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Markbass shutdown

#24
I think you are overdriving the Hartke XL cabs. They are pretty ancient (but good) technology ceramic drivers and will hit their limit a little earlier than you might be used to with more modern designs. My XLs used to "click" quite horribly when I pushed them too far with a 350 watt amp. The Markbass is easily capable of frying those cabs.
 
#25
You probably know this but just to say standard trouble-shooting procedure would be: Use the same speaker cables as you switch between cabs. Try your Hartke cabs one at a time to verify they work individually. Then use your Hartkes one at a time in tandem with the Markbass or Peavy. If one of the Harke-Mark/Peavy pairings shuts things down, that's the faulty Hartke. If you try all that and it all works except the Hartke pairing, I've got no ideas.
 
#26
jTrolt said:
Sounds like the Markbass is going into a protection mode, unhappy with the load it's seeing.
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This was the issue I had with a F1 amp I had years ago. It happened with only one 4Ω cab I had. Most of the time it was fine but when cranked it would go into protect mode and shut the power amp off (the preamp/DI still worked fine). Most likely it was a point along the impedance curve that dipped low enough to trigger the protection.
 
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#27
Sparky Mark said:
I don't think either of those Hartke XL cabs have a tweeter.
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Good point, I was thinking of the MarkBass cabinets and maybe from another thread.

Sparky Mark said:
I think you are overdriving the Hartke XL cabs. They are pretty ancient (but good) technology ceramic drivers and will hit their limit a little earlier than you might be used to with more modern designs. My XLs used to "click" quite horribly when I pushed them too far with a 350 watt amp. The Markbass is easily capable of frying those cabs.
Click to expand...
If the speakers are being driven well beyond the driver's limits, and a large percentage of the voice coil extends outside the magnetic gap, the inductance will fall very quickly and the impedance will also fall closer to the DC resistance. This would result in an illegal load to the amp.

I wouldn't expect it to sound very good this way, and a HPF would really help, set to about 50Hz.
 
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#28
agedhorse said:
Good point, I was thinking of the MarkBass cabinets and maybe from another thread.


If the speakers are being driven well beyond the driver's limits, and a large percentage of the voice coil extends outside the magnetic gap, the inductance will fall very quickly and the impedance will also fall closer to the DC resistance. This would result in an illegal load to the amp.

I wouldn't expect it to sound very good this way, and a HPF would really help, set to about 50Hz.
Click to expand...
I'm fairly confident that this is the condition causing that Markbass head to go into protection mode. With the input and output controls both at 50%, my Markbass heads are pretty much at max output, more than enough for that Hartke XL rig.
Hopefully, no damage has been done to the cabs, and the amp has just acted as intended.
 

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