You could probably wire a passive HPF for the 412 without too much trouble.
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One More Time: Running Distorted Tones Through a Tweeter
- Thread starter matante
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You could probably wire a passive HPF for the 412 without too much trouble.
Yep absolutely. Bought 2 used Acoustic 3 ohm Vega loaded 301 18" bins and my Acoustic 370 ran them at 1.6 ohms no problem. Still working then and now.
Blew both the Vegas by 3rd show lol.
Sold one cab years ago for repair cost and tubes on my SVT. Still have the other one now. I've lost it twice and had it stolen and bought it back 2/3 owners later.
CTS drivers and shallow Kustom cabs are only a glimpse at what a deeper cab. And heavy duty 15" can really do. Those work but be pretty farty and loose.
Not to derail the thread to much
As far as distortion. With guitar or bass essentially the sharp drop off of the speakers response is the final filter.
Even with that still alot of fizzle. But " cab sim" is emulating that sharp drop off.
Run a pedal straight to DI or the Board. Nothing is there filtering that sizzle.
Likewise a " cab sim" or " final filter" can be somewhat the same completely different as well.
Most distortion and amps have simple low order filters. To actually remove most the fizzzle you don't wanna hear. The gradual roll off of a low order filter needs to be set way lower in frequency to finally remove the higher frequency you don't want.
Hence it could make a ideal tone setting a little darker than you want. Since it's going to unfortunately remove from the bandwidth you wanna hear. To actually finally reduce what you don't wanna hear enough.
With higher order filters. You can allow more of what you wanna hear. And then it has a much sharper cutoff and removes that sizzle. But allows more clarity. Since it effects the pass band less. And then quickly chops off what you don't want.
" Cab sim" with complicated filtering to have very realistic response of a speaker is still benificial. Cause it's still gonna incorporate a higher order filter to simulate the sudden cut off of speakers.
But simple higher order filters can still be used in the Distortion pedal to allow more clarity and kill the fizzle.
As you know with many single knob tone controls on pedals. You'd like to use a brighter setting for tone. But then it allows to much fizzle as well.
So it's compromise between slightly darker setting to not be so scratchy.
Higher order filters can fix those problems
Anyhoo like those old farty CTS speakers a huge huge upgrade but still in the mid ground of speakers. Is the classic cast frame Eminence Legend CB158. Can go in big deep box. Very very low tuning possibility. But trades little high-end to go deep.
Not problem with distortion type music.
Probably perfect driver for beefy 2x15 and distortion or any punchy warm blues player
Common driver for large tilt back 2x15 Ampeg SVT215E and Common in 1x15 SVT15E. They make up for the high-end with a tweet.
Much to high crossed over tweet. Perfect example for the hole in crossover designs for alot of cabs.
Don't matter , dam good rock n roll driver.
Turn stupid tweet off.
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I haven't really tried it with bass, but I have a pretty large pedal board that I put together for guitar and I can plug it straight into a mixing console and get a really nice OD sound playing through PA speakers.
IMHO the big disconnect comes in because most people who use distortion favor traditional tweeterless cabs that roll off and filter the highs as you describe. So if the distortion is set to sound good through the traditional cab, it's going to sound excessively bright and fizzy through the DI and PA cabs unless you apply a cab sim, LPF, or apply a lot of EQ on the channel strip. Course one particular problem I agree with is many bass cabs with tweeters don't sound particularly good with distortion. Personally I think this is a design and economic problem more than a problem inherent with combining tweeters with distortion. Of course YMMV
So if you take a heavily clipped signal, which presumably approaches a square wave, and then filter off higher frequencies, whether electronically or physically, what sort of shape waveform is left?
Pretty much
The bandwidth is what the bandwidth is.
Basically anything over a certain frequency is useless lol with distortion.
Especially cause your creating alot of the harmonics we wanna hear. But the higher harmonics are just straight noise.
It's simple design. How would you incorporate a tweeter into a med to high gain distortion. Easy = freaking switch to turn it off lol. Ground breaking
Don't get me wrong I've made some pretty amazing synths. Using basic subtractive even additive synthesis methods and basically used noise as the primary waveform. You can apply further delay or pretty complicated envelope/modulation and make noise sound pretty dang cool.
But in a blues or heavy rock band . heavily modulated noise doesn't really fit in lol.
Be great for expieramental electronic music. I've done some fun stuff and basically did use a " tweet" using a 2x15 2 way column speaker as bass cab. With some synth based effects on bass. For live electronic.
But live with various heavy blues bands and industrial metal. Using med to very high gain distortion. Absolutely have no interest in hearing a tweeter.
Distortion is rather simple and likewise complicated lol
It's pretty simple to blast the krap out of a semi conductor or vacuum tube with gain.
But to actually get something musical and pleasing and understanding the instrument your designing it for is complicated.
Most of it is gain stages and filtering.
But filters are the same. Filter is pretty easy to make. Semi conductor few passives. Bingo your there.
Then again what to do. What type and what music instrument your dealing with. Filters can make your head spin
With musical instruments you can get all kinds of waveforms. Cause you have multiple filters. And even just a basic 3 band EQ you get all kinds of rounded waveforms or cute little sharkteeth.
But in simplicity if you use a slew limiter
Or basically a filter. And apply it to a squarewave. It will limit the slew of the sharp rising edges of a squarewave and go to triangle wave.
Of course more complicated than that cause it depends on frequency of the squarewave and frequency of the filter.
Likewise duty cycle or pulse width of the square.
With different duty cycle only one side of the square is slew limited so it be more sawtooth.
But in simplicity square to triangle
Technically " distortion" meaning not being the same as it's original form. Doesn't always mean the waveform is clipped into a squarewave.
