After several hours of playing at bedroom volume I am very pleased with the sound with the Matrix with both the uke bass and Ibanez going thru the Mesa TT-800 and Quilter BB800.
My line of thinking in obtaining this cabinet was the all-in-one full range aspect. I have a Mesa Subway 1x15 and GR Bass AT 212 Slim. The GR Bass has a wonderful bright and clear full range sound, very snappy with my fretted Ibanez. I was having trouble replicating that full snappy brightness with the Mesa 1x15 by itself, but I have no doubt that I could easily attain that if I bought the Subway 2x10 to go with it. But, in my ongoing efforts to be as lazy as possible and carry as less as possible, I was immediately intrigued by the Matrix because it was essentially a 1x15 and 2x10 all in one cabinet not all that much bigger than the Subway 2x10. Indeed the Matrix does achieve that nice bright snappy sound much like the GR Bass AT 212 Slim, and lots of bottom that I am too scared to test the limits of in my condo. I will hopefully be able to play the cabinet under full blast rehearsal conditions soon.
As mentioned, I was thinking about removing the luggage handle. I thought the handle was attached with only the 4 bracket screws, but there are additional screws going thru the bottom bracket that can only be removed by opening up the cabinet and I am not going to do that.
The devil is in the details. The rear connector panel is mounted slightly crooked. I don’t think this is an isolated thing because if you look at the
Sweetwater photo of the back of the red Matrix the handle on that one is mounted crooked as well. Also, the screws for the two top front corners are dome headed, but for all the rest they are flat headed. Not sure if this is intentional or if he ran out of flat head screws and made a Home Depot run and could only find dome heads in stock. Unless there is a specific design/engineering reason for the different screws I think it would be nicer for all of the screws to be consistent. On a related note, some of the screws are driven in at an angle and don’t sit flat. A small detail to be sure, but it looks messy and careless especially when compared to the beautifully aligned panels and perfectly installed corner screws of the Mesa Subway 1x15 and GR Bass AT 212 Slim (as tiny and flimsy as the GR Bass corners are). I realize BBC is not a big operation like Mesa or perhaps even GR Bass, and as annoying as these little factors may be they aren’t deal breakers for me at the moment. But for a $1449 cabinet I feel more care should be taken with these details, especially since the owner of BBC is supposed to be a carpenter.
