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Post subject: Passport 500 Pro and "Bass Heavy" Instruments
Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2013 12:17 pm
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Location: Newfoundland, CA
Hi, new to the Forum but a long time Fender follower and admirer.

Just recently purchased a Fender 500 Pro to use in my small at-home jam room (I don't gig). I wanted to use it for vocals and acoustic guitar primarily, and maybe drag it along to a few small parties seeing as how easy it is to cart around.

I am now looking to add a bass guitar and electronic drums to my jam room, which are both pretty bass intensive instruments. I guess my underlying question is...would the passport 500 be able to handle the bass guitar, drums, and a vocal mic at the same time? I would also consider adding a sub-woofer to add more presence to the bass sounds, and have read that the 500 pro will "clip" the sound, sending the bass notes to the sub and leaving the treb notes to other 2 speakers.

Just trying to determine whether I would be better off getting a sub-woofer to use in conjunction with the Passport or if I should get a stand-alone bass amp? After paying the money for the Passport, getting another (larger) PA speaker to run along side of the Passport just to handle those two instruments seems somewhat ridiculous.

Thanks!

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Bigdawe


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Post subject: Re: Passport 500 Pro and "Bass Heavy" Instruments
Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 7:53 am
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The Fender Passport 500 Pro can definitely handle everything you currently use it for and everything you are planning to use it for. In other words, it is loud enough and clear enough for the task.

Meanwhile, there's a question of the quality of sound you are looking for. If you want a thumping bass that you feel more than you hear, the Passport needs help. The issue is that if you use ocean waves as an analogy to treble notes, then the bass notes are more like tides; bigger and slower. You have to move more air farther to push bass notes that thump.

That means that you need a magnet that is bigger, heavier and more powerful than for other notes, pushing a speaker cone that is bigger than can be moved fast enough for higher notes. You really need a separate speaker cabinet specifically made for bass notes.

You could use a bass amp. That's a perfectly valid choice. My personal preference would be to use a powered subwoofer with the Passport, for several reasons.

But first, just to straighten out some vocabulary (and maybe I don't have it exactly right and someone will fine tune MY explanation): When audio guys use the word "clipping", it's generally a bad thing. It's what happens when a signal gets too loud for the equipment it's being run through. Imagine taking a 3" sine wave and stuffing it through a 2" tube. That chops off those nice curves at the top and bottom of the wave, leaving a flat top and bottom with a square edge where the rising or falling wave form hits the ceiling or the floor of the tube. The sound is noisy, like the sound of the radio from a 1957 Chevvy's cheap AM radio with the volume cranked to 11. Some like this particular quality of sound. I am not among those who do.

Useful words for what you are describing would be "bi-amping" and "crossover". When you split a signal so the bass goes through one amplifier and the treble goes through a different amplifier, that's called "bi-amping". The frequency at which the signal is split so higher notes go to one amp and lower notes go to the other is the "crossover frequency". Sound guys also talk about the "crossover circuit" which is the electronic component that splits the signal.

The Passport is built primarily to reproduce more or less acoustic sound really well. It can handle any treble and midrange sound deliciously, and it has enough power with it's 10" woofers to reproduce the tone of higher bass notes well, though it doesn't really have either the surface area nor the power to drive those really low, powerful notes in music that features electric bass guitar or synthesizers, or deep, loud drums. You don't really FEEL the bass coming out of the Passport like you would from a speaker cabinet built to play bass notes.

You could play your bass through a normal bass amp. That's a valid choice. But if you do that, and you have electronic drums that play both beefy bass and tinkly chime and chick-chick egg-shaker sounds, you have to either sacrifice the low sounds, running it through the Passport, or sacrifice the high sounds running it through the bass amp.

Instead, you can get a powered subwoofer and hook it to the Passport's sub out port, and run every sound source through the Passport. The crossover circuit is built into the Passport, so the amp in the powered subwoofer becomes the other amp in your newly bi-amped sound system...


