Amps with no tone controls

You reckon re the 12" requirement? I probably agree with you but the fashion these days is for smaller and thinner cabinets so the bass must be suffering somewhat with these designs. You can pay £1500 for some floorstanders and still miss out on some bass. How thoroughly demoralising!

 

You can pay a helluva lot more than £1500 and still get no bass!
If you've only got, say a 6.5 incher (!) it'll have to move about 2 feet to get anything below 40Hz..
Still, I find many speakers are tuned to give that hifi "boom" at about 50-60Hz so folks think they've got bass.
When I was giging as a bass player I used to use a 2x15" and a 4x12" cabinet, the 12" cab was for the top end! Then my back went...

 

im not sure i agree with the last few comments.. ive owned a few slimline floorstanders... and with the exception of one.. all were capable of sub 40hz bass and one design could even manage 28hz. This from a driver never bigger than 6"

the next speakers im after are the epos ES30's... they have a 20cm bass driver with a quoted response down to 25hz and given what they say about the 22's im inclined to beleive thats an accurate figure.

mind you.. those were £2500 floorstanders in their day :S

 

shrink, was that bass performance that you measured, or just publicised stats by the manufacturer?

 

using a test tone CD and a sound pressure meter i could pick up usefull levels off bass on my old B&W's down to 29 hz before it was getting too quiet to pick up easilly.

SPL meters aint that great at picking up low bass unfortunately. But the fact that there was any output that low is good enough.

my new speakers give no impression of any lost bass weight over the B&W's

 

Sure but it doesnt tell you the frequencies produced does it? 29 Hz in = 3 x 29Hz out [modulated at 29Hz], room singing along nicely, ears filling in missing fundamentals. Don't worry thats what 99.99% of speakers do, and we still enjoy them.

 

With ever increasing house prices its no wonder the fashion is for smaller drivers, if imagine if you had 12" cones and played it in a flat at the ten o o'clock position, you might get a few complaints.

 

AT - personally I think the fashion for smaller bass cones has got more to do with the obsession we have as a nation with room decor, and less to do with sound.

A fashion thing IMO

 

A simple swept parametric EQ as found on the channel strip of any half decent mixing desk will do that.
What "bad things" are tone controls in the signal path supposed to do anyway?

PS I'd find it easier to adjust EQ controls on a preamp than to have to keep moving speakers around the room.

 

Aye, I blame Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen as well...
It's perfectly possible to get low bass out of a small cone, but the amount of general piddling about in order to get it makes me think, why not just use a bigger cone in the first place? After all, bass is all about moving air - using a small cone to do it is like using a teaspoon to dig the garden!
Besides, if you're going to have a speaker it might as well be a bit imposing in a "cor, how fast will it go mister?" sort of way!

 

My grandparents have some old Sansui units from the 1970's so they were probably at the cheaper end of the market when they were made, but they are ugly things, with 12" cones, they are based on the floor as well which makes matters worse.

I am not a fan of larger speakers but then my room is quite small, so if I have any speakers bigger than the ones I have now there will be lots of boom, and I am not exactly a fan of a vengaboys.

 

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