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New Quilter bass amp!
- Thread starter Mikeee71
- Start date
I don't think I've seen how anyone has liked the new addition of snap and woof controls compared to the older bb800 unit. Any setting suggestions or are they deemed unnecessary?
Update: I played my new Bass Block last night, and it performed well. I tweaked around on my settings a little, but ended up pretty much the same as the practice room settings. The Depth at noon, and the Contour at 9:00. I'm wondering how the Quilter cabinets sound now! I'm a 10 inch speaker fan, so my interests are the 2x10 cabs. I think 2 2x10 cabs would be my choice setup.
- Jan 26, 2014
- 1,525
- 1,946
- Disclosures
- I teach lessons and perform live music in and around San Diego CA. Sometimes I even make money doing it!
Quilter is weird, but they sound good. I just got the Microblock 45, and it's KILLER on bass as well as fabulous for guitar. No DI on that either, lol. I have to think Quilter just like being difficult. I'd imagine the .3% of gigging bassists who only mic their uprights and want an 800 watt amp must have driven their choice to make the input XLR, you certainly don't need it to re-amp recorded parts or anything. But back on planet Earth, gigging electric bassists who care about shaping their tone, use effects, etc., enjoy having a reliable DI onboard. I understand the form factor is all that's off, but @peteratquilter, there are several practical reasons an adapter is bad for everyday use: It's another piece to break, and they often do. it puts more weight and pressure on the input jack, which are also prone to wear. It puts more cables in front of the amp and speaker, unless you fiddle further to re-route it. Some players like myself also like to use amps that are so equipped as direct boxes in the studio. I'm too busy to fiddle with more cables and adapters than I already must, and there's no reason for this to be the case on this amp, other than just being too cute, and it's too expensive to be too cute, it just needs to sound great and be easy to use. Hopefully the 8003 is a final logical step 
- Jan 26, 2014
- 1,525
- 1,946
- Disclosures
- I teach lessons and perform live music in and around San Diego CA. Sometimes I even make money doing it!
Quilter is weird, but they sound good. I just got the Microblock 45, and it's KILLER on bass as well as fabulous for guitar. No DI on that either, lol. I have to think Quilter just like being difficult. I'd imagine the .3% of gigging bassists who only mic their uprights and want an 800 watt amp must have driven their choice to make the input XLR, you certainly don't need it to re-amp recorded parts or anything. But back on planet Earth, gigging electric bassists who care about shaping their tone, use effects, etc., enjoy having a reliable DI onboard. I understand the form factor is all that's off, but @peteratquilter, there are several practical reasons an adapter is bad for everyday use: It's another piece to break, and they often do. it puts more weight and pressure on the input jack, which are also prone to wear. It puts more cables in front of the amp and speaker, unless you fiddle further to re-route it. Some players like myself also like to use amps that are so equipped as direct boxes in the studio. I'm too busy to fiddle with more cables and adapters than I already must, and there's no reason for this to be the case on this amp, other than just being too cute, and it's too expensive to be too cute, it just needs to sound great and be easy to use. Hopefully the 8003 is a final logical step
Just realizing the XLR in is line level... so it's not even useful as an upright mic input. I haven't read all 16 pages of this thread, but I still haven't seen why this feature would be on any instrument amp. Patch bays and line outs from preamps are almost always 1/4." Simply baffling.
Quilter is weird, but they sound good. I just got the Microblock 45, and it's KILLER on bass as well as fabulous for guitar. No DI on that either, lol. I have to think Quilter just like being difficult. I'd imagine the .3% of gigging bassists who only mic their uprights and want an 800 watt amp must have driven their choice to make the input XLR, you certainly don't need it to re-amp recorded parts or anything. But back on planet Earth, gigging electric bassists who care about shaping their tone, use effects, etc., enjoy having a reliable DI onboard. I understand the form factor is all that's off, but @peteratquilter, there are several practical reasons an adapter is bad for everyday use: It's another piece to break, and they often do. it puts more weight and pressure on the input jack, which are also prone to wear. It puts more cables in front of the amp and speaker, unless you fiddle further to re-route it. Some players like myself also like to use amps that are so equipped as direct boxes in the studio. I'm too busy to fiddle with more cables and adapters than I already must, and there's no reason for this to be the case on this amp, other than just being too cute, and it's too expensive to be too cute, it just needs to sound great and be easy to use. Hopefully the 8003 is a final logical step
Hey Nick, I hear you, but the reason is because you straight up couldn't access the XLR out if the amp was docked in our BassDock 10 and a TRS connection is the same thing. We're aware this is different, but we're not trying to be cute. The amp should work with our cabs. The choice was between making a new amp that works with our new cab but requires a different but widely available cable with the same kind of connection, or make an amp that doesn't work with our new cab so you can have a familiar jack, albeit, one that you can't get to when paired with another product we make. Can you imagine the outrage from everyone that bought BassDock 10s? There's a lot of them out there that have bought into our modular benefit and would have been pretty upset to discover they couldn't use the modular benefit and go to a DI.
