6 string guitar and Thiele cabs

[nuke]

Probably attenuated a bit for a drop-tuned guitar. Might be OK with a bass player in the band.

If you really want to thumpity-thump with a guitar, maybe look at the EV15" speaker and the similar cabinet design for it.

[pjd3]

Hey Nuke,

I was definately considering that route at first. And while its not out of the question, I admit, I'm a tad bit concerned about loosing any high end sparkle n chime that a 12" may allot over a 15" It may not be an issue but, theres no way from here I can tell. I'm sure that would be great for those lower D flats and C's. Even though this baritone is a 28.625 scale initially make for low A's and B's, I don't ever expect or desire to use it down that low. Thats why I had to wonder if the 12" Thiele stood a chance in hell of giving a good go to those lower notes. Most of the time, the guitar will be tuned around D, with the low E and A tuned down as low as C, with a capo on the 3rd, 5th or 7th fret. Yeah, I made an odd duck out of it. But, thats where I find it plays and sounds the best.


Thanks. Keeping this all in mind.
Best,

Phil D. pjd3

[nuke]

Build one of each!

Stack 'em up.

I think the 15 will still sound pretty good, or perhaps, build a suitable cabinet around a different 15".

I had an old Traynor YBA4 tube combo with a 15" in it, originally meant as a bass amp. I know I swapped around several speakers while I owned and came up with a Weber with an aluminum dust cap (JBL style) that really worked great in the vented cabinet. It sounded really great, though I got tired of hauling it around.

[pjd3]

You know,

The plan is to be using a Vox modeller pedal of sorts (probably UA Ruby or Strymon Iridium) as the base sound, and those are teaming with very present highs, lots of bite and sizzle. Perhaps the 15" will balance all of that off, and I'll be left with plenty of "higher" frequency energy and presence, with the advantage ot the thiele 15" with its lower tuned cab/port to meet the lower frequencies of my often low D, D flat and C. And now that I think of it, since I am well into the venture of creating my own cabinets, should the Thiele 15" be lacking in higher chime/sparkle energy, I could make a little cab with say two 10's or 8's that would bring that back. That actually might be quite more of an optimum situation. Well, for now there is plenty to do with just building the stereo amp.

Ive done a basic layout with Edcor PT and OT with a hammond choke, two pairs of KT88's and two pairs of 12ax7's maybe, so, there is time to mull over the speaker solution. But I do want nice solid, full tight pumpy lows. Not boomy, not overpowering. Just present and powerful.

Thanks for being such a bad influence on me (kiddin). Its just more good things to think about1

Best,
Phil D.

[Colossal]

My friend, the bass player, plays a Jazz bass with Rotosound 66 45-105 strings. When working with the Thiele 15" cabs for his bass rig, I did not find them to be at all dark, muffled, or imbalanced with respect to higher frequencies. They had excellent punch, detail, clarity and articulation. With a Tech 21 Geddy Lee YYZ pedal pushing the front of the bass amp, the response was devastating; shimmering growl and layers of presence, if that makes any sense. It would easily jump way out over the band, in a great way.

If anything, I think your baritone setup is going to be better served with a 15" cab. Heck, why not run a pair of 15s AND a pair of 12s. Then you'll know. It's certainly not an inexpensive exercise. I think the choice of (stereo) amps you build and drive the cabs with is equally important. You mentioned building a stereo pair of 50W clean amps...I would consider a CLC filter in front of the output transformer primary. You will need a large choke for this. I used 100uF - 10H/73R (600mA) - 100uF for this. But this was for a 140Wrms bass amp. The amp was extremely quiet and very responsive.

[didit]

Hello Phil --

It has been a long while since I spent deep time on this. However memories are clear. EV's TL806 specs are accurate. The cabinet tuning works to extend the bottom and flatten resonance peak assuming the correct driver, and the EM12N seems a nice current production example. Performance below the ~52Hz spec (with EQ) is not a hard cliff. Excellent advice from Miles on that. Solid production down at 20Hz is expecting too much, but you should be happy with a low E or even a D. Note well that it's the upper harmonics as much as the fundamental that we want rendered.

Search no longer coughs up plans for the TL806A, which is the design I'd prefer to build and use. If you're adapting plans floating around beware that it's the interior volume of both the cabinet and the porting that must be preserved.

This is their old spec sheet:

TL806A_TL806D_Engineering_Data_Sheet.pdf

(880.33 KiB) Downloaded 1561 times

Listened to your Soundcloud "tape". Cool music and nice deft playing. Given spectral range, particularly the sparkle in the sound, it's skeptical to fit with designs based on 15".

