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Under driving your cab with too much headroom?

OP, the watt rating on your speaker cabinet indicates the amount of power your cab can take safely.

OP:

If you read Lug's post, I thought it might be helpful to chime in with some information regarding wattage ratings of bass cabs. If it's a run-of-the-mill consumer-grade cab (which most are), please don't make the mistake of thinking that the cab can actually handle its wattage rating. Most consumer-grade cab manufacturers publish wattage ratings based on what amount of power will melt the voice coils (known as the "thermal" rating). Those manufacturers love to publish those ratings because the number sounds so impressive, especially to unsuspecting buyers. The real limiting factor with bass cabs isn't the thermal rating, but rather the *mechanical* rating (the limit of cone movement). You won't find consumer-grade cab manufacturers publishing those numbers! Goodness no! They want to keep those numbers hush hush! A safe rule of thumb to use is, the mechanical rating for consumer-grade cabs is about *half* of their thermal rating.

When I say "consumer-grade", I am referring to those commonly mass-produced cabs of various brands that you find all over the place. Their published wattage ratings are thermal, not mechanical. However, there are a few boutique cab builders that don't play that sneaky game. You can actually trust their published wattage ratings because they are more representative of what their cabs can actually handle. A few examples of those cab builders are Jim Bergantino, Alex Claber (Barefaced cabs), Duke LeJeune (Audiokinesis), and Greenboy (fEarful, fEarless).

So, for your cab, you should plan for about 1000 watts max. With your amp putting out 800 watts into a 4 ohm load, you have a good match.

EDIT: I just read that your cab is a Behringer. So you had better ratchet down the cab's power handling capability to around 500 watts RMS.

Hope that info helps! :thumbsup:
 
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The only caveat that I can think of is that you might not be able to power the 2000W cabinet into it’s best sounding region.
^^^^This, until the OP said the B word.

Behringer watts divide by 4 to 10 for the rest of the MI world. Now if that's on a Behringer amp, I guess it's OK.

The only caveat to under powering is if you dime all the knobs, you may actually be over powering... up to x2 the amps rated output. Should sound like hell too, but some people like hell.
 
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I beg to differ - AFAIK the Behringer cab ratings are "peak" AKA 2x the "program" rating which is 2x the "RMS" AKA thermal rating. So figure 500w RMS (thermal) on that cab.
You are right RR, but they clearly don't follow the industry standard definition of peak. Actual wattage is a guess. Their power amps had quite a following here a couple of years ago, and IIRC they were more like 300 Watts for their 3000 Watt claims (according to those who owned them). Pretty bad, pretty sad, and pretty dishonest.

Mr. Behringer has made himself pretty much the butt of the joke in the industry.
 
You are right RR, but they clearly don't follow the industry standard definition of peak. Actual wattage is a guess. Their power amps had quite a following here a couple of years ago, and IIRC they were more like 300 Watts for their 3000 Watt claims. Pretty bad, pretty sad, and pretty dishonest.
Their power amps are't quite that bad - I have an NU3000 and an NU4-6000 and an independent test I found showed a 2dB "headroom adjustment" so the 3000 was about the same power as an old QSC RMX2450. BTW an NU6000 is just two NU3000's that are permanently bridged. The NU4-6000 is those same two NU3000's but not permanently bridged.

I also have a Peavey IPR3000 that uses real watts LOL.
 
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I'm using a solid state 800w/4ohms amp head and a 8x10 2000w/4ohms speaker cabinet. Is this okay for the cab and head? My head also says it runs 450w at 8ohms on the master dial. Is this okay to run on my cab or should I keep the master at 800w at 4ohms (max) and keep the volume down. Thanks in advance.
Oh, son. Have you been taking technical advice from your lead guitarist again? :roflmao:
 
Wow. This place is full of some really lousy people. You should all be proud of yourselves.
Their name.

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I've actually had the chance to play a used Behringer head in a pawn shop - not a bad piece of kit, in all honesty. The 210 cab it was on top of was absolute trash though. Sure, maybe it was the fact that it was old and worn out, but I could neither make the Behringer head nor a gkrb400 sound good with that thing. Like, it was simultaneously too bright and too muddy regardless of what you'd do with the EQ.

That being said, that was an aluminum cone 210 - the paper cones hopefully sound better. But anyways, yeah, Behringer overrates their gear. Basically, they'd use advertising magic (e.g. deceitful numbers, creative rating systems) to make their products sound like a better value than it may be. If you know what you're getting, It's not all horrible gear - I can dig their small guitar combos for what they are. But hey, even though your 810 probably won't actually handle 2 kilowatts - it'll still get loud enough. I've played through a couple of them before buying my first amp, and they definitely shook walls.
 
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OP, don't pay too much mind to all the crap you're getting. However, you should read up on how amps and cabs work in terms of watts and Ohms, etc. We of the bottom end have to worry about pushing our amps to the limit, and dealing with multiple cabs, more so than guitarists do. You really need to understand what is going on to get the most from your equipment and avoid a costly mistake.
 
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