Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

...to go along with their new 4001c64s "Wings" bass?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2543042121&category=23787

Looks to be very, very similar to the amp and speaker combo Macca used in the early days of Wings, when they toured around Europe and the University campuses in England.

a word of caution, those are prone to meltdown and have absolutely no top end, and no punch, the 18" is facing downward in them and the high end gets lost in the turns in the folded horn. Jaco Pastorius used those, if you like the middy tubby sound go for it. They also sound better 10 to 20 feet away. And they are about 350 (330?) watts not 600.

I played through a 370 cab and a peavey head in the 80's ... great setup ... it still had a good treble punch ... add a 2x10 cab and you will have lots of treble bite .... I used the 1x18 with a crossover to a 1x15 ... by the time I put my head on top it was 7 feet tall ... very impressive sounding and looking ...

18" speakers are great for bass when mixed with 10's ...

The 370 cab has nice focused lows without getting uncontrolled low end rumble ... it is similar to a svt 8x10 cab except not as brite ... but you can eq the right sound into it ...

The main problem with the 370 cab is size ... it is like a refrigerator ...

I had one of these bad boys while in high school, say 1975 through 1977. I paid 800 bucks for it new; 350 watts (I think), 600 pounds (I know), much too large for a lad with a Buick Skylark. It didn't do much for my Precision Bass, or my back, as I recall, but it had a cool sticker on the back of the cab which read "Warning: extreme sound levels" which made it all worthwhile. It self destructed in a cloud of blue smoke; I had it fixed then traded it for a Guild 12 string. I miss the Guild.

The acoustic amp is a nice compliment to a Ric bass ... a lot of the sound depends on what 18" speaker is installed ... some 18" speakers don't have any high end frequency response ... but some do ... the folded horn projects the sound real nice ...

A young guy with a P-bass had that same exact model head and cab back in 1976 in Anchorage, Alaska. He was a civvie that played about twice a month on weekends at the Elmendorf AFB Airmans Club. I got a lot of experience hearing that Acoustic 370 setup over the course of a year or more. It never blew up on him, but he played at a reasonable club level. I also had a P-bass and a Peavey 1x18 folded horn cab at the same time, driven by about a 150W @ 8 ohm solid state Peavey head. Mine didn't have much treble, and all the EQ in the world wouldn't have forced much out of it. It DID project, and it WAS loud, and I mean LOUD! However, it also had a rolloff in the deep bass as well. The lowest couple of notes were noticeably weaker than the others. The folded horn cab functions as a passband filter. It is EXTREMELY efficient over a limited bandwidth, and it does focus the sound and project it very well. But I consider that bad, as the sound was fairly quiet standing next to the cab while it could seemingly flatten you 40 feet away. You WILL need a LOUD 2x10 cab at the minimum to balance the highs and lows per Jeff Rath. In the defense of the Acoustic, it had a much nicer sound than my Peavey. I thought it was a very decent bass amp compared to mine...........until I heard an Ampeg SVT setup with two 8x10 cabs that totally redefined for me what a bigass bass amp should really sound like.

The Doors used Acoustic amps to great effect over 30 years ago......but times have changed and better amps now exist. Power is cheap now, and I would never consider a folded horn cab. It is impossible to properly integrate a conventional speaker with a folded horn speaker. Some people THINK they can, but they probably played disco when these things were popular. The folded horn is out of phase within itself, much less another speaker. The output will have huge peaks and dips if you check it with a spectrum analyzer.

HOWEVER, if you crave the sound of uneven and highly colored bass, you may have found your slice of heaven. The Acoustic 370 is the best folded horn setup I ever heard, which ain't saying much because my Peavey setup was the only other one anybody in those parts was stupid enough to buy. I took mine home to Minnesota and found a buyer for it and the matching P-bass with the S-curve neck. A MATCH MADE IN HELL!!!

And the buyer played in a really redneck country band. Who says no justice exists in the world?

