The Blooz Toob - the little Metro measures up & more!

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

I'm now the proud guardian of 3 Toobs - a Metro GP, Metro BG, and a 10S. First and foremost, they live up to everything great that's been said about them! Second, they're not your father's speaker cabs - they're lighter, tougher, and sweeter than the competition - and they're really cool !!!

I took the Metro BG to the club Sunday for our blues jam to see if it could keep up with the big dogs. I hooked it up to the speaker out jack on the CS PR, plugged in my 7 string LP through the Wampler Tumnus, cranked the drive, stuck it on top of the Leslie cabinet back in the corner of the stage behind me, and fired it up without telling anyone what I was doing. (Yes, the stage lights are red and blue - there's an overhead rack of lights that would turn winter at the North Pole into a day at the beach...)



Man, does this little sucker rock!! Cranking it up in the mix with a Hammond plus another guitar player, bass and drums, it's amazing! When I revealed the secret, the audience and the band all agreed that it was a success. It's not quite as strong 'way down there as the PR's internal speaker - but I'm playing a 7, and the PR's only a hair better. Without the low A, it's a pretty close competitor - loud as all get out and sweetly funky. The tonal range is amazingly broad - OD it & it screams, play it clean and it purrs. I can't record our blues shows because the club owner is the sound guy, and he plays bass in our blues band. My wife doesn't come to these gigs. So there was no one to watch the TASCAM, and leaving it alone on the sound desk at the back of the room near the bar seems unwise to me.

The BG is wonderful with a 7 string archtop. It sounds fantastic with my Quilter Microblock - I could use the two for almost any jazz gig. Now I'm thinking of selling my Little Jazz and buying the Quilter Superblock US that I waited for in vain for months last fall. A SB US on the 10" will be a great jazz combo. And the two Metros (BG paired with the GP) and one of my class D stereo amps (Douk ST-01) make a great and portable stereo setup for my Roland synth or my new stereo effects pedal (Zoom MS60B).

More Toob testing to come - I'm using the 10 (driven by the VIbrolux) for our jazz show this Thursday and should be able to record it.

[EDIT] I just ordered a Supeblock US and posted the Little Jazz for sale. With the Superblock, the Microblock, and the DV Mark head at home plus 3 Toobs, a RevSound cab and a RE cab, I'm in fat city. And you can see above what I have in my little corner of the club, along with the DV