- Joined
- Aug 27, 2007
- Messages
- 1,536
- Reaction score
- 264
You are completely misinterpreting what I am saying (and it isn't a personal attack on you) and it appears that like many you are under the impression that the size of a driver has a direct impact on the tone that it produces... it doesn't! You can't get a different kind of low from a 15" than you get from 10" or multiples of. A cab may be tuned for low end... it should in fact be tuned for the driver specs but that is another matter but a 4x10 can be tuned as low as a 1x15, there are many cabs out there (and it would appear that the Hellborg cabs may be representative) where 15's can have more top end than 10's (a friend's EV loaded 2x15 can literally cut your head off at 10 paces) yet I know 2x10 cabs that sound as though they are actually sub bass bins.
Ported/Infinite baffle and sealed cabs is a whole different ball game and you are comparing apples and oranges but the same applies that a properly designed cabinet (designed, ported and tuned to the driver(s) NOT designed to make the cabinet aesthetically pleasing and made to fit into the potential customer's hot-hatch LOL) will not necessarily mean that 10's are higher than 15's.
I recall when Hartke aluminium speakered cabs first came out, I tried a rig (4x10 + 1x15 as that is what the store had as a demo bass rig) with my bi-amp GK800rb. I'd been playing 10-15 minutes and couldn't quite figure out what was different about what I expected to hear, so I hunkered in front of the cabs (1x15 on the floor, 4x10 on the top of the 1x15) and realised that I had mistakenly plugged the 15" driver into the 'hi' output and the 4x10 into the 'lo' output! Silly mistake but simple to swap back... it sounded worse! I then went back to the high frequencies going to the 15" and the lows to the 10" BUT I swapped the cabs so that the 4x10 was on the floor and the 1x15 was on top of it and that was by FAR the best sound out of this rig; it made me begin to realise that you can not take for granted the perceived idea that 15's are deep/slow/low and 10's are tight/fast/high.
From there I have been interested in the whole idea of bass tone/sound and I've experimented with lots of combinations and I have to say that the 'science' of sound is irrefutable BUT you can and do get some pleasing sounds from combinations of speaker sizes though you can and do get the same results and in a more predictable way by maintaining one driver size. The problem with all of this is that for 50 years we've had this impression that the 'ideal' (visually) is the classic 4x10 + 1x15 yet our understanding of acoustics has changed. There is an age old tale that the first designs of Marshall guitar equipment were the size and dimensions that it was purely because it was the dimension of timber that Jim Marshall had kicking around and it fitted in with the dimensions of the amp that he was building at the time.
I'll stress again that certain combinations of speakers can sound great (remembering that 'One man's meat, is another man's poison') and yes some 15's can sound lower than 10's but that isn't too say that has to be the case or is the case; a well designed full range speaker cabinet will reproduce bass as low/high as the limits of the driver will allow.
Have a read around on the whole idea of the benefits of single size drivers in a full range cabinet, it makes fascinating reading.
