[BobK]

Calling all bass players!

When playing live I use a 40 watt Marshall valve, our other guitarist uses an 80W Peavey solid state and we are both far louder at halfway than our bassist who is using his new Ashdown MAG which is 300 watts. He needs it on full volume to match us/the drummer!

Duly sent back to shop who sent him a replacement. Yep, you guessed it, it?s the same volume as the one he returned.

Now I know a bit about how watts translates to volume and linear curves and all that, but a 300 watt bass amp ought to be mind blowingly loud?

Any thoughts?

Bob

[StugIII]

It seems that this bass amp has low efficiency speakers. 6dB less means reduction to 1/4 of the original sound pressure.

Also human hearing is prone to perceive better mid frequencies than bass ones. Try increasing mids in the bass amps, not bass.

[JohnA]

Good reply from StugIII

Also 'watts' is a funny rating some maufacturers quote power before distortion i.e. marshall some, like Line 6 quote PMP or peak music power which is quite different,

As a rule of thumb, manuafacturers at the lower end of the quality scale try to dazzle new buyers by quoting huge wattage figures so they think they are getting a really loud amp, like Halfords car stereos rated at 1000W, bollocks, imagine 10 Marshall stacks in a chav's Vauxhall Nova

[fury_dice]

The Ashdown MAG 300 combo is rated at 307w RMS and the head version gets good reviews for having plenty of power. Possibly down to an inefficient speaker in the combo version? Ashdown, Behringer etc. are built down to a price rather than up to a spec...