Finding gold in mixing sealed & ported

[Tim Skaggs]

Acquired a home-made vertically oriented (designed to sit on one end) 2x10 cab recently that is very much sealed. The volume of the cab is about 2.5 cu. ft. I had a couple Peavey 4 ohm 10" speakers out of an old TVX 410 I slapped in the cab & wired in series for an 8 ohm load just to see the results.

1st impression is the cabinet by itself doesn't have any special magic, but sounds pretty good, and is very well balanced from lows to mids to highs for a sealed cabinet.

THEN, I searched up some old threads about mixing ported & sealed cabs. There were the many technical reasons given not to do it, but I had already engaged the most common suggestion, and that was to give it a try; I set it up vertically on top of a large ported box with a single Eminence Legend CB 158 (15"- 8 ohm). The results were excellent to my ears. Super smooth highs, excellent high mids giving nice definition and deep lows, however, this experiment is confined to my shop so far.

My question to the masses; Is there an environment where the two cabs are most likely to sound like crap? Small room, outdoors, etc? Just trying to find out before I throw the pair in the truck & get 100 miles from the house..... Guess I can always carry back up cabs, but I'm trying to go lighter when & where I can, and carrying extra cabs isn't the way.....

 

[dukeorock]

Heck, you could be just fine! The potential negative of that sort of mixing is even dispersion throughout the room. What sounds good to you standing directly in front of the cabs a few feet away might sound radically different to someone a few feet further back and slightly off to the left, for example. Or you may have gotten lucky! Next rehearsal, get a long cord and try walking around a bit during a song and see what you think.

Good luck!

 

[JimiLL]

I see dispersion as a non issue if they are aligned vertically

 

[dukeorock]

I see dispersion as a non issue if they are aligned vertically

Good catch! Though in a sense it still can apply. Two different spec'd cabs can cause some cancellation issues, which can cause uneven dispersion, tonally. That's what I was getting at

 

[agedhorse]

The more likely issue will be mid bass cancellation (or alteration) due to phase response and/or disjointed summing/coupling, off the top of my head somewhere between 90Hz and 150Hz. This may be ok or not, depends on taste as much as anything.