notalemming
Fractal Fanatic
Could be, or local environmental regulations, effect on sound or cabinet weight???
Could be, or local environmental regulations, effect on sound or cabinet weight???
FRFR, full range, flat response, is a term that gets batted around a lot. The Friedman in particular, is not flat response & seemingly deliberately so. It's trying to be somewhere in between a guitar cab & an FRFR cab. To me, that's fine if you only want to use it as backline/cover the whole room with that cab but if you are also sending the same signal to FOH or trying to record with patches created on them, you could run into problems. The CLRs accurately give you what the Axe is putting out. If a patch sounds too bright, it's because the patch is too bright. Much easier to get patches that sound great everywhere without having to rely on the sound man to do major surgery on you sound to make it work. Since I haven't tried the Xitone, I can't comment on where it fits in but it seems their goal is to be an accurate FRFR cab.
Atomic was pretty much first in the game. They had another line of cabs before the CLR but I don't think they were true FRFR. The other one mentioned earlier, Accugroove, is a true FRFR too. They started making bass cabs that were billed as a studio monitor that could handle bass at gig volumes. The company folded but was recently resurrected & now they make guitar FRFR cabs too. They are really hard to find from what I can tell but would be another one I would love to check out along with the Xitone.
They are still around & having the same issue as others with a world wide shortage of parts. Fractal is having the same problem but maybe not to the same extent depending on exactly which parts they use.
As a newcomer to Fractal and modelling one of the most frustrating thing to deal with was figuring out what cabs/wedges to use. And then actually being able to purchase them. If Fractal had their own solution I would have jumped on that first and foremost.
Really, only you can make that call. If we were comparing the CLR to something much cheaper, it would be an easy call. Let us know how you like the Xitone.
The Line-X stuff bonds really well to itself but poorly with wood. So if it does get damaged at all, it can peel away from the wood surface, and refinishing would be hard. But by many accounts, it seems hard to damage in the first place, so dunno.
Meh, if you like how it sounds, great, but the Accugrooves are not "true FRFR," the design is weird. And Accugroove has a history of fraudulent practice that they've never acknowledged let alone apologized for. Their current speaker specs are lies or at best misleading.
I used to have a bass cab made by Avatar with a Line-X coating. This thing was totally bomb proof - the cab was more likely to damage the user than the other way around. I actually needed to be careful carrying the thing when wearing shorts so it wouldn't scrape up my legs.
Exactly what do you base this on? Sure, there is nothing perfect in our world but the CLR is a very accurate, neutral cab. A flat response speaker is not supposed to "sound good". It's supposed to accurately reproduce what you are sending to it. If your patch sounds bad through a CLR, it's because it's a bad sounding patch. Also, what evidence do you have on Accugroove? Are you referring to the original company that went out of business or the current resurrected version?
Sorry my writing wasn't clear. I wasn't talking about the CLR, just the Accugrooves. Agreed on the CLR.
On the fraud thing, it was a while ago so I guess that's the original company. Accugroove had a feature called the Accuswitch, which was a switch that would supposedly flip their passive 4 ohm cab between 4 and 8 ohm. The switch was connected to some epoxied little black box that held a capacitor, which did nothing -- no change in cab impedance, 4 ohm cab stayed a 4 ohm cab in its "8 ohm" mode. And if two of these cabs were used in parallel in 8 ohm mode, it could damage the customers' amps. When confronted by the bass gear communities, Accugroove simply lawyered up and shut up, and quietly got rid of the switch from their future cabs and ads.
