary for slap with a fearful? No, but is it better with one, 1000%.
I have an ASD1001 in my fearful (12/6/1) it is without a doubt the best I've ever heard in a bass cab. The 18sound tweet for the bigger cabs is said to be superior, so I'd want to know some details about that too.
I have an ASD1001 in my fearful (12/6/1) it is without a doubt the best I've ever heard in a bass cab. The 18sound tweet for the bigger cabs is said to be superior, so I'd want to know some details about that too.
popgadget
Commercial User
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I would say they are of average sensitivity with much greater than average power handling ability. The fact that they can handle large amounts of power often leads to the belief that the require lots of power, which isn't accurate. (Unless you need to get stupid loud).
The 12" models are sort of middke ground regarding sensitivity as compared to a lot of common bass cabs until you get below about 80hz. Down there they have higher sensitivity as a lot of cabs are losing output pretty good down there.
The 15" models have pretty good to fairly high sensitivity compared to a lot of common 15's and again trounce them in the deep lows.
Sensitivity can loosely be thought of as "how much loud coming out per watt going in".
"Efficiency" is often used to mean "sensitivity". OK for purposes of discussion here, but technically a different measure all together. Has to do with how much of the power input actually "makes it through" the speaker and ends up as the sound we hear. Even very good speakers may have efficiency of maybe 5%. Meaning if you give one 100 watts, they sound you hear is the result of 5 of those watts "getting through", the other 95 being burned away as heat in the voice coil. Basically, although they have made incredible improvements since they were invented, the speaker is still a horribly inefficient machine.
All laymens terms there. A real engineer (or physicist fdeck
) could explain in greater detail, or at a minimum, blow holes in my vocabulary.
They are very efficient for the bandwidth they serve.
You can easily find a speaker with a higher sensitivity at a frequency of say 1,000 Hz [a common spot to express sensitivity] but it will likely not do diddly below 80 Hz or so - which makes for a crappy bass cab IMO/IME.
There is a trade off when your speaker does low lows very well - it typically suffers in efficiency at higher frequencies and/or yields a very uneven response higher in the bandwidth.
One way to get past this problem is to use multiple drivers sizes and a divide the bandwidth up so speakers with good performance do the work on different parts of the bandwidth.
fEARful cabs use high quality components and well considered engineering principals to yield a cab that will work across the entire useful bandwidth for instruments with large low frequency content [bass guitar, synth, et cetera] with relatively high sensitivity, relatively high output capability + good dispersion [works over a broad angle of listening positions].
You would be hard put to find/design a practical bass cab that can make as much loudness per watt and go as low [serve as large a slice of the bandwidth] as a fEARful.
scottfeldstein
Roots and fifths and a little extra.
Fascinating.
It's getting into "acoustic watts", which is a better measure of the sound we actually hear, but the numbers are very low and don't look impressive at all in an advertisement.
The math and acoustic theory of it is beyond my expertise, just have a basic understanding.
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First off, most of us played commercial cabs with little piezo tweeters and have never actually heard a true pro compression driver in a bass cab...it's a completely different ballgame. I think the ASD1001 or a Faital HF100 or HF102 are amazing and just right for those enclosures. For the big cabs like a 1515/66/1 or a FEARLESS 215 the 18 Sound HD125 is more sensitive and can climb up over the weight of dual 15" woofers at high SPL. An additional argument could be made for a Mylar dome over a titanium dome, sonically...just a tad smoother.
Fascinating.
The basic idea of a coil of wire sitting in a magnetic field attached to a cone making pressure changes/soundwaves in the air we can hear is over 100 years old.
Much like the internal combustion engine, though it's been refined and refined and refined some more, the basic principle that makes it work is still the same. There's only so much performamce you can squeeze out of it. Thankfully it's enough to do what we're looking to do, and the refinements end up as smaller, lighter, louder, more convenient stuff as it relates to humans.
