There is no tag or label that we can put on our cabs to tell our customers how many countless hours of thought and work goes into our designs before they ever reach a musician's hands.  So, with that in mind, we'd like to share some "inside information" about what it took to deliver our new models to market.  If nothing else, it saves you the trouble of buying one and cutting it in half to see for yourself... (we're kidding of course, please don't do that!)

It all starts with a healthy appreciation for the old adage "Know Thine Enemy".  And in the world of cabs, that enemy is vibration.  If cabs just sat there, jiggling like Jello, nobody would care.  The problem is that there are these things called "drivers" that are mounted on them, and guess what?  They're jiggling too.  Except when they jiggle, they are trying to make sound, and that's the whole point of them in the first place.  So the fundamental problem is - what is all that vibration in the cab doing to all the vibration coming from the drivers?  The answer?  It plays hell with your sound.  That cabinet vibration not only rattles around and counter-acts what your drivers are trying to do, it also gets expressed out into the air as sound.  It's an interesting concept when you think about it... if you could somehow "turn off" the sound that your drivers were making, but still keep them working, you'd still hear the sound coming from the cabinet shell.  Of course, what you'd hear would sound like crap, but you would definitely hear it.  So in a very general, very simplified way, that's an explanation of why vibration is bad.  Because it does nothing but screw up the sound coming from your drivers.  It's horrible in high-end audio cabinets, but it's bad in guitar and bass cabs, too.

If you want to get serious about vibration, the first thing you need to do is measure it.  In the first image at the top left, you'll see a standard frequency response graph made with a microphone.  That's fine for measuring vibration in the air (sound), and it may be the typical kind of graph you see associated with speakers, but it's not too good for measuring waves of vibration traveling through a cabinet shell.  To do that, we use an accelerometer, which measures vibration through a solid surface, and that measurement is what you see on the second image.  That is the same cabinet, playing the same waveform, but measured with an accelerometer and run through what's called a Waterfall Spectral Analysis.  That, folks, is what vibration looks like.  The intensity is in color, the duration measured on the left axis (how long the vibration "rings"), and the frequency of the vibration left-to-right, with bass on left and highs on right.  Pretty amazing stuff!

So now that we can see the vibration, we can do something about it.  In this case, we start bracing the cabinet shell.  The easy, cheap and traditional way would be to just start slapping some wood inside and hope for the best.  And if you think we're joking, just take a look inside almost any other cab out there and you'll see that we're not joking, not by a long shot.  But the fact is, while the common approach may make the cab stronger (which isn't all bad), it usually doesn't much at all for vibration.  That's where our perimeter bracing system comes in.  Our bracing, while definitely making the cab stronger, is really designed to combat vibration.  Does it work? See for yourself in the third image.  That is the same cab, again with the same signal, but after it's been properly braced.  The improvement is obvious.  There is still vibration, but they are much more narrow in frequency (spikes instead of columns) and far weaker.  The vibration in the bass regions is much more contained, and that's a key reason why the bass reproduction in our cabs is so tight and defined, and the overall sound is so three-dimensional.

Images 4 is an early cabinet prototype showing our new, perimeter bracing system.  It's not exactly like our final production models because we still had some improvements to make, but it gives you a good idea about how it looks.  People have compared it to a rib cage, which is pretty accurate if you think about it.  That system, which looks so simple, took a lot of work and effort, not to mention a lot of testing to prove that it really does it's job and isn't just a bunch of eye candy that no one will ever see.  We're very proud of how it performs and we know that there are few, if any, manufacturers that put this kind of raw engineering into their cabs.

The last picture is of our BlackrockTM polymer coating.  It's another example of us not accepting the same "good enough" attitude of other companies.  It features the best looking, best patterned texture that you will ever see on commercially sprayed cabinets.  To spray this type of material is expensive, requires working closely with the manufacturing chemists to get the formulations perfect, and demands skilled operators to produce such a remarkable textured finish.  But we weren't going to put all that work into our cabs and then coat them with something that looked like black cottage cheese, or would get all chalky and dull.  We're happy to say that the outside looks every bit as good as the inside!

You should have a better appreciation now for how we build our cabs and the level of performance that we strive towards.  It's not easy, and it's not cheap.  But we know it's worth it the every time you play one, and hopefully so will you!