Neither power amp + cab nor FRFR are doing it for me anymore? What's wrong with me?

[firmani99]

Have you tried running both? I generally do.

 

[Tahoebrian5]

Never say never. People keep saying FRFR is never going to sound like an amp in the room. Well mine sounds exactly like my half stack minus the narrow spread. The ASM thumps like a real cab and after you get a good sound dialed in you can't tell that there is not a real amp and cab behind you. Anyway it always bug me when people say it can't be done.

 

[dr bonkers]

@dr bonkers
Not sure what PZM means exactly but if it means that you mixed room captures with the close-up captures it's something I have also tried with varying results. I like the Celestion Plus mixes that include the room mic. But I've failed to mix something like this myself (for example using Ownhammer IRs which include room and mid field captures).

A PZM IR is fundamentally different than a room IR. A room IR records and impulse using a conventional mic that basically is in a sweet spot between cab response and room decay character to give the"distance equals depth" that many classic recording engineers used to use to simulate amp in the room on albums. The down side of room mics is that you may have phase issues between your close mic and the room mic as well as a room characteristic in that may not match the feel of the tone or play well with any reverb or other effects you are adding later to the instrument tone.

A PZM IR uses a pressure zone mic attached at a resonance point on the actual cabinet. Where the mic attaches to that cabinet transforms that cabinet panel into a giant mic diaphragm, so it is capturing an IR not only of the cab resonance characteristics and timbre of the speaker in some cases, but it also does so with zero or very little phase issues. So in essence, in an acoustically neutral room, a PZM will yield all the rumble of the cab but no comb filtering coloration per se. Mixed in very small doses, a PZM IR gives a feel to a cab IR that cannot be gained by other means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_microphone

 

[Andrew Sullivan]

I am using 2 - XiTone FRFR passive cabs with a matrix and I like it a lot. I would also recomend doing some research on cab packs or even third party IRs. There are a lot of possibilities.