does anyone even make w bin bass cabinets anymore?

[jastacey]

I played one of the Ampeg V4-B cabinets, interesting tone, but you couldn't hear it very well, standing next to it, but 20 or so feet in front, it would liquidize internal organs, the throw of those cabinets is pretty amazing, for an outside gig, maybe yes, small/medium bar/club, hell no, gotta have a pick-up truck or Suburban, to haul one around, there are a few, still around, if your willing to wait, in your search, to build one, you'll need some good cabinetry skills, to build the horn section

 

[JTE]

First band I was in had a pair of the EV Eliminator PA cabs with the midrange horn and the tweeters (piezoelectric ons I think) in '76. A friend if mine copied them and made about eight of them. I got one and used it once by itself. Not what I wanted to hear on stage or lug into the VFW in Lincoln, IL with that freaking steel outdoor staircase...

It worked well for me on outdoor gigs where we played on a flatbed trailer. We didn't have big PA so I set the W bin on its side down front on the ground center of stage or fist under the trailer. I used my Music Man 212RH on stage as usual and had a good stage sound with the wood out front.

Don't ever want to carry that kind of stuff again

 

[Killing Floor]

There is not a linear correlation between Watts and volume. Just putting it out there.

If you want a sugar scoop or a big W I'm sure you can find a used one. Get a bigger car too.

 

[AGCurry]

My experience is with JBL "scoops." There was the single 15" 4530 model (120 pounds), and the dual 15" 4520, which had a 13-foot horn length and weighed 215 pounds. Both of those weights are without drivers.

For PA, my early-seventies band replaced Shure Vocalmaster columns with 4530s paired with massive high-frequency horns. Using the same 100-watt Shure PA head, these were much louder and sounded a whole lot better. But the only thing more painful than carrying them up and down the stairs to our loft was carrying the Hammond M3 and Leslie.

A fellow bassist in another band got a 4520 for his bass, powered by his Kustom tuck-and-roll amp head. Amazing low freqs (you would need this one for low B) but pretty shy in higher frequencies.

My touring band in the mid-seventies used Altec A7 Voice of the Theatre. These were also great, with 100 watts of power. Not as heavy as the JBLs but bulkier.

Why did we do these things? Because we couldn't get high-power amplifiers! Nowadays, watts are cheap; we would have made quite different choices had watts been so cheap.

 

[kesslari]

i know folded horn bass cabinets are wildly unpopular. heavy, hard to tame, big and clunky, lack of highs, but there’s something about them i love.

john paul jones and his tone at the royal albert hall is so dark and low and evil and i know those acoustic w bin cabs had something to do with it. also, i love hearing those stories about guys in the 70s turning up their acoustic 360 only to get a notice from their neighbors that the bass was being heard all the way down the street a few several hundred feet away.

all of that, and they look incredible. very utilitarian. very very efficient too (or so i’ve heard), they’ll turn any power you put into them into bone rattling low end. those acoustic heads were only 200 watts of early, late 60s solid state power and yet i’ve heard people call the 360/361 one of the loudest bass amps they’ve ever played.

Didn't you just go through a few dozen threads to find and purchase your perfect rig?
Surely GAS hasn't set in already!

Happens to the best of us...

 

[abarson]

Maybe you can find a ‘50s version like one of these, only 2/3 the size of an Acoustic 18” folded horn. Still awkward to cart around.
View attachment 4433104

A Karlson? That's really dated! Although Acoustic did put out the Karlson-based BC-2 combo. I liked it when I tried it, but there was no way I was taking it home on the bus.

 

[Old Fart]

My first decent bass rig, about a thousand years ago, included a Sunn 215SH like the one pictured. I didn't love it. It put the loudness in the back of the room. The sound guys were pointing their fingers down and I couldn't hear myself. They said it also sounded boomy.

Jim Bergantino doesn't make a folded horn bass cab. Coincidence?

