Har-Bal Users Forum BBS

Anyone here use 'Isolation Speaker Cabinets'?

I'm interested in perhaps building a couple - for bass and guitar. After completing a few 'Faux VOX' rigs I can certainly do this.

I see that Randall Amplifiers makes two and apparently Demeter makes (or made) one.

But, are they useful?

So let me get this straight. Is one of these isolation cabinets basically a fully enclosed bass guitar loudspeaker plus a microphone in the enclosed space? If it is then, although you'll get a boxy bass sound it is certainly very unlikely that it will be the same as what you'll hear from your normal speaker.

Seems like a wierd approach to me. Why not just place a mic at your favourite mic'ing position and do a frequency response test of the bass guitar speaker system. Then take the impulse response you got from that test and plug it into a digital filter to model the speaker sound. Then all you have to do is feed a line signal from the amp through the filter and you've got an isolated approximation of what you'll here with the box mic'd. It's only approximate because it won't model the distortion products the speaker introduces but that could probably be reasonably well modelled too if someone does enough research on the subject.

That's my impression on the subject.

Regards,


Paavo.