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Is an 18 better than a 15?

#45
It depends on the cabinet. W cabinet? Half W"? Karlson" labyrinth? sealed box? Ported? rear loaded folded horn? Cabinet size?

Smaller speakers in groups, though, tend to have more near field midrange, and 18's have little. But 18's in the right box can knock down an audience.. You can look at frequency response graphs and thiele - small parameters all day, but what happens on stage with frequency dispersion, is what you will wind up hearing.
 
#47
you usually need about a 100' cable to get far enough away from an 18 to hear what's up .. ?!?

18 - OK for PA sub ... but i'd still prefer the control of a 15 ...

but for bass amps on stage ... you need a standing wave you can actually hear on stage .. !! not wait for it to bounce of the back wall ... ! 10 , 12 , 15 ... i think they'd do that better
 
#48
DavC said:
you usually need about a 100' cable to get far enough away from an 18 to hear what's up .. ?!?

18 - OK for PA sub ... but i'd still prefer the control of a 15 ...

but for bass amps on stage ... you need a standing wave you can actually hear on stage .. !! not wait for it to bounce of the back wall ... ! 10 , 12 , 15 ... i think they'd do that better
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OK, I'll bite. What happens at 100' that doesn't happen at 10 feet? Explain to me why you'd need to wait for an echo to hear what your amp is doing.
 
#51
BurningSkies said:
OK, I'll bite. What happens at 100' that doesn't happen at 10 feet? Explain to me why you'd need to wait for an echo to hear what your amp is doing.
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Jeez-people, go learn about W cabinets, subwoofers, and waveform lengths. A 32hz sine wave is about 35 feet long. To actually hear it, without hearing room bounce or half wave reflections, you need to be 35 feet away from the cabinet. In a room, what you hear most is half wave reflections, not the fundamental. Long ago I had a pair of Acoustic 370 W cabs. On stage, not a whole lot - mids and no highs, but out there in the audience, i was shaking tables and angering bartenders. I later got an EAW 10 cu, ft box that had an 18 in it. Great sound about 5 ft away from the box, but there was this one venue I played at and the mixing desk was 36 feet away from the stage. I liked to have killed to house engineer every time I hit a low B.

On stage you hear mostly the next harmonic up for the low end, but what is needed on stage is not what is needed for the audience. Any commercial sound system will show you that - they all sound like crap up close and great out in the field. I think I've used about any and all types of boxes, including an 18' in a Karlson (don't do that). and an Ampeg 18" amp - I miss that one bad - for soul and R&B it was killer. My best on stage sound was 4 15's, each in it's own 5 cu' ft box. Wonderful and even sound spread, and enough low end to take your breath away. and huge. I used 2 SVT bottoms and while they were loud as almighty there wasn't that much low end in the audience. Loud is one thing, but low end is something else. I settled on twelves because they sound good up close and make enough low end to make me happy.
 
#52
azureblue said:
Jeez-people, go learn about W cabinets, subwoofers, and waveform lengths. A 32hz sine wave is about 35 feet long. To actually hear it, without hearing room bounce or half wave reflections, you need to be 35 feet away from the cabinet. In a room, what you hear most is half wave reflections, not the fundamental. Long ago I had a pair of Acoustic 370 W cabs. On stage, not a whole lot - mids and no highs, but out there in the audience, i was shaking tables and angering bartenders. I later got an EAW 10 cu, ft box that had an 18 in it. Great sound about 5 ft away from the box, but there was this one venue I played at and the mixing desk was 36 feet away from the stage. I liked to have killed to house engineer every time I hit a low B.

On stage you hear mostly the next harmonic up for the low end, but what is needed on stage is not what is needed for the audience. Any commercial sound system will show you that - they all sound like crap up close and great out in the field. I think I've used about any and all types of boxes, including an 18' in a Karlson (don't do that). and an Ampeg 18" amp - I miss that one bad - for soul and R&B it was killer. My best on stage sound was 4 15's, each in it's own 5 cu' ft box. Wonderful and even sound spread, and enough low end to take your breath away. and huge. I used 2 SVT bottoms and while they were loud as almighty there wasn't that much low end in the audience. Loud is one thing, but low end is something else. I settled on twelves because they sound good up close and make enough low end to make me happy.
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Sorry man. You're wrong.
 
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#53
azureblue said:
Jeez-people, go learn about W cabinets, subwoofers, and waveform lengths. A 32hz sine wave is about 35 feet long. To actually hear it, without hearing room bounce or half wave reflections, you need to be 35 feet away from the cabinet.
Click to expand...

Thankfully that isn't true or headphones would only start working at about 10kHz. And in-ear ones would only work on dogs and bats and other animals that can hear well above 20kHz...
 
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#54
The Electro-Voice EVM-18B, in its various (three I think) incarnations, is a lone example of an 18" woofer with a significantly extended response up high: (40-6000 Hz "usable" 18" - why no love? | TalkBass.com). Very decent sensitivity (a smidge less than 101 dB). Kinda heavy (almost exactly 10 Kg), requiring a big enclosure for best results (200 L were recommended, tuned to 33 Hz in stepdown mode), and I guess it beamed (beamt?) more than many 15s but less than one-box (square) 4x10s do - even though, as @agedhorse reminded us a couple times today, not even beaming behaviour is deterministically predictable from diameter alone. Still, it's out there (used), should one feel like trying something different from eighteens, subwoofy or nearly so, young and old.

Recent threads on 18-inchers:
Pick an18 | TalkBass.com
18" - why no love? | TalkBass.com
 
#56
Generally speaking, the larger a driver the lower the frequency starting from which the sound dispersion pattern narrows in a kind of sudden, steep fashion: in practice a listener hears high-mids and highs less and less (down to complete masking) the more he/she moves from the directly-in-front-of-driver position; this is due to the fact said frequencies are cancelled out for every off-axis position by the waves produced by one side of the driver interfering with the waves from the opposite side: even such relatively small differences in path lengths (one-side-of-cone-to-ear vs. another-) matter because the higher the frequency, the correspondingly smaller the wavelength.

Or something like that.
 
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#59
InhumanResource said:
Erm...please excuse my ignorance, but what the heck does "beamy" mean?!
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AltGrendel said:
Ok, second time I've seen that term used, what exactly is "beamy".
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Oh, sorry. Answer is in my post above. From a certain point up in its freq response a driver "beams" in that it only diffuses that upper portion of its sound in a narrow cilinder of air directly in front of itself, not laterally. Roughly speaking.
 

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