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Wattage Importantness

#21
Joe Beets said:
It's always fun to hear from bass players who play in a heavy metal rock band and use a combo amp. All I can say is your drummer must have a very sensitive and tastefull style. And your guitar players are truly rare and exceptional musicians to control their stage volume so well. You are very lucky. On the other hand, I haven't left the house without at least 1000 watts for thirty years. Unless it was for a hotel-room rehearsal or maybe for one of those "special jobs" like backing up some folk singers. I've always had enough headroom to never worry about TOF. But if TOF hits you because you are short on watts you will sound like crap and everyone will hear it. Avoid the heartbreak of TOF (Threshold of Farting) by always having plenty of power. I use a Stewart 1.2 with a PLX3002 for emergency backup. It will work for you too. ;) :smug: :D
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I am lucky to have such the situation - we realize that you don't blast everything from stage and hey, that's why we have PA. It's helped our playing come together drastically in the meantime, as we can hear what we're actually playing, rather than just noise. No need to carry 1000W around here.

Ray
 
#27
I guess you could argue for and against the importance of power... but bottom line: it can only do so much. Go ahead and power yourself with 1000Watts... its not gonna be worth a damn if you've only got a 112 cab. Now... if you took, say, 400Watts and put it through a 410/115 stack.... it would be pretty monstrous.

Then again... you wanna make sure you've got a touch of headroom. And when I say touch... I mean as much as you really want. It'll be easier on your amp and such.

Either way you look at it... you've gotta spend some money. Whether your trying to pocket headroom, or stack up a ton of speaker surface. You really just need to discover what the correct balance is for YOUR preference and needs. :cool:
 
#29
yeah all the stuff mentioned so far is impartant.

TOF, gotta love it............... :p

having efficient speakers is definitely a big part of the equation. not only sensitive, but voiced so they're loud. as mentioned sensitivity is measure as 1 watt @ 1 meter @ 1 K. not a real useful frequency for bass. hopefully a cab will have equal sensitivity in the frequencies that matter. the frequency response specs will tell you a bit about this as long as they have a tolerance (+/- X db) in addition to the response (X hz - Y Khz)

in theory a cab that has a sensitivity of 100 dB @ 1 K with a frequency repsonse of 40 hz - 4 khz +/- 3dB should be no lower than 97 dB at any given frequency in that range. as previously stated, few manufacturers will actually show you a graph of the frequency response curve. and a few are suspect of "fudging" a bit.

after all the specs you have to let your ears decide if the voicing and volume of the cab is to your liking. then you have to determine if the power handling and xmax of the cab(s) will let you use enough watts to get the volume you want/need

then you can think about watts. me? i like to have a ton at my disposal for headroom and "just in case". my stewart 2.1 gives me anywhere from 800 - 2100 watts depending upon what cabs i use and how i hook them up. for me that's plenty, even when i have to play with a guy with a marshall plexi style 100 watt amp going thru 4 or 8 12' speakers. :cool:

i can do lots of gigs with 150 watts with a couple of cabs, and used to be able to do a bunch of louder gigs with 400 watts when i had a 400 watt head. i just like to have the extra watts handy, and by having a 20 lb amp in a 2 space rack, it's not that big of a deal to bring that much juice. :ninja:
 
#30
[QUOTE=TheChariot Go ahead and power yourself with 1000Watts... its not gonna be worth a damn if you've only got a 112 cab.

Wait just a minute. I'm running a PLX3002 bridged into a single Eden 112XLT. :eyebrow: :eyebrow: :eyebrow:
 
#31
I'm not sure where y'all are coming from. I played the American Indians Longest Walk in '76 on the Mall (Washington Monument) for 20k + with my same Musicman HD130 that I use now. It is plenty for a 300 + person club without PA assist. It will rattle bottles off their shelves with the Acoustic 301 cab. Am I missing something the SS 1,000 plus folks are using? Not ragginging anyone, maybe I'm missing something.
 
#32
Joe Beets said:
TheChariot Go ahead and power yourself with 1000Watts... its not gonna be worth a damn if you've only got a 112 cab. Wait just a minute. I'm running a PLX3002 bridged into a single Eden 112XLT. :eyebrow: :eyebrow: :eyebrow:[/QUOTE said:
Yeah... that would be loud, for sure... but... not my point :p

Now... PLX1602 into an Eden 410XLT + 115XLT. I cant say I've heard either of these combinations, but I think that the one with far more speaker surface would be louder, despite only having approx. 1/3 the power.
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#34
It needs to be said that manufacturers rate their products differently. There's a big 'ratings game' going on within the music industry and it makes it really hard for the consumer to discern what's legit and what isn't. Genz Benz, for example, is very conservative with their power ratings. Peavey has honest specs as well. Behringer doesn't. I have the little BX1200 1x12 kickback combo. It's rated at 120 watts, which is stretched a bit because it's a 4 ohm rating (the internal speaker is a 4 ohm driver). Even so, there is still no way that thing is 120 'real' watts.
 