You might want to dig around on the TalkBass forum for more on-topic insights.

Best ..

[pjd3]

Hi didit,

Thanks for the points, data sheet and just stopping by.

And thanks for the nice words on the Soundcloud clip. That one was actually capo'd relatively high unusually high, maybe the 8th or 9th frett. Most of what the guitar will be seeing is capo on the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 7th fret, occasionally hitting down to a low C (60.4 Hz). My main concern initially was that the speaker in a tl806 would see over excursions on notes as low as a low C but, what I think I'm finding out is that having only a 50 watt amp powering a 200 watt speaker and not going way down, I'll be OK perhaps needing some EQ. I can live with that. While I'd like those lower notes to have good solidity and definition, I surely wasn't looking for a bass guitar type of presentation on those notes - Just notably more than I'm use to hearing in a 12" open cab. Piano type solidity is what I'd like, to give clear support to the upper melodies and lines.

As long as a 200 watt speaker will handle a clean lower C with a 50 watt amp, I'm good with the tl806 and yes, I rather liked the clips of the Eminence EM12 I've heard. But I do understand why some might suggest the tl808 with 15" based on a few things I've mentioned - baritone guitar, low notes and such.

OK, I would rather do a 12" Thiele and its looking as though there is some good promise with that, as I'm not at high power and not way, way down there.

Now, I will be seeing if making these Thiele cabinets out of pine isn't pure sonic heresy. I do have reason apart from weight that I would like to use pine.

Thanks again, didit, good info as usual, I'm listening,

Best,

Phil D pjd3

[nuke]

I don't like hauling an EV12 cabinet around anymore, and age doesn't make me more inclined to go to the 15".

It's hard to tell the taste for sound/tone in words. Sometimes, you just gotta try it to find out if you like it.

[solderhead]

I have 50 years of experience with the EV-designed cabs. I was a beta tester for the factory in 1976 when they were designing the TL Series cabs, when they were still in Buchanan MI. I've gigged them since the mid-70s and I still use EV drivers in TL Series cabs for guitar and bass.

Here are a few considerations to think about if you're planning on using a Thiele-Small cab like the TL-806:
* It was designed around an EVM-12L or an EVM-12S. If you decide to go with any other speaker than you'll need to run the T-S calculations for the speaker and cabinet to assure that Fll isn't violated. Fll is the absolute lower frequency limit that the speaker/cabinet array will be asked to produce.
* If you apply a frequency below Fll to the array, then speaker displacement begins to increase exponentially. No, hoping that your low powered amp won't blow up the speaker in the array is not a safe assumption. Voice coil displacement increases as the exponent of the frequency, and even with a low powered amp you're likely to exceed the Xmax rating of the driver if the frequency is low enough. The danger zone for the TL-806 is 60 Hz.
* The engineers at EV designed the TL-806 with an 80Hz guitar signal in mind. If you plan to use a baritone or a de-tuned guitar then you're likely to violate Fll and when that happens you're placing your driver at risk.
* EV designed the TL-606 with a 40Hz bass signal in mind, designing it around the EVM-15B and EVM-15L. For a baritone application the EVM-15L and TL-606 combination is a much better transducer. Unfortunately although the EVM-12L Series I and Series II are both still in production, the EVM-15L has been out of production for a long time.
* All of the EV TL Series cabs have two methods of port tuning, which EV refers to as "normal mode" and "step-down mode". Changing modes involves installing/removing a cover plate on the cabinet's square port. Normal mode involves a rather steep frequency response roll-off at the box tuning frequency, while step-down mode begins LF roll-off at higher frequencies with extended usable bass response. To get the LF response that is claimed in the Engineering Data Sheets, you have to use an EV-designed parametric equalizer to boost the LF signals. As you might expect, it's been out of production for decades.
* Even if you boost the LF signal with the EV-designed EQ, it's important to understand that the extended frequency response of Thiele-Small arrays only works with small signal levels. With large signal levels (think concert PA applications or loud gigging) the Thiele-Small arrays FAIL to reach their claimed frequency response. Back in the day when EV was a major force in concert PA and was still an independent company, they published a white paper where they demonstrated mathematically the failure of every one of their T-S array designs when transitioning from small signals to large signals. They published this information to help sound engineers/customers overcome failure problems in concert PA applications. I can't lay my hands on this paper anymore... and I've never been able to find it online. The perception of the problem of T-S failure with large signals appears to have faded from everyone's collective knowledge, as this paper was intentionally deep-sixed by Mark IV Industries immediately after they acquired EV. Mark IV did not want to be as forthcoming as EV had been about the limitations of their products. The subsequent owners Telex and later Bosch claim no knowledge of the existence of the relevant white paper. The moral of the story is that the T-S paradigm works great for low signals, but it fails with large signals. For large signals you can forget about TL-Series cabs, as even EV admitted that there's no substitute for horn loading.

