The first of Bill Fitzmaurice’s Tuba 36 subs has been constructed by John Reynolds of San Antonio; Bill didn’t build the first himself as his New Hampshire workshop is closed for the winter. Unfortunately John doesn’t have any testing equipment, but as the following report tells it the planned Texas Sub Shoot Out should prove quite interesting indeed.
Posted on the Bill Fitzmaurice Loudspeakers forum:
HOLY CRAP!!!
Ok now that that is out in the open lets proceed.
My friend drove up from Corpus last night. His cargo included
1 Carvin ProBass500 bass head
1 Carvin DCM2500 power amp
1 Carvin LB76bass guitar
1 Carvin “redeye” 4 x 10 cabinet
Assorted cables
Evil intentions
Ok, I expected the cabinets the Tuba36’s to sound good, that is just a given. But DAMN did they go loud! We ran the rig (which looks utterly ridiculous by the way) full tilt with no low cut engaged. It was quite frustrating trying to get the Magnum15LF woofers to distort or cause throat distortion in the cabinets. The output from the Magnum15LF drivers was MUCH higher than I had anticipated.
Now I am not joking around saying we went to extremes. The low B string on the bass guitar was repeatedly de-tuned way WAY lower till you could easily count the cycles as it swung back and forth over the pickups. With the amp bridged dumping all 2500 watts into the cabinets ridiculous amounts of air was moved. Hitting the bass guitar body with palm of your hand (a favorite effect of ours that routinely bottoms out 18’s) proceeded to knock over beer bottles dumped crap off of a shelf in my pantry (a jar of mayonnaise took a dive and made a horrible mess) and caused my roof to flex. I am not kidding, I stood out side and could here the beams flexing and strange groaning emanating from my roof. My house is only two years old.
The amp was eventually able to get some distortion from the cabinets, throat or driver I could not tell as I was not about to put my head in the horn mouth to do any critical listening. At that level of output you get dizzy being near the cabinets (probably from your inner ear fluid getting moved around) and your vision blurs. So we engaged the low cut on the amp on started on the ultimate volume stomp. Thus far with the low cut engaged the cabinets will not distort in any fashion.
My friend got possessed and went on a freakishly low de tuned bass solo for around half an hour. It was cool to watch the world disappear to him and the sick look come across his face as he put out tones most bass players can’t even dream of. No low-end bass boost was used on the bass head, just some modest compression and the tone knobs on the guitar. The tuba36’s belted out every low tone put to them without breaking up, no matter how hard we tried, and trust me WE TRIED! We turned off the stack around midnight utterly amazed the cops did not show up. We will beat on the rig more today and probe for weaknesses.
A related side note:
My friend happens to live right across the street from a liquor store (how cool is that!). According to the people that work there, when the band practices in a converted garage the low bass notes going through the tuba30 “rattle every damn bottle in the store.”
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