From sgtpepper@surewest.net Fri Jun 20 21:06:07 2003
Subject:Re: Leslies with 12" Woofers

As I mentioned before, I have two FrankenLeslies that I built last year, one
from a 25 and the othger from a 55C. The 55C has a 15" speaker originally
used in a Yamaha combo bass amp, and the 25 has a 12" speaker that I bought
cheap on Ebay. I have no idea of it's origin. But that 25 with its 12'
speaker does as well if not better than the 15" speaker in the 55C cabinet.
Both have very good bass response, actually.

BTW, I'm one of those dinosaur bass players--my bass cabinet has an 18" and
two 10" speakers.

Now to address the previous comment about modern bass speaker technology. I
agree with the previous poster's comments about how well 10 and 12-inch
speakers do in bass applications, up to a point. An array of 12 or 10 inch
speakers can do very well at reproducing what an electric bass can put out,
down to 50 or 60 HZ. Below that, the smaller cone just cannot resonate slow
enough to reproduce the sound well. If you look at the frequency response
specs of a 2 x 10 or 4 x 10 cabinet, their response starts to drop off at
around 60 HZ, and it's WAY down at 40 HZ. The problem is that the
fundamental for low E on a bass is about 41 HZ, and for low B on a 5-string
it's around 32 HZ. Translation: that 4 x 10 cabinet can't reproduce the
fundamental for anything lower than the open A string on a bass, so what
you'll hear is just the harmonics. With a tuned bass reflex cabinet you can
extend the response curve down a little bit, but not far enough to get those
low fundamentals. But my 18" Black Widow speaker handles 40HZ just fine, so
I get those fundamental tones that a cabinet with 10 or 12" speakers just
can't do.

And you see a lot of bass rigs that feature a 2 x 10 or 5 x 10, plus a 1 x
15 or 1 x 18. One of the benefits of the 10" speakers is that they extend
the upper end of the frequency range of the bass rig to 6K HZ or higher, to
get that bright metallic sound that is so popular these days.

Just my 1/50th of a dollar's worth.

--Steve