Rich - I expect you were just joking, and I'd prefer not to speculate on the nature of devices you might buy that would cause you to be more responsive to verbal requests from your wife (ouch). But if you have some serious questions about various forms of hearing loss/impairment, you should start another thread. There was some good stuff here recently on tinnitus, which is a fairly specific problem; males generally suffer from reduced high frequency perception with age, while the classic too much exposure to loud stuff problem tends to result in a scoop in the low thousands region.
Joey - obviously, I'm with you. If you want to sound like a bass, be it an upright or maybe classic Motown with a bit more articulation, you don't need horns or tweeters. At the same time, if your style demands that you hear the sounds of calloused fingers scraping across thin gauge, round wound, stainless strings, or strings bouncing off frets, then go for it :-) I don't mean to sound cynical or sarcastic, slap and maybe some picking techniques that emphasize the attack *mechanism* (not to say the more general attack envelope of the tone) are valid reasons for wanting some higher frequency output. Just not mine.
Dave - I don't have a copy of the referenced Feel So Good either, and it's not quite enough for me to open an iTunes account just to get one song (if they have it) that I might listen to twice, at most. Though I am adamantly opposed to piracy and will not copy stuff for friends, something like a 30 second excerpt strictly for educational/reference purposes falls within my understanding of the definition of fair use, and would not concern the labels. So if you happen upon a good quality excerpt, I'd also be interested.
Dave again (and Nic) - the yellow line problem, of the applet not being sensitive to the selected fret position, is neither a bug, nor a deficiency, nor a browser issue. I said something about this in my post, though indirectly and it was written before Dave asked the question:
- The program just shows the theoretical response of pickups at certain positions, ignoring electronics and tons of other details. It just figures out how waves pass over a given position (the pickup), and I still think it assumes they all have the same amplitude.
- For a string tuned to any given pitch, the wavelengths of all frequencies you can produce on that string, regardless of where you play and including all partials, are fixed.
- Since the bridge is in a fixed position, and determines one end of the waves, the only thing that matters then is how far the pickup is from the bridge, and how wide it is.
This was not intuitive to me either, and one of the first things I started to do after downloading the code was to figure out how it could be fixed to reflect what happened as I played different notes. Well, I got to the right place in the code, and (though I can't be absolutely certain) it looked like Tillman had started to write something there, quickly realized it didn't matter, and commented it out. This in turn prompted me to look at the frequencies and wavelengths, for partials of various notes. It's an interesting result, and a good reminder that while the wavelength of a low B in room temperature air is on the order of 36 feet, it can be more like 36 inches or less in a heavy metal string (not a reference to musical preference).
Nic - thanks for the clarifications, further insights, and yet more historical footnotes. Let me be the first to admit that some of this is over my head, and it's also probably more than most of us need to know - but interesting, and thankfully I seem to keep learning stuff. I don't consider myself to be your peer in either the electronics or more general mechanical physics realms, but sometimes I can spot what appears to be a logical or practical flaw in reasoning, and hopefully ask a good question.
My main point was just as you said: while Ron has done some truly brilliant work, and I will personally be forever indebted for what he did on my bass, I think he'd get a pretty good laugh at the suggestion that he should file a patent for solving the comb filtering problem with a 9 dB Q switch.
Now, I'd really like to hear Jack's solo (just for reference of course).
Wait, one last thing for tonight...
Going back to the key practical question: how many classic guitar amps (which certainly need a higher range than for bass) can you think of that had nothing smaller than 10 drivers? Yes, nowadays you can get around 6 kHz out of these, but still not a lot more. I'm too tired to research the question, but if we take a relevant example like the Wall Of Sound - what was the high end response of the portion used for guitars?
-Bob