#35
I'm reading alot of different TBer's formulas for tonal satisfaction and think it's important to ask something. Different tone styles and playing styles, and basses, will have different perceived effects on headroom requirements, wouldn't they? For example, a bassist playing punk rock, pick style on a Rick 4 string may have a fairly middish tone with very consistant attack. In my case I play a 5 tuned down to Bb, and it needs to be pretty thick, I also slap and every thing else one could think of. To get the same "volume" I may require more wattage(and more cone)????comments????
 
#36
It keeps coming back to the wattage thing, and the problem is that watts tell you nothing about performance. Watts are a measurement of power, not loudness, not frequency response. Going to the horsepower analogy, knowing a vehicle has a 300 HP motor doesn't tell you how fast the vehicle will go or how well it will handle. 300 HP in a Porsche isn't the same as 300 HP in a dump truck. If all the information you have to work with is how many watts a certain amp has or how many and what size drivers are in a speaker cabinet then you may be comparing sports cars with dump trucks. If that's the case then you have to do the same thing that you, I hope, do when you buy a car: take a test drive and be sure it's what you want.
 
#37
pickles said:
...
2-3db is the smallest increment of volume increase that most people can hear.
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1db is the smallest change in volume that can be heard.


Joe Beets said:
All those numbers can be confusing. What is more important is the threshold of farting. If you have a 500 watt amp you will be able to keep up with one or maybe two small guitar combo amps with only occasional farting on the loud notes. If you have a 50 watt amp you will hear constant farting on every note. Unless, of course, you are backing up some folk singers. The 500 watt amp will reach its threshold of farting at 300-350 watts depending on how much low boost you use and how hard you thump on your bass. The 50 watt amp will reach farting power as soon as you turn it on. :eek: :rolleyes:
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As BillF said, it depends on the cabs you're using.

On the cab side -- yes, you do want to avoid farting (driving the speaker(s) harder than they were designed to be driven).

On the amplification side, you want to avoid clipping (except, possibly with certain tube amps).


pickles said:
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If you're digging what you've got then great, and the important thing to remember is that 400 watts is only "barely noticably" louder than 200 ...
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That's an approximate 3db difference -- definitely noticeable.


billfitzmaurice said:
It keeps coming back to the wattage thing, and the problem is that watts tell you nothing about performance. Watts are a measurement of power, not loudness, not frequency response. Going to the horsepower analogy, knowing a vehicle has a 300 HP motor doesn't tell you how fast the vehicle will go or how well it will handle. 300 HP in a Porsche isn't the same as 300 HP in a dump truck. If all the information you have to work with is how many watts a certain amp has or how many and what size drivers are in a speaker cabinet then you may be comparing sports cars with dump trucks. If that's the case then you have to do the same thing that you, I hope, do when you buy a car: take a test drive and be sure it's what you want.
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What he said...
 
#38
not to be picky lo, but maybe exceptional people can hear a 1 dB difference, but by definition, a 3 dB difference (in SPL) is the increment that an average person can hear.

and i agree with you bill. the sports car dump truck analogy is a good one. watts do become important once you've picked your cabinets and know your volume needs. (kind of like once you've settled on a porche, do you want the 200 hp one or the 450 hp ultra-mega-turbo). even so, one company's watts do not equal another company's watts so its still an inexact science in that regard.
 
#39
IvanMike said:
not to be picky lo, but maybe exceptional people can hear a 1 dB difference, but by definition, a 3 dB difference (in SPL) is the increment that an average person can hear.
...
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The following is a quote from Invalid Link Removed
A University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) website.
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How big is a decibel?
...
One decibel is close to the Just Noticeable Difference (JND) for sound level.
... 10*log10(1.26) = 1, so to increase the sound level by 1 dB, the power must be increased by 26%, or the voltage by 12%.

What if the difference is less than a decibel? Sound levels are rarely given with decimal places. The reason is that sound levels that differ by less than 1 dB are hard to distinguish...
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I have seen other sources that quote 3dB as being just noticeable, so maybe I am splitting hairs, but it's difficult to imagine that the difference between a 500W amp and 1000W amp (with the same speaker system) is just barely noticeable.
 
#40
Great web site.

Yeah, the "it takes twice as much wattage to equal a mere 3 db change" thing is something oft-quoted, and is demonstrably true. What should be quoted along with it IMO and rarely is, is that the decibel scale is logarithmic. That means that while the difference between 3 and 6 db is barely discernable to the human ear, the difference between 100 and 103 watts is VERY noticeable. It's not a linear scale, and there's a huge difference between how much sound a 500 watt and a 1000 watt amp will put out (in decibels, anyway. Frequency response is, as has been pointed out, a diferent matter).
When buying gear, I like to probe a companies website/catalog thoroughly. The amount of specs you see on a high-end PA company's gear (say, Meyer Sounds MILO line arrays, or JBL's touring cabs) is astounding in detail, and if read properly will tell you exactly how they arrived at those ratings, and give you a good idea whether it will do the job for you.
B%^$%r's (and a couple of other company's) site is remarkably bare, and I've been told on good authority they'll measure the power supply, not the power amp itself, to get higher numbers, or worse, give you a theoretical number based them using "ideal" components in their designs. Shady...
 

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