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Post subject: Re: Passport 500 Pro and "Bass Heavy" Instruments
Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 7:54 am
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Aspiring Musician
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Joined: Wed Feb 16, 2011 7:24 am
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The 1/4" subwoofer port in the Passport has a switch in it that flips when you plug something into it. If you play music through the Passport and plug a 1/4" TS cable (that isn't hooked into anything else) into that port, you'll notice that the bass drops out of the sound, and the remaining music gets louder.

That's because wattage drives volume levels, and bass notes take more wattage than treble notes. So, when you plug in the cable, the crossover circuit kicks in, shedding the bass notes off to the stairway to heaven at the end of your cable, and having lost the load of those bass notes, the amp in the Passport gets louder for the rest of the music.

Meanwhile, if you have a 400 watt powered subwoofer with a 15" speaker at the other end of that cable, those bass notes get special attention. You feel them. And the rest of the music getting louder is a good thing, because they have to keep up with the bass.

Effectively, your 500 watt sound system becomes a 900 watt sound system, with specialized equipment doing what it does best.

You can get subwoofers with speakers from 12" to 18". The apparent ideal is 18", though that's really big, and the speaker cabinets for them are often over 100 pounds, and the resulting speaker is strikingly expensive. The 12" version is not nearly as big, as heavy or as expensive, but it also doesn't sound nearly as good. For the power level of the Passport 500, your subwoofer should probably be in the 300-400 watt range, and it should have speakers around 15" in diameter. Roughly speaking. I have a 400 watt, 15", 65 pound Gemini powered subwoofer that suits me well. It's not so spectacular that I recommend it above all others. It simply works, and it fit my compromise in terms of portability, price, and sound quality.

I'd like something smaller, lighter, and cheaper that sounds better and is of higher quality. I'd also like to make rich people pay their taxes, get the Post Office to put back all those mail boxes they took away, generally redistribute wealth so that nice people get rich and mean people get poor, and the only way for them to get more money is to get nicer, and I'd like to design and build my own airplane.

But here I am, stuck in reality.

So, my recommendation is to get something that fits your compromise of power, quality and budget. I think money spent on a subwoofer would give you a better result than money spent on a bass amp, since you have more than one instrument playing bass sounds, and one of them also plays treble sounds.

You can plug a bass amp into the sub out port. It sounds like crap. I've done it with a 300 watt Peavy bass amp. Hey, somebody gave me the amp when I bought the electric bass guitar that came with it. Using a bass guitar amp as a subwoofer is not recommended. It doesn't hurt anything. It just doesn't sound good. The interaction between the Passport's crossover and the bass amp was not complimentary. Maybe a different bass amp would work better, but I got advice that this would not work well, but I tried it anyway and discovered that this did not work well.

One perhaps unexpected "feature" of the sub out port is that the signal splits between bass and treble after the individual channel volume levels BUT BEFORE THE MASTER VOLUME LEVEL. So, when you are using this system, keep in mind that you will have to adjust the subwoofer's volume at the subwoofer. Changing the volume at the Master Volume on the Passport will not change the volume of the bass notes coming out of the subwoofer. Changing the master tone control on the Passport similarly has no effect on the sound coming out of the subwoofer.

So, don't put the subwoofer too far away from the mixer on the Passport. You'll need to adjust both to get the balanced sound you want.

I hope this helps.


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Post subject: Re: Passport 500 Pro and "Bass Heavy" Instruments
Posted: Fri Apr 26, 2013 10:34 am
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Joined: Mon Apr 22, 2013 12:08 pm
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Location: Newfoundland, CA
Thank you very much for your detailed response. I feel as though I had 2-3 options or more here to get to the same setup, but with your logical and methodical advice I must agree that the Sub woofer hooked into the Passport is the way to go. I simply need to decide on wattage and size now, and have been considering something in the 400-600 wattage range, whether that be a 15 or 18. I am surprised at how much the sub woofers cost (the active ones which are needed in this case anyways) but not much point in playing my Martin A/E or Deluxe Strat through an inadequate sound system...kinda defeats the purpose of having nice guitars.

Thanks again for your help and advice, it is greatly appreciated.

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Bigdawe


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