As for the XLR In, that was highly requested when we made the 800 because there are a number of bass DIs out there that people wanted to plug into our power amp.
And trust me, that guy that started QSC knows how adapters work and recommends a cable
Fair enough, but do you really think there are more of those people who want the XLR in than there are of people who use the XLR out virtually every time and every place they play? Especially since presumably one of the design goals of the 802 was to allow more control over tone shaping ... and thereby possibly reduce the need for outboard pres.
Ideally, of course, it would be nice to have both XLR in and XLR out, but assuming you had to choose, if you ever did a large-scale poll, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the XLR out users would VASTLY outnumber the XLR in users. (As Charles Barkley said, I might be wrong, but I doubt it.) Granted that the TRS connection is electronically equivalent to XLR, why not suggest to the users of third-party preamps that THEY use an adapter?
I'm not trying to be difficult--I own and use a fair amount of Quilter gear, for both bass and guitar--but your choices on the 802 still look to me like you focused on the wrong things to some extent. Doesn't mean the 802 isn't a great amp for the most part. But honest feedback isn't guaranteed to be positive 100% of the time.
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Well, you also could have designed the cabinets differently in the first place, in a way that would have avoided this difficulty. They could have been a bit bigger, to leave room for this connection. They could have had the notch on the top rather than down the back, so that the amp's speaker output faced back rather than down; that might even have made the controls of the amp easier to see when you're a couple of feet in front of your amp.
And the lack of Speakon jacks on the cabs is somewhat puzzling. If it's important to have them on the heads, why not on the cabs also?
I hope you don't see this and other similar posts as an attack. I'm sure you want to meet the needs of your users, and this is some users telling you that what you're doing may not be meeting some of those needs as well as you would wish. You can always ignore this kind of feedback, but it might benefit Quilter to at least listen.
@peteratquilter
As a current owner of three Quilter amps and two Quilter cabinets, former owner of two more Quilter amps and one cab, and pusher of irl friends to buy four Quilter amps and four Quilter cabinets, I'm satisfied with the design choices and feature sets of both Bass Blocks and the cabinets.
As a current owner of three Quilter amps and two Quilter cabinets, former owner of two more Quilter amps and one cab, and pusher of irl friends to buy four Quilter amps and four Quilter cabinets, I'm satisfied with the design choices and feature sets of both Bass Blocks and the cabinets.
My BB800 and 2 x Blockdock 12's are great. Being able to add a 3rd cab without needing a second amp would have been sweet..... just saying, if you could make that happen for a new 1200 watt model you would sell at least one!
If you come out of the BB800 using both 1/4" outs for the first two you can use a speakon to 1/4" adapter for the 3rd cab. But, IME, the clean headroom is greatly diminished when running sub 4 ohms.
Update: I am using the BB800 by itself now. I'm a LONG TIME Ampeg guy, and I think this BB800 is great! It doesn't sound better to my ears, when NOT in a live setting, but it is much more clear in a live setting. It took me a couple of shows to learn the eq, but its very easy to me now. I would like to hear opinions about the 2x10 Quilter cabs.
As far as the line in/out subject, I agree that line out would probably be the most popular choice, as a whole. JMO.
As far as the line in/out subject, I agree that line out would probably be the most popular choice, as a whole. JMO.
- Jan 26, 2014
- 1,525
- 1,946
- Disclosures
- I teach lessons and perform live music in and around San Diego CA. Sometimes I even make money doing it!
Hey Nick, I hear you, but the reason is because you straight up couldn't access the XLR out if the amp was docked in our BassDock 10 and a TRS connection is the same thing. We're aware this is different, but we're not trying to be cute. The amp should work with our cabs. The choice was between making a new amp that works with our new cab but requires a different but widely available cable with the same kind of connection, or make an amp that doesn't work with our new cab so you can have a familiar jack, albeit, one that you can't get to when paired with another product we make. Can you imagine the outrage from everyone that bought BassDock 10s? There's a lot of them out there that have bought into our modular benefit and would have been pretty upset to discover they couldn't use the modular benefit and go to a DI.
As for the XLR In, that was highly requested when we made the 800 because there are a number of bass DIs out there that people wanted to plug into our power amp.