 

[brianrost]

I used to use 2 of these EAW monsters. While I still love heavy gear, was so happy to see these things go

I still own and sometimes use as a backup a ported EAW 1-15 that was sold as a subwoofer like yours was. Sounded much deeper than typical TL606 style 1-15s.

 

[brianrost]

Is that an actual Orange cabinet? Because it looks to me like a copy of an original (the 1969 version) EV Eliminator I.

A pic from an old (maybe early 70s?) Orange catalog with PA horn cabs visible on the left and center and one for bass on the right. Also DJ turntables!!! Looks like what PhatBottomBass saw was a PA cab.

The last time I saw Larry Taylor (RIP) playing with Kim Wilson he was using some kind of Karlsson cabinet with a GK 800RB head for his DB. This was in a small club so a lot of the bass tone was coming off the stage and it sounded massive.

 

[azureblue]

Maybe you can find a ‘50s version like one of these, only 2/3 the size of an Acoustic 18” folded horn. Still awkward to cart around.
View attachment 4433104

And I was the fool who had one built for an EV 18"... Now that was dumb.
The issue with W cabinets is projection. You will barely hear them on stage, but you are killing them 20 feet out. The Kalrson is great, but doesn't develop much lows on stage. If you want to go that route, get a pair made for 12" speakers. I think as far as cabinet designs go, rear loaded folded horns are the most practical. You still get to hear the speaker, and the low end is reinforced for the audience. Just be careful with the design to make sure it is a match for the speaker you plan to use. I had a 2 15" RLFH with the port in the middle of the cabinet. I was surprised how much air came out of that port. And, it had one of the speakers up high, so I could hear it if I had to stand close to the box. One of my favorite cabinets at the time.

The other issue is a bass cabinet that conflict with the mains low end boxes - you can get phase out that way. Practically speaking, I think a tuned port is the best compromise. You get a lighter box with good low end reinforcement. If you size the box right you can get a box that will go down to 40hz and still be movable.

 

[LiquidMidnight]

At least up until recently, the revamped Acoustic (that is, the real Acoustic, not the GC house brand) was making a modernized version of the folded horn cabinets from yore.

 

[Analogeezer]

One point you guys are missing about folded horn bass cabinets; this was well before my time but what I found out from reading an article about the state of stage gear and PA gear in the late 1960's:

Venues were getting larger and larger, but the PA technology of the time was still rather primitive, Altec VOA's were kind of the standard, often used as side fill monitors as well before the advent of wedge monitors.

The vocals, maybe keys and the drums went through the PA but that was it.

The reason the Marshall stack and similar amps came about was the requirement for the guitar amps to reach to the back of the hall since the PA rarely had the guitar coming through it.

So multiple amp stacks were the way to do this (Marshall cabinets are very directional FWIW).

On the bass player side they had two issues:

1. How to compete with these new Marshall stacks (from a power perspective the SVT and Acoustic 360/371 were the answer to the Marshall stack)

2. How to project the bass to the back of the hall? Folded horn cabinets which had the additional plus of being very efficient, so a pair of 371 bottoms put out a lot of power but that power also was converted into a very efficient output.

So if you wanted to rock the Filmore back in the day, you needed a bass amp to carry the entire hall and your 100 watt Bassman was not gonna do that.

Analogeezer

 

[Analogeezer]

So you want ya some W Bin bass cabinets? Got yer cabs right here; Glenn Hughes at the California Jam in 1974 using EIGHT of them:

https://www.dibpic.com/uploads/posts/2020-03/thumbs/1585558507_1.png

I gotta admit it was a great look, as was Greg Lake's rig from that same show.

Analogeezer

 

[Bob_Ross]

I'm not going to pretend that this is OP's intention, but fwiw I would imagine there are two reasons someone might pine for the folded W-horn bass cabs of yore:
1) they literally liked the sound of a specific example; or
2) they are enamored of the alleged benefits to low frequency extension and/or throw that folded W-horn bass cabs were originally designed to achieve

If it's the former, I cannot argue. If I had infinite resources, infinite storage space, and a team of roadies at my beck & call, I would own an Acoustic 371 because I very fondly remember playing through one a few times in the mid-1970s and that amp/speaker combo made even the crappiest bass -- and the crappiest bassist, e.g. me in the mid-1970s -- sound huge! Enormous! Deep and phat and throbbing and omigod yes!!!