Well there has to be a reason that the Acoustics have been obsolete for at least twenty five years.
They still make the SVT's because if you don't mind lugging them, they are still the best sounding amp made. To me the pinnacle of bass sound was reached when Rics and SVT's became THE combination to have. For those of you overseas in case you don't know, an SVT is a 300 watt RMS all tube bass head with one or two 8 X 10 cabs, the cabs have 4 separate sealed chambers each with a pair of tens in it. The are very tight sounding, when you stop your string, these speakers stop immediately, they are very highly damped, they are the model for all the modern 10" speaker cabs. 300 watts out of a tube amp sounds like 1000 out of a solid state amp. These things sound so thick you feel like you could walk on the sound.

You know there are guys out there that can make ANY amp sound bad ... then there are guys who can make ANY amp sound good ... Geddy Lee sounds good no matter what bass or what amp he uses ... there are some bar band guys who have a rumbling plodding muddy sound no matter what ... I know when I used to show up and play that huge 1x18 folded horn cab with a crossover to a 1x15 cab for highs and my peavey head ... I used to blow people away ... the weakest link was the peavey head ...

Now I use an ampeg b2r and a 2x10 cab and a 1x18 cab ... I mike the 2x10 into a big pa ... and we use Cerwin Vega Subs and klipch speakers ... this setup sounds very good ...

If you are going to use an 18" speaker then it makes a big difference which one you use ... some 18" cut off at pretty low frequencies like 1000hz ... and some go up to 5000hz some 15" speakers are the same way ...

I played out tonight ... You know I go to great lengths to get a great sound .. Ric basses, ampeg, eminence, line6, etc ... then some dufass who doesn't know what he doing with a pa screws up the sound going out the front ... we had like 8 bands or so and this sound guy messed them all up to some degree ... I had a great sound on stage but what went out through the mains sucked ... that's what we get when we can't use our own pa and sound man ... then the stupid *** sound man came over and started changing my eq settings in the middle of a song ... I almost took his head off ... he needed to tweak what was going out the pa and not what was on stage ... but he didn't know what he was doing ...

So some people can't make any bass amp sound good and some sound men can make any pa sound bad ...

Jeff,
I think every musician here has gone through this at one time or another. The really bad soundmen outweigh the good ones, no doubt! The bad ones will go on and on about how good they are. A few years ago we decided that if we can't use our own soundman and equipment, we don't play.

Soundmen are necessary evils to me. They have WAY to much control over the sound of a band nowadays. When I started playing sound men used to augment the sound of a band not entirely reproduce the sound of the band, a lot of the sound used to come off the stage. I know some arrogant sound men who think they are more important than the musicians, I don't know how many times I've had discussions (arguments) about miking versus direct boxes (which I think s**k) then only to have the sound guy say: Hey, that does sound good when you mike a bass.
When a bass is miked it's much harder to screw up your sound, many of them just don't get that some bass players use the amp for their sound just as much as guitar players. Their usual excuse is that you don't get enough bottom from a mic like a 58, that's baloney, they are essentially flat down to 50 cps (with a slight mid rise which sounds good with a bass), and then there is a gradual roll off. What they really don't like is that they can't relegate the bass sound to a subliminal rumble as easily with the sound out of your own amp. It's all about control! Rise up bass players!! Bass players liberation! BPL. Burn those direct boxes! Lets march! haha. Time for another spot of Camomile Tea I think.

Folded horn cabs have a unique sound, but definitely NOT a true representation of what was fed into the speaker cab. Other designs have far less efficiency, but it also means you do not apply 6 to 12dB of EQ in the lowest octave to try to achieve a sound "so thick you can seemingly walk on it" as Bob has mentioned. And if you do, a bad bass reflex design just muddies up even more due to "overhang". Folded horn cabs have not been popular with audiophiles since the Klipschorn speakers of the 50's and 60's that were designed for underpowered 10W tubed stereo amps. Henry Kloss (of KLH and AR fame) and more powerful tube and transistor amps obsoleted the folded horn cab for high fidelity sound reproduction long ago. Henry championed the acoustic suspension design, which is probably what is used in Bob's beloved SVT cabs. Acoustic suspension bass is the most accurate bass. Period. The horn speaker has it's place, but it's not as a folded plywood contraption that is cube or rectangularly shaped. There are some excellent designs that are a permanently installed part or the building, made of poured concrete, and are about 20 to 40 feet in length........because the acoustic engineer had it done RIGHT.

