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The ultimate 112 cab
- Thread starter bassgrackle
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- aguiar ampeg bergantino mesa boogie
Al Kraft
Supporting Member
- May 2, 2016
- 10,779
- 40,469
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- Mesa Boogie beta product tester and player support
Well it's also possible that the cab just wasn't "that sound your hear in your head" and that's cool. I own Berg, Eden, GK and AK cabs as well as Mesa because they all give me a little something different. And, quite honestly, bad first impressions are often hard to shake!
IMO the Mesa SW line has a great characteristic I have always associated with GK gear in terms of being designed to sound really well in a mix and an audience seat. Unfortunately that great characteristic doesn't always lend itself well to impressing you in a music store or when playing alone at home.
Turning the horn down for quieter/close up playing tends to make the cab sound warmer. On the flip side that horn adds air and definition to your notes in the mix and out in the audience. The neutral position voicing is a trade-off that I think Mesa and GK do as well or better than anyone else, but I'm sure it costs them sales when folks listen in a music store setting.
The good news is power is cheap these days, so efficiency is becoming a much less important factor.
+1000!
Exactly my experience. I've used a lot of 15" cabs in my 35+years and the sw115 is by far the best. It does everything. Spectacular is not strong enough. I need to post a clip of my rock band with me filling out the low end using a SW 112+115, with no for support. Awesome.
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There's a lot of much newer stuff on the market that admittedly I haven't kept up with, but based on the scuttlebutt that was going around a couple decades ago -- and the fact that they're still being made -- I don't think I would buy a 1x12 (or a pair of 1x12s) now before auditioning the venerable Harry Kolbe/Soundsmith cabinet.
Eden EX112:
I just picked up a pair of these yesterday locally. After hearing that they may be discontinued, I jumped - although I had been thinking about buying a pair for at least a couple years now. I have not even plugged them in yet - have to find my old 1/4" speaker cables and speakon adapters to test out! I'm pretty sure they will handle my restaurant gig where we play every other week - off this weekend, but I'll bring them to the next gig and post a gig report. They're not that expensive and if they don't do it for me, I can always flip - no big deal.
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FWIW, I somehow ended up with a MarkBass NY121 last June; it was a panic purchase after I broke my foot and thought I'd need something super lightweight to play. (Truth be told, I was on pain meds and it was on sale, and looked like a good idea.) Turns out, it's pretty cool, but as it seems like all 12s, it has to be pushed. But, it has quite a bit of low end when I do that. I'm not sure i recommend this cab, but for my studio use right now, I like it quite a bit.
I see you'r selling a Subway 112. Was it replaced by the MarkBass NY121?
Audiokinesis Changeling 112 gets my highest marks.
I have had a lot of guys telling me to stay away from the neo magnets. Which isnt a problem. Does this bring the Aguilar DB series into contention?
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Does the epifani tour series have selectable impedance technology? That could be useful. Anyone have experience with them?
I won’t throw anyone under the bus. I am truly impressed by all the feedback you guys have given on this topic over the last few days. It’s amazing how much I have learned. The crazy part is I’m still far from making a decision.
No, only the D.I.S.T series does. I just got one of their custom 2-12's last month.
I’ve played and owned at least 5 neodymium cabinets with not so much a minor rattle out of any of them.
interesting. It nearly always piques my curiosity when this idea is presented .... 1 smaller speaker can "out perform" speakers of a larger size.
I understand that a well designed and engineered cab with a high quality, and well mechanically spec'd driver can deliver amazing performance for the size/weight, but I am a natural born skeptic and tend to hear this kind of reasoning as bravado/hyperbole.
can someone elaborate how a well designed and engineered 1x8 (such as the referenced MAS 18) could "out perform" and equivalently well designed and engineered 1x12 (like a Genzler, Mesa SW or Bergantino Ref 12) ?
... and yes, I do understand that the only thing speaker size tells is what the diameter of the driver is.
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- Nov 24, 2008
- 4,343
- 7,163
- Disclosures
- Owner & designer, AudioKinesis; Auth. mfg, Big E (Home Audio only)
Well I dunno about the neo magnets that agedhorse and dawind99 use, but MINE will make you popular with the ladies. Or the men. Or whoever you want to be popular with.
Seriously, I think the specific driver parameters matter more than what kind of material is used in the magnet. Neodymium's high field strength and light weight makes it easier to get a powerful motor, which can make the woofer a little bit louder but also a little bit "thinner" in the low end. Getting to the same point with a ceramic motor can be done of course, but with a significant weight penalty.
One inherent advantage of ceramic magnets is, largely because of their mass, it takes longer for them to heat up to the point where they temporarily lose field strength. The field strength comes back after the motor cools down, but all else being equal a ceramic motor is less likely to get mushy/start to compress at the end of a loud set.
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- Nov 24, 2008
- 4,343
- 7,163
- Disclosures
- Owner & designer, AudioKinesis; Auth. mfg, Big E (Home Audio only)
I think I can compare Mike's 1x8's with my 112's. His 1x8's have a few things going for them.
First, he's using a custom 8" woofer designed by the engineer who designed the Kappalites, along with most of Eminence's bass-cab-compatible woofers. That 8's linear excursion is the highest I've ever seen in an 8 that still has decent top end extension. I'm not going to get specific because it's Mike's woofer, not mine.
Second, the "Manipulated Vortex Waveguide" enclosure he uses imo has worthwhile advantages over vented or sealed cabinets. Disclaimer: I am an authorized user of the same technology in the home audio market, but I don't currently have any products that do so. My understanding is that the MVW enclosure does a good job of harvesting and using the backwave energy over a very wide frequency range, from the low bass all the way up to maybe 4 kHz or so. (The internal geometry deliberately encourages vortex formation, and sound travels more efficiently on the edge of a vortex, and my understanding is that the shorter wavelength energy "vortexes" its way around bends that normally would filter most of it out.) In contrast, a vented enclosure harvests and uses the backwave energy only at and somewhat above the port tuning frequency. And a sealed enclosure makes no attempt to harvest and use the backwave energy. In addition to the higher broadband SPL of the MVW cabinet, it also has excellent pitch definition down low, better than a comparable vented box and quite competitive with a comparable sealed box. And it has excellent dispersion, in my experience better than the cone diameter predicts. Which bums me out because good dispersion is something I think matters.
Third, Mike is one of these people who accomplishes as much as three normal people. He has done far more to advance the MVW technology than I could have, simply because he is totally unafraid to go outside the box with his time-consuming, brain-intensive trial-and-error explorations. His work ethic is scary.
My impression is that Mike's 1x8 cabs are not quite as loud as my 1x12 cabs, but that three of his 1x8 cabs (or a 1x8 + a 2x8) are louder than two of my 1x12 cabs (Mike had Eminence make his 8" woofers with a higher than normal impedance, such that three of them in parallel still qualifies as a "4 ohm" load). I think Mike's 1x8 goes deeper than my 1x12's and does so with better articulation. The notes really "pop" on his cabs in a way that makes me jealous, and I think that mainly traces back to his MVW cabinet. Anyway that's my impression of how his 1x8's compare to my 112's.
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Why would someone say that? I certainly had a problem with my Markbass NY121, which is a neo cab, but I don't assign any of the issues to the fact that it was a neo driver. Just that it broke in such a way that Markbass wanted a few hundred dollars to fix it out of warranty. In my case, the magnet somehow degraded. That's not typical of neo drivers at all. That could happen to any speaker cabinet.
