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"Wall of Sound" - worth a try?

#41
My buddy used to do this for sound reinforcement, incidental music and sound effects for amateur dramatics productions.

He had a motley assortment of low wattage cabs that he drove with a 200W tube PA amp. Some cabs were getting next to nothing and others half the amp output and he wondered why he kept blowing drivers. It sounded disgusting with very little bass, probably because of phase issues, so he cranked the bass and just got farting and blown drivers instead.

The tube amp packed up and he brought it to me to fix and at about the same time he came by a pair of half decent PA cabs (on poles) and a matching SS amp, it sounded so much better!

I still have the tube amp (now fixed) in my garage but refuse to give it back because I know that if I do he will start using it again because "more is always better" and just go back to bad sound and blowing drivers again.
 
#45
OK, here's some input from an Acoustical Physicist:

There are a few things at play when you start making an array like this. First off, adding cone area is a good idea - it linearizes things, increases efficiency, gives you more output capability, and more power handling, especially at lower frequencies. Twice the cone area makes a rig better at low frequencies and more reliable, all other things being equal.

The other main thing that happens is you start to affect the polar pattern - how the sound comes out of the array depends on how big it is, in wavelengths. At 41 Hz, a wavelength is about 27 feet, so unless you get to Greatful Dead sized array, you're not going to beam things at 41 Hz. At 328 Hz, however (3 octaves higher, about the top fundamental on a bass guitar), a 3.3 foot high or wide array is definitely going to beam; you'll notice that, At 3.3 kHz (we often have harmonics in that range) a 10 inch speaker is over 2 wavelengths in diameter - we've all noticed beaming of higher frequency stuff in typical bass cabinets. What you're doing by increasing the cabinet size is extending that behavior downward in frequency. This can be good or bad - you just have to figure out how to work with it.
 
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#48
xnewyorka said:
The trick is that I built a Series box which lets me put the two 4's in series to get 8. (Easy enough to build, but I was thinking about making them up and selling them for those who need one. Do you think there would be enough demand to make it worth pursuing? It would turn two 4's into an 8 ohm load, or turn two 8's into a 16, which could then be put in parallel with another two 8's to get back to 8.)
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pigpen1 said:
I'd probably buy something like that at a decent enough price.
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Palmer has them, for example, both ways (series/parallel).

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And for the "Wall of Sound":

giphy.gif
 
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#50
Perhaps it would be worth paying a bit more attention to the power ratings of the components of your setup too. After all if what you are after is an experience in houseshakingbowellooseninglowfrequencydestruction, you may as well do your damnedest to get the max out of everything, and having half the energy coming out of your poor little 1*12s feels like a waste of watts. Given you've got that many devices there are probably quite a number of ways you can wire it up to get the desired impedance. What are the power ratings of all the bits of kit? Ideally you want everything to be fed the same percentage of rated power.
 
#51
lfmn16 said:
Complete and total waste of time - for me. If you want to do it, go ahead. Not sure why anyone would ask permission.
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I wasn't asking permission so much ask asking if anyone else has tried something similar and had either a good or bad experience. I am really glad I asked the question, because I was only thinking about arriving at the proper impedance and I had failed to consider the unequal power distribution across the drivers. So I am going to rethink it, and probably will end up connecting two 4-ohm cabs to one amp to get 4 ohms, and connecting two 8-ohm cabs to the other amp to get 4 ohms there as well. My goal is to stand in front of a massive wall of moving air just to experience that. (I never got to see The Who in concert.) Like many of us (I assume), I LOVE feeling the bass. I have six cabs in total, but three are 4 ohms and three are 8 ohms, so I can't really use them all as I had hoped.

If I merely wanted to experience LOUD, the Barefaced Super Twin all by itself is more than plenty loud to cause total deafness very quickly. Then again, I think the Berg AE410 is too. But I am not after just obnoxious loud volume. I wanted to see if I could get a nice and clean sounding massive wall of air movement with all of that speaker surface area available.
 
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#52
Fuzzonaut said:
Palmer has them, for example, both ways (series/parallel).

View attachment 2980273

Dang - that is exactly the design I had in mind I was going to sell them. Thanks for the link! @pigpen1 and I will both buy one! The one I made cost less than $10 in parts with Switchcraft jacks and a plastic project box from Radio Shack (R.I.P.). With Radio Shack gone, I'd have to mail order the project boxes. Probably not worth the hassle, when you factor in the build time, as compared to buying a nice looking one for $48.
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#53
It can be done and can be face melting.

After trying multible " walls of sound" with this cab and that cab etc etc.

Without sounding to generic. Using tube amps it was a real pleasure and i got very consistent sound with a sealed 8x10. With all its sealed magic.

On tour and in a interest of punishing any act before or after us. I simply added another 8x10. Amazing presence and room to room consistency with 2 matching cabs and one head.

Ahhh i love the smell of blown screen resistors in the morning lol. Have fun
 
#56
Supposing you pair up each 1*12 in series with a 2*12 for 12 ohm combinations
then pair up the 410s in series for another 12ohm combination
then run all 3 in parallel you'll get 4ohm total

the 410s will have 22% (Berg) and 11% (eden) respectively
the 212s both 22%
the 112s 11% each
That ought to be safe, but if your amp won't deliver full power into 4ohms its well down on output.
 
#58
Bob_Ross said:
Thread drift: How do you like those Kolbe cabs?
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I don't like them. I LOVE them. They are A-W-E-S-O-M-E.
I discovered them quite by accident. I visited Harry to get an amp mod done, and the bassist from Spirogyra had just been there and tried out his new cab design and immediately said "Wow! I'll take six of them". So I asked Harry if I could try them, and he said sure, fire it up. So I tested my amp mod with these very cabs and bought them on the spot, which cleaned out his inventory at the time. That was in the late 80's or early 90's, and I am still as blown away by them today as I was then.
They use an EVM12L guitar speaker, and he tuned the port to take advantage of the full speaker excursion potential. So they put out a surprising amount of bottom, but also have tremendous presence in the mids and highs because the driver is innately bright by nature. Sounds like there is a tweeter in there, but of course there isn't. But it's not an obnoxious bright like an aluminum Hartke or an Eden with the treble set on 10. It's a nice natural sounding bright, kind of like the AE410 with the treble at around 4. What is uncanny is that you can play a 5 string chord and hear every note clearly. It doesn't just turn into mush like my previous cabs had done. There have been lots of advances in cab design since then, I'm sure. But these things, at 36 lbs, were the best thing going at the time. For a gigging NYC bassist, they were a Godsend because I could carry my entire massive sounding rig in a single trip from the taxi to the stage or to my 3rd floor walkup apartment. A cabinet in each hand, the bass on my back, and the amp in a shoulder bag. That was unheard of back then, in the pre-Class D days.
 
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#59
xnewyorka said:
That was in the late 80's or early 90's, and I am still as blown away by them today as I was then.
They use an EVM12L guitar speaker, and he tuned the port to take advantage of the full speaker excursion potential. So they put out a surprising amount of bottom, but also have tremendous presence in the mids and highs because the driver is innately bright by nature.
Click to expand...

I get what you are saying about how the EVM12L speaker perform. I had two 412's loaded with them. They really sounded good with both bass and guitar.
 

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