All together your creating more Harmonics and just basically creating a more complicated wave form. Straight clipping to a squarewave definitely creates the harmonics musicians love. But more " musical" distortion is based on yes getting close to square. But also has more to do with the symentry of the waveform. And getting even order or odd order harmonics. Then of course filtering what you don't want or boosting what you do want
String instrument creates non symmetrical complicated waveform. So it's already has even order harmonics. Looks nothing like a sinewave and doesn't clip to a squarewave.
Can get close. But not exactly
Various distortion can also clip symmetrical or non symetrical. And you can often clip or compress the string waveform to be symetrical. Which musicians like. Or clip non symetrical which musicians also like.
Non symetrical distortion quoted as the " magical" thing that makes tubes so amazing.
But true and not true. Cause even a basic garbage general purpose transistor can be made to clip exactly like a tube.
And a tube can be made to clip exactly like those garbage solid states
Much more things that make distortion sound good with string instruments
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I am not an engineer but, I have read that when a clean bass signal is sent to the speaker, the frequencies sent to the tweeter should be well within the tweeter's rated power handling capabilities. When distortion is added, either through a pedal or by overdriving the amp, the amount of signal sent to the tweeter through the xover can be much greater and way more than it can handle because of these high order harmonics, even though the overall speaker rating may be the same as or higher than the amps rated output.
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I think this is the main reason. The PA can't add back what the source cab and eq-ing removed, and that was/is the trend in good bass tone. If the source recording were purposefully distorted with high end and tweeters, the PA would reproduce it faithfully (good or bad). Anybody have an example where the artist went for high end and distortion?
Just for interest I downloaded an oscilloscope app onto my phone and then played square sine triangular and sawtooth waveforms from an on line tone generator. The sine waves got through OK, but the mess made of the others was quite instructive. Quite possibly down to the phone rather than the sound system (or both) of course, without properly calibrated systems you don't know where the problem is.
Seriously. It's great to know the science behind it, but all you really need to do is try it once and hear how terrible it sounds.
I think the main reason is just the sound, tends to sound small and harsh. I like some tweeter in my regular cleanish fingerstyle tone (on Mesa PH cabs which have a really nice sounding tweeter/crossover) but I roll back to 10-25% if I am using distortion. I think generally guitars can fill that 5K+ sonic space.
Sighs... that was mid 80s and that cab is now dismantled and in storage . At that time I had Never heard of LPF or HPF or I would have readily used one!
So have I. SWR cabs in particular, I think the distorted tone crew likes those because of the legit 35Hz bottom frequency response. About four years ago, before I got a clue and went all neo, I was trying to find a second Goliath to go with my original one. Bought five cabs. Returned five cabs. All because of tweeter damage; all five had blown fuses, three had blown tweeters and one had "blown crossover with visible scorch marks" which is not a thing I thought was possible, but there you go.
Are ALL SWR cabs like this?? I have an 810 Workingmans Tower and I really like it. It sounds great on the high and with dirt. And I use dirt a lot.
Very cool thread discussion!!
I use dirt more than 90% of the time so this is really interesting stuff to me. It took me some time to figure out that your live sound extremely important and couldn’t be overstated as I think a lot of guys forget to include that in their thought process when building a rig and or board. I know I did the first 6 months I started playing out regularly. Then I started asking sound guys questions cause I knew all about the “bees in a can” sound in the FOH. I started paying more attention to different kinds of DI’s, LPF and HPF’s, IR’s as well as onboard EQ’s as they leave my board. The only thing I really want to get to complete my live rig is a separate DI.
What do you guys who have commented pretty in depth about the Palmer DI PD109??? I am planning on getting that and running it between my amp and cab and sending that to the FOH. It seems to me that that particular DI box could be a great solution for curing the whole “bees in a can”. I just know better about taming and or turning my tweeter off in my cab. My ears told me that long ago.
I use dirt more than 90% of the time so this is really interesting stuff to me. It took me some time to figure out that your live sound extremely important and couldn’t be overstated as I think a lot of guys forget to include that in their thought process when building a rig and or board. I know I did the first 6 months I started playing out regularly. Then I started asking sound guys questions cause I knew all about the “bees in a can” sound in the FOH. I started paying more attention to different kinds of DI’s, LPF and HPF’s, IR’s as well as onboard EQ’s as they leave my board. The only thing I really want to get to complete my live rig is a separate DI.
What do you guys who have commented pretty in depth about the Palmer DI PD109??? I am planning on getting that and running it between my amp and cab and sending that to the FOH. It seems to me that that particular DI box could be a great solution for curing the whole “bees in a can”. I just know better about taming and or turning my tweeter off in my cab. My ears told me that long ago.
I don't think the Palmer is a good choice for bass. It's designed specifically to be run at speaker level as you plan to do, but the manual specs only 200W. The terminology is a bit odd...the manuals states, "MAX. LOAD: DEPENDENT ON LOAD, MAX. 200 W" See attached OM.
Another thing to keep in mind is you can't use a speaker level DI with amps running in bridge mode, and many class D amps actually run in bridge mode.
Well my amp is 180w but all tube. I knew it would be pushing it but you still don't think it's a good choice huh?
If you're pushing a 180W tube amp into distortion, the output will definitely be over 200W. You could contact Palmer and see what they say. The problem may be with over voltage or over current. If it's over voltage then it's not useable without an attenuator.
If the problem is over current, you may be able to use the device, as long as you don't run the speaker through it. Instead, you will need to connect the device in parallel with your speaker....but this is just supposition.
Then what would you recommend for me for a modestly priced DI that I can run between my amp and cab?? The Radial JDX maybe??
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