FWIW, I still carry TL-606 cabs. I have them in single, dual, and quad arrays. I use them primarily for 4-string bass and guitar. I won't attempt to use an EVM-15L/TL-606 cab with a low 5-string for the same reason I won't use a TL-806/EVM-12L with a baritone guitar; X-max. IME a standard Avatar -sized 2x12 with a sealed cab gives all the bass response you could ever want out of 2 EVM-12L even though the total box volume is still below the theoretical perfect volume for the 12L. Best of all, there's no port-tuning or Xmax worries with a sealed cab.

I hope this helps while not being overwhelming -- but it's important to understand that if you substitute drivers in a T-S design cabinet you do so with significant risk of blowing up your driver. It's absolutely imperative to run the T-S numbers and tune the port diameter and depth to match the substituted driver to avoid catastrophic/destructive over-excursion.

[solderhead]

On a related note, I was talking to Friedman the other day and he mentioned that the reason behind his little 1x12 cabinets sounding so huge is that they designed them using T-S parameters for the Celestion 65W ceramic Cream speaker. I've never been one to place a lot of faith in Celestion's T-S numbers, as I recall the era (70s-90s) where Celestion's T-S numbers were so bad that they refused to publish them. Things seem to have changed, at least in that Celestion publishes those numbers now, and companies like Friedman are using those numbers to produce cabs that sound quite good. If anyone is looking for an alternate T-S solution, the Friedman 1x12 tuned port cabs based on the Cream drivers really kill. And Dave seems to be very proud of them, based on their price tag. I haven't bothered to look at Celestions to determine which drivers have the best T-S parameters and the best tone, but in Dave's estimation it's the 65W Cream driver... Presumably he built his cabs around that driver because it combines the best power handling with the best T-S numbers.

Does anyone have experience with them?

[pjd3]

Thanks solderhead, for that generous overview on your history and knowledge of the TS cabs, technology and usage, very, very interesting.

What you've said actually gives me hope that they could be a good solution for my application, in that although it is a baritone guitar, it is used primarily with the capo up at the 5th, 7th and even 9th fret while also tuned up to a nominal "D" area. I had tried the baritone guitar in B tuning per usual but, even with 14"s for strings, found the sound a bit murky and not very vibrant. As an experiment, I brought the B baritone tuning up a flat third to a D tuning which would normally be considered heresy for a 28.625" scale guitar, but that brought the guitar to life, instilled it with clarity, sustain, rich harmonics and what seemed like a much better interaction between strings. Win-win-win for me.

But although 90% of the time I'm probably not going much lower than 65-70Hz on the lowest string, the60' type of material this guitar was built for (older Celtic, newer acoustic fingerstyle), usually has a supporting bass line that is an essential part of the harmonic movement of the songs, and could benefit from a strong presentation on the lower two strings of the guitar. On my weekend warrior gigs with my strat and plexi, as long as there is some good low note grind and zing I'm good (typical classic rock, 60's, 70's and 80's).

This baritone is for acoustic fingerstyle, only. I even choose pickups that were not of the typical vintage response that you'd typically find on a Tele or Strat for that classic rock kind of music (Wilde Microcoils). Also, I likely wouldn't ever be pushing things any more than a very clean 40-50 watts, using a couple of modelling pedals to bring some texture to the sound.

I"m already well into the planning stage of a "very hi fi'ish stereo tube amp" that would be say, two clean fenderish gain stages with UL output transformers and even using a mix of 5751's or even 12AY7's should that show to be more beneficial to the pedals, modelling and time-based. The output section would have KT88 push pull pairs with Edcor ultra linear OT's. And from all the talk I've been hearing, it just seemed like a couple of EV type speakers loaded in a TL806 cab might round the application off, with maybe the provision of a TL808 instead, with maybe a little 10" speaker cab on top for some "sparkle".

But like I say, I"m just in the planning part of this, things could change. I haven't heard enough to talk me out of it though! This actually sounds like a very fun project, and I'll probably go with it. All I have to lose is money, self-respect, my wife's composure, you know, little things!

Thanks solderhead, very much,
Best,
Phil D.