Re: ok....next question...G12M and a V30?....who has done it, how did you like it?
Call me a boring, unfashionable, close minded, grumpy old fart for preferring to run just a simple quad of the same kind. :grumble:
Do you wear funky shirts because Herr Bogner himself does, too? :haha:
The whole mix & match approach is IMHO futile effort as much as a dog chasing its own tail.
I base my opinion on the dichotomy that either your rig is a balanced system that produces the right amounts of each frequency, or it is not / does not.
In the first case, you don't need to fill out anything except filling the venue with sound.
In the second case, you don't need to fill out anything except maybe the return form for your last gear purchase. What you need to do is identify and swap/mod/remove the component that upsets the balance and only proceed to rock out after the issue has been resolved.
One thing that seems a stinky taboo about mixed-driver cabs is phasing. If you want all your speakers to produce coherent waveforms, e.g. play in (almost) perfect sync, you gotta keep 'em matched. Otherwise, phase shifts are going to litter your tone with a rash of interference artifacts. What it means, in layman's language, is that miking up and mixing a heterogeneously loaded cab is a pain in the arse.
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Meanwhile, I totally get it how listening to the 3D sound of a mixed-driver setup might seem cool in person but try capturing it on a record and placing it in a band mix and you'll see what I'm on about. In other words, I don't reckon multiple speaker types are necessary for achieving the depth of sound you're looking for. I'm done picking on you. Hope it's some food for thought. My rant is now over except for the punch line.
Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
I'm going to say that, even though I like how my cab sounds, I agree with this for the most part.
Pairing speakers will definitely present some problems that a single kind of speakers will not. For starters, as you walk across the front of your cab, you will notice it sounding SIGNIFICANTLY different if you stand more towards the left or right of it, which can sometimes make it difficult to dial in a sound. This happens to an extent on any cab because sometimes you're hearing the speakers off axis, sometimes on axis, etc., but I do feel it geats greatly exaggerated when you have different speakers on each side of the cab.
You will have to choose one of the two kinds of speakers to be mic'ed at a gig or recording, or go through the trouble of phase-aligning two mics to truly represent the sound of your cab as a whole.
That being said, though, the phase issues that might come from mixing different speakers while standing in front of the cab are negligible, IMO. A cab with four (or whatever number) of speakers will have a significantly different sound depending on which speaker you mic, even if they're all the same kind of speaker. It's just the nature of the beast. Recording engineers will not uncommonly experiment with mic'ing all four speakers in a 4x12 to see which sounds the best. Surprisingly, they all tend to sound noticeably different. Cab construction, imperfections in the wood the cab is made of all play a roll. Even many "straight" cabs have a slight angle to the baffle. Sound is not bouncing off their back at the same rate... that, and add the fact that you'll VERY RARELY be standing in a place where all speakers from the cab are hitting your ears at EXACTLY the same time with sound.
To be completely honest, I like my cab. It's unique-sounding. I don't see the EVH/V30 mix very often, and I think it works well... BUT it does have issues that other cabs do not. I like how the V30 sounds mic'd, but I prefer how the EVH sounds in the room (not that I dislike the V30 in the room). The mix in the room is cool, though, and, even though I must admit I have not worked as hard placing a mic in front of the EVH as I have with the V30, I know that if I throw an SM57 in front of one of the V30's, the result is probably going to come out familiar-sounding and workable.
