NOT another thread about speaker size

Speakers don't respond "faster" or "slower," but brighter cabs tend to give you that impression that they're faster because you can hear the high end better. And speaker size is unrelated to tone, but is wholly a matter of the design of the speakers and the box you put them in. You can design speakers of any size to sound how you want, but the reason bigger speakers tend to be voiced lower than smaller is more a matter of efficiency. For example...to get as much power handling from a 10" cab as a 15" cab, you would usually need two 10"s to hang with one 15". And a guy like Phil Jones designs bass cabs using 6" speakers and loves how they sound, and through targeted speaker design and porting methods, he can get solid low end out of them. But he'd need a lot more of them to get the output you can get from a single 15", so that's why you don't see a whole lot of bass cabs using 6"s.

It can get as complicated as you want, but cab and speaker design is all about making the right compromises to achieve a tone and volume you want, and the only thing you can tell from speaker size alone is the size of the speaker. So you're best to let the whole speaker size thing go and just trust your ears. And when you hear a cab you like, buy it.

 

I don't think the OP is talking about fast/slow/bright etc. If I understand, he is describing a cab that to him sounded like notes decayed (the "D" in ASDR) faster than the decay he was accustomed to with other cabs. His response to this faster decay was to hold each note longer, leading to a sense of discomfort in his fretting hand, all of which occurred involuntarily. At least that's what I took from it when I read it.

 

I hate to tag you in twice in less that 24 hours, but....

@agedhorse is this a thing? Can 8" speakers cause a note to decay so much faster than 15" speakers that your technique will adjust accordingly?

 

Not due to size that I am aware of or have heard of, but...

There is the perception of lack of low frequency extension that can be described this way, especially indoors where the boundaries at low frequencies typically have longer RT-60 times.

The other perception is damping, a speaker with higher moving mass tuned to an underdamped response condition can feel this way too.

This is assuming that there isn't a gate being used in the system which can certainly be responsible for such an effect.

 

Brilliantly stated.
Rock on.

 

yes, with or without effort.

 

Just to note "headroom".
Lots of players talk about "headroom" while there is physically no more headroom nothing at all.
In the past lots of folks talked frequently about phase issues while physically there was most of the time no reason to talk about it.

Sometimes people want to talk about things beyond their head.
Nothing wrong with this "issue" cause everybody is welcome to any forum.

 

Yup pretty much.

Musicians can not only hear it, but feel it.

And I completely adapted my playing style to a 810E.
Has a whole bag of tricks that other cabinets can't unleash.
Especially from ported to sealed.

Actually using the sustain release to describe it makes sense

But otherwise I adapted even came up with new technique using sealed 810