Thanks for the reply. I understand our use cases will differ. I do not play with loud bands but I need to account for both with and without pa support for the bass.
I would appreciate any help on the kind of equipment that works for full range monitoring of bass with the Fractal. I can then work on how to scale it to suit.
I have regular bass amplification and could use this at first. Not sure if I would be missing out on something.
This is long...apologies...
I tackled this many years ago, when there weren't a lot of full range, flat response PA speakers available unless you spent a TON of money on high-end touring speakers. Due to such a demand on the Fractal forum, Atomic Amps partnered with an audio guru named Jay Mitchell and they produced a really excellent sounding speaker cabinet, the CLR. It's a 12" coaxial design and I got in early and purchased 2 of their powered wedges. I later purchased a pair of un-powered CLR wedges. The Atomic Amps/CLR story is another whole can of worms.
At the same time, before the CLR was available, I also purchased a custom built pair of ported "traditional" bass cabinets, but loaded them with Ciare full range 15" coaxial drivers, biamped. Each cabinet, loaded, cost about $700 at the time (over 10 years ago), and I powered them initially with a Crown Xti8000, with its programmable internal crossover settings. I later would also use a GK 1001RBII in biamp mode. Both amps and all the cabinets were speak-on connections. Though the cabinets are full range, they are not so flat response without a lot of EQ, but do have a more traditional bass rig "feel", since they are bona fide bass guitar cabinets. I tend to prefer this for gigs where I need stage sound to carry the room.
Typically, I'll use the Atomic CLR cabinets to design my sounds in my ghetto home studio setup, and cranked up pretty loud to expose any problems.
Over a number of years, I've grown to understand the things that DO and DO NOT work well when creating modeled amp/cab/effects tones with Full Range PA speaker cabinets. With the CLR cabinets, they are so accurate that generally anything that works well on those cabinets will work well when I send my DI signal to any other Full Range PA system/monitor cabinet (or IEM).
When performing on a big stage with a huge PA/Monitor system, I've come to the conclusion that what I hear from my bass sound is pretty much mostly for me, and if our drummer or anyone else wants to hear more (or less), it is handled via their own discrete wedge or IEM mix. Thus, I tend to be less stressed about fussing with the modeled tone while on the gig, and mostly just concerned with being able to hear myself when the band is at full tilt. Because we usually have very high quality PA gear on our gigs, I just use my monitor wedge to hear myself, and it is PLENTY loud and sounds damn good! We also have very competent sound tech personnel on the gig, which is key. My sounds are usually tweaked at rehearsal for level/balance.
As for gigs where there's no PA support and I need a bass rig to cover the room audience, I'll choose an amp/speaker combination a-la-carte to suit the gig.
Small, relatively low volume/acoustic pub gigs: I'll use a powered CLR cabinet, or maybe a lightweight Class D bass amp head with an unpowered CLR.
Small bars with a drummer: I'll use 2 of the CLR unpowered cabinets OR one of my 15" coaxial ported cabinets with the GK1001RBII head.
Anything larger than that: two 15" ported cabinets w/the GK head. This rig gets very loud & rivals the output of my old all-tube SVT Classic rig w/8x10 cab.
This is what I've been doing for 10+ years, and I've sold all of my traditional bass cabinets (including the full SVT Classic rig). Although I did love my Ampeg rig, I don't miss moving it. My back is better off and I can always fit my rig into a sub-compact vehicle. Bear in mind that I've got about $4k invested in speakers, and another $2k or so invested in amplifiers. So you add the FM9Turbo to that (around $1800 USD), you pay the financial price for having a versatile, programmable, lightweight all DI rig that takes little space, with very fast setup/teardown time. But you don't HAVE TO go as crazy as I have. I'm sure I could get by with a lot less, maybe just the GK head, and a pair of speakers and be perfectly happy.
Also worth noting is that the cabinet modeling IR is something I use, but not always. Sometimes I'll use EQ/filtering instead of the cab sim. I go back and forth and both can sound great. It just depends on my mood or if I want the flavor of the cab sim or not.
Happy to share more if you have any other questions.
I've posted up a lot of things on the Fractal forum, so I'd have to see the context to comment any further. I'd love to always gig with a great bass amp, but I don't enjoy hauling all of that stuff around, especially now that I know I can be happy with fully DI signal into a full-range monitoring setup.
