sweet
great playing and tones
Thanks for the compliment dude...
im halfway through building one,to say its a ballache is an understatement,ive been threatening to make one for ages,spent many long hours listening to all manner of clips of anything i could lay my ears on .. the silent sister seemed the best of the bunch (commercial and home made boxes)
so i gotta ask,can you go into more detail about why you hate it ?
On the Randall ISO cab, I just could not get the boxy-ness out of the sound the mic captured, no matter what I did. Different speakers, different mics, post-eq in the daw, nothing I did would get "that" sound out of it. Other people may have had better luck, but I just couldn't get it to sound natural. I thought maybe I should've gotten a Jet City, or the Rivera, but couldn't see taking the chance again. I'm using a 4x12 now, & I'm pretty happy with my tones. I have the luxury of being able to get pretty loud now too, although after 9 pm is a no-no, because I'd have the cops here. Any one of these commercial ISO's could work for someone else, but the Randall left a bad taste in my mouth....YMMV...
IMHO, my home-made ISO cab was way better, but, it was also way bigger & heavier. I can't remember the exact size of the one I built, but it was like 3' x 2' x 3'. I made a "box in a box", & sandwiched Roxul panels in between the boxes (covering the bottom of the outer box, then sitting the inner box in, & filling the sides). For the lid(s), the inner lid fit down inside the inner box itself & fit quite tight. The outer lid, I made Roxul panels covered with fabric, so all 4 sides of the inner box was covered by 2-3" of Roxul, & it had latches that pulled it down tight (with weatherstripping on the lid/top edges of the outer box). I also put small Roxul panels (covered in cloth to keep the fibers off my speaker/mics) behind the speaker baffle, & smaller, thinner panels where the mic(s) would actually go...
Here's a pic of the inner box (made out of good plywood & 2x4"'s) with the baffle, wingnuts & speaker wiring (looking at the side, the dimensions of this was 18"H x 18"W x 30"L, IIRC):
Here's a pic to give you an idea of how big the cab was:
And here's another pic where you can see it a little better (although the pic quality is shit):
The outer box was made from MDF. It originally started as a box to put my 1x12's in (one at a time), but I got tired of lugging a cab in/out for different speaker sounds, so I built the inner box. The bolts/wingnuts made it pretty easy/fast to swap speakers, & there was enough room to get the mic(s) almost a foot away from the speaker itself. IMHO, there was a big enough space inside, with enough Roxul, that it somehow sounded pretty decent....
The big fucker weighed a hell of a lot though. It took both me & my brother to put this thing in the back of a pickup truck. The truck was just a little higher than the porch/deck, but it was all we could both do to lift that thing up into the truck. Just guessing, that thing was close to 300 lbs, hell it may have been more because back then I was healthy/strong, & my brother is just a pure brute, but it kicked both our asses...
Something to keep in mind, sound is like water. Where water will escape, sound will too, so be sure to seal yours up really good with caulking on the seams. On your lid, be sure to get some weather-stripping/foam or something to make it seal up as best you can....Another thing is to buy some wheels/casters, so if you ever need to move it, you can just roll it around...
Sorry for the long post, but just wanted you to know the ISO I built was far different from the one I bought later on. My home-made ISO, not including a speaker, cost about $150 to build, IIRC. The Randall ISO was like $400 with a V30 in it...I finally sold the Randall just a week or two ago after trying to get rid of it for almost a year...
Not only was my behemoth ISO cab better sounding, it also killed the noise in the room a hell of a lot better than the Randall...
Good luck dude, keep us posted on how your build goes, & post some tones up.....