And trust me, that guy that started QSC knows how adapters work and recommends a cable
No doubt Pat Quilter knows how to make an amp circuit
. But i think as you can see on this thread, It would've been more logical to make the one XLR jack the DI out, based on the needs of most jobbing pros. Also, the xlr In says line level on it, whereas the folks who apparently want their DI out feeding their amp would probably want a mic/instrument level input, or at least switchable, to deal with different noise floors from passive or active DI's. Beyond all this, that's not how DI's are designed to work in the first place (there is usually already a 1/4" amp out, buffered and isolated on many active DI's), so Quilter has designed an amp around a very fringe request IMO. I see how this gets around the Bassdock problem, but frankly, the whole Bassdock system should have been designed to allow an XLR DI out, since that's precisely how most bassists use DI's, as a parallel to/from their stage rig, not feeding the stage rig from the DI XLR. And for those (exceedingly) few who do feed stage rigs from the DI XLR, a 1/4" TRS jack on the front of the head would be perfectly appropriate, since they wouldn't be using the regular input jack to begin with. I get what you're saying, and it seems Quilter has designed themselves into a corner with the Bassdock. There's just no getting around the fact that designing a gigging system for bassists without making an XLR output a priority is a mistake; bass nerds have different needs than guitar nerds, I nerd out on both
. Sure it's understood an adapter cable will work, but again, Mo gear mo problems... One other possibility- XLR out on back, TRS out on front for those who use bassdocks.
At any rate, i appreciate the response, and hope the line keeps improving, the microblock is currently my main session amp, miked of course
I wouldn't comment if I didn't feel the company was worth it.
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No offense, this bring to mind the long discussions where Markbass just couldn't wrap their heads around why the majority of bassists preferred having a mute switch for silent tuning. For gigging bassists it's kind of a "duh" thing but there was a ton of conversation. Markbass suggested all sorts of workarounds, like unplugging your bass, turning the amp's gain up and down or using a pedal, etc. Anything but use the tuner out they built into their amp in the industry standard way. Funnily enough, when they finally got around to doing it they offered it as a push/pull knob on an easy to move lightweight amp. What could go wrong?
When designing the cabs, I don't understand how, before they finalized the design, forcing an omission of a long standard device wasn't a dealbreaker. It's akin to having an AC wall wart for the sake of space. Sure, it would work but... it's a serious case of the tail wagging the dog.
When designing the cabs, I don't understand how, before they finalized the design, forcing an omission of a long standard device wasn't a dealbreaker. It's akin to having an AC wall wart for the sake of space. Sure, it would work but... it's a serious case of the tail wagging the dog.
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I would imagine they know how many bass docks they have sold and will sell vs stand alone amps and I'd guess that the TB community is a small but loud demographic. They do have a mandatory form factor to fit in limiting their options. I don't mind using a good DI box with this thing. The 802 kills. To each his own.
The BB800 remains a great value and has an XLR out on the back. The more gigs I do the more I appreciate what a great little amp it is.
Every gig I've ever played, there has been a house-provided DI for the bass. Seems like a total non-issue to me.
For me, automatic provision of a DI was somehwat more common years ago, though today the soundpeople certainly all still carry DIs and use them when needed.
In more recent years, my experience has been that a majority of soundpeople walk over to your amp and just assume they can plug into it, because they not unreasonably assume (1) that that feature is available on the amp, since it's become so common on bass heads, and (2) there's a possibility you might want to use something of your own amp sound through a post-EQ DI (though some do try to discourage this), and (3) they can save themselves the use of a DI that might get lost or stolen or spilled on and might not sound as good as your amp anyway. (I once recorded a live EP in a singer's living room where the Grammy-winning engineer didn't like the sound of three different outboard DIs as well as he liked the one coming off the back of my Carvin B1500. Go figure.) It's not universal, but it's closer to the norm than to the rare exception IME.
The situation obviously would be different for backlined gigs, where typically the sound company has already set things up the way they want them and just wants you to plug your bass into the input.
Nobody's arguing that this omission makes gigging impossible or insuperably difficult, just that it's needlessly inconvenient and is failing to provide a useful feature that's been more or less standard on better bass heads for years now. And that it could easily have been avoided.
Nevertheless, it's true that we all have different needs. To each his/her own.
It's not really mandatory in the usual sense, as no external body is compelling them to do this. It's really a self-imposed restriction, and part of what some of us are suggesting here is that, at least from our POV, maybe they didn't think things through as well as we'd liked them to before they imposed this restriction on themselves.
Personally, I like Quilter. I have a BB800, two MicroPro Mach 2s, a guitar extension cab, and an Interblock 45. I've known about them since they were making amps for local Orange County bands in the '70s, before there even was a QSC. Still think they could and should have done better here.