GOOD bass speakers are much closer to audiophile speakers in their construction than are guitar speakers. Their cones are stiffer (heavier) and their maximum excursion capability is greatly increased (softer suspension & longer voice coils). You trade efficiency for frequency extension. YOU CAN'T HAVE BOTH. If you have an 18" speaker that has some highs, the lows will be sacrificed to achieve it. If it goes low, then there will be no highs. If there really are any highs, it will beam the sound like a searchlight and the person off to the side will miss it. Four 10" speakers have the surface area of a single 20" speaker, but the 4x10 retains the speed and range of the individual 10" drivers while the highly efficient 20" driver is a two-octave wonder at best. The day may come when a lot of 6" or 8" speakers in a bass cab becomes the norm, as it would allow a higher crossover frequency or even eliminate the need for a high frequency driver. The Eminence B102 is just such a speaker in a 10" size. I think it could be improved by reducing to 8", but Eminence would have to fight the prejudice against small bass drivers, and 10" is a standard size that bass cabinets are made to accept. There is no present market for an 8" replacement bass speaker since pro bass cabs only go down to 10" cutouts. The B102 has enough treble extension unless you are a treble freak, which no bass player in a band should be anyway. The B102 has a lower cutoff of around 40 Hz (resonance at 45 Hz), and that is it's lowest useful limit. Not suitable for 5 or 6-string bass by itself. To make it go lower requires destroying the 95dB efficiency and 5+kHz upper extension. Still, it's the present ultimate driver for those wishing a one-way cab design. Just be sure to load it into 2x10 cabs so that you can stack them with the speakers arranged vertically like a PA column in order to encourage spreading of the high frequencies it can produce. The standard 4x10 arrangement encourages beaming of the highs, and they seem to be missing even if they are present when you stand to the side of the cab. A tweeter is thus made necessary. I make things rattle all through my apartment with a couple of small speakers that have 6.5" longthrow woofers. They have linear output down to the open E string. Multiple small speakers sound better than an equivalent surface area single large speaker if you need a wide range response.

Philip,
Check this out for bass cabinets!

www.philjonesbass.com

Bob: I agree ... Miking a bass cab is better than direct out ... In my band we use an in ear monitor system ... we hear everything CLEARLY ... anyway the first time I used the in ear monitor I hated it ... why? because I was running direct ... the tone was horrible ... I picked up a Shure sm57 and mike one of my eminance 10" speakers ... much improved tone!!!

I have player through Acoustic 1x18 folded horn, Peavey 1x18 folded horn, Ampeg 8x10 cab, and many 2x15 cabs, 4x12, 4x10, etc .... I am really into 2x10 cabs these days ... this is a scaleable soultion with a controlable sound characteristics ...

I prefer the following combinations for bass ... 2 2x10 cabs, 1 2x10 and 1x15 cabs, or 1 2x10 and 1x18 cabs ... the exact choice depends on the room size ...

there is no perfect cabinet or speaker ... they all have strengths and weaknesses ... I use my line 6 pod to improve the sound of bass amps ... it is interesting ... one of the best amp models in the line 6 pod is the acoustic 360 ...

Jeff, I also agree that any good musician should be able to get a good sound out of just about anything, but some are easier than others, also there are no perfect cabs for me either.
An SVT cab is really 4 2X10 cabs built into one cabinet, they are isolated from each other.
I like that Phil Jones tube head, too bad it's $10,000.00.
Yes, SVT's are acoustic suspension Phil, that's why they are tight.

Whoa! When I pointed out the eBay posting, it was for the "Macca" connection alone! It's interesting how my pointing out an amp for it's "collectable" qualities and not for it's sonic strengths has prompted this many postings in response!

Since I am old enough to remember seeing and hearing these things "back in the day", I'm very aware of all of it's sonic shortcomings (and/or strenghs, depending on your point of view)!

I was only thinking of those select individuals for whom having PM's ENTIRE early 70's rig would be a private little dream come true (you know who you are!)