It was time for a new bass amp for the Living Room. Our first one was a Fender practice amp lent by Steve, a lawyer/bass player friend. This was OK for the occasional jam session, but once we realized that most of the acts were going to be loud college rock or punk bands, I started scrambling around for a better solution. Just then, Barry, the drummer for numerous bands called and asked if I wanted a 15" bass amp. "Sure! I'll pick it up." A price was set, and the club now had an ok but not terrific 125W solid state Laney bass amp that would rattle when it got too low.
I dealt with the rattling and wimpy sound for months pining for something fat and low. After I got the 5E3 project built with no major issues, I contracted the deadly tube amp virus. I was totally overcome with a sick desire to understand how these damned things worked. It was insane. I actually went as far as to read the 1952 Radiotron Designers Handbook, 4th edition, a long boring technical expository on everything any geek could ever want to know about designing tube amps. I foraged around like a junkie on various DIY builder forums, and after a month or two decided I would go ahead and build a killer bass amp for the club.
I started really thinking about what I wanted vs what I could actually build. Budget was always a key factor. Simplicity was another. Tone of course was the main factor. I wanted an amp that had a minimal amount of knobs on it so that bass players wouldn't stand there for hours trying to dial in a tone. As a club owner and a band leader this constant putzing around with amps really annoyed me. I wanted guys to plug in, turn a couple knobs, and start the gig. Nothing is more annoying than sitting there watching a player's ass while they adjust knobs forever.
I talked to a bunch of bass players I knew, and I got a zillion different opinions. I scoured the internet, and got a zillion more opinions. I decided to just go with what I had heard that I personally liked: Ampeg, Sunn, and Acoustic. The size of my club was a factor, as well as keeping volume balanced with the current guitar amps. The 4:1 rule seems to apply well here (Four times as much bass power as there was guitar ampage). So now I knew it should be 80-100+ watts. This narrowed my scope a lot, and in the end I decided to marry a late 60's Ampeg B25 with an early 70's V4B power section which would give me about 100W. It would be like a mini SVT with easy to dial in tones, and enough power without blowing over anyone.
Then I had to decide what cabinet to build, and what kind of speakers to put in it. After playing around with speaker coefficients and various bass speaker design programs, I decided (after talking to Rich Koerner at Time Electronics ) to just build a Sunn 2000s cabinet loaded with two Eminence Delta Pro 15s. (I called Rich because of his informative and opinionated posts on various music newsgroups I frequented. He obviously knew what the hell he was talking about, and I learned a lot just reading his posts. We talked about transformers, ultra linear taps, 6550s, some possible configurations, player experiences, club needs, tone wants, and the decision was made.)
Originally the Sunn 2000s cabinet had a folded horn and was loaded with JBL K130s, but these were getting hard to find. I spoke to the Eminence guys and they said the Delta Pros were the closest they had to the JBLs efficiency wise, and they even spec-ed them out for me using their own speaker box program with the Sunn 2000s cabinet dimensions. It would be a good marriage of classic and new. And it would be low, which is what I wanted. I needed to feel the bass.
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