But if it's the latter...well, welcome to the 21st Century. There are designs and technologies extant today that give you all the Good Stuff that a folded horn hoped to achieve, without any of the Bad Stuff that folded horns invariably seemed to achieve regardless of whether anyone wanted them or not. The funny thing is, very few bassists -- and even fewer sound engineers -- want super-extended low frequency response and very sensetive/efficient subwoofers cable of putting out 20Hz at~120dB SPL (1 watt/1 meter). Most classic folded horn designs actually couldn't do that; but today you could. Do you really wanna? All You Need Is Cash.

 

[DJ Bebop]

Dude, even I was moving away from these things!

 

[Analogeezer]

Just gonna point out without the folded horn (Acoustic 371) slap/pop bass would have probably never been invented.

I read something about Larry Graham developing that style to get more percussion and "snap" out of his 371's.

Not sure why he didn't just buy some SVT's, but maybe Sly was spending all the band's money on recreational items LOL.

Analogeezer

 

[Johnny Fingers]

When we miked our guitar player’s amp through the Altec PA, one of the horn drivers would invariably blow and out came the Jensen equipped Altec B15 extension cabinet to save the day.

 

[DJ Bebop]

My experience is with JBL "scoops." There was the single 15" 4530 model (120 pounds), and the dual 15" 4520, which had a 13-foot horn length and weighed 215 pounds. Both of those weights are without drivers.

For PA, my early-seventies band replaced Shure Vocalmaster columns with 4530s paired with massive high-frequency horns. Using the same 100-watt Shure PA head, these were much louder and sounded a whole lot better. But the only thing more painful than carrying them up and down the stairs to our loft was carrying the Hammond M3 and Leslie.

A fellow bassist in another band got a 4520 for his bass, powered by his Kustom tuck-and-roll amp head. Amazing low freqs (you would need this one for low B) but pretty shy in higher frequencies.

My touring band in the mid-seventies used Altec A7 Voice of the Theatre. These were also great, with 100 watts of power. Not as heavy as the JBLs but bulkier.

Why did we do these things? Because we couldn't get high-power amplifiers! Nowadays, watts are cheap; we would have made quite different choices had watts been so cheap.

Yup, John Paul Jones said that if he had the gear then, we have now. He would have never used the stuff he did. He was using Acoustic 360/361's
In other words folks used what they had, at the time. Not because it's better then what we have now but, because that's all there was

Thats not to say some of that stuff can't fill some tone goals, think Sleep. But practice? No so much, IMHO The W bin type of speaker on stage is not an accurate representation of your sound off the stage.

 

[Guitalia]

Just gonna point out without the folded horn (Acoustic 371) slap/pop bass would have probably never been invented.

I read something about Larry Graham developing that style to get more percussion and "snap" out of his 371's.

Not sure why he didn't just buy some SVT's, but maybe Sly was spending all the band's money on recreational items LOL.

Analogeezer

Larry Graham developed his thumpin' and pluckin' style long before he worked with Sly Stone, in his mother's bass/drums/keys band. She played keys and Larry played bass. When their drummer quit, Larry started snapping notes on the G string for a snare effect and bouncing his thumb off the E string to simulate a bass drum.

 

[Bill Whitehurst]

W bins do what they do pretty well.
They make a lot of sound with relatively little power.
They project to the back of a big room.
They look impressive,

They do not do full range hifi well and
they are not your first choice for moving.

If you truly like what they have to offer, nothing else will be quite the same.
There are still working 361s, 371s and V4Bs out there, if you want to experience one for yourself.
With a van and ramps they can be moved OK.
There is always some market for them, at least to collectors, so you can resell one for about what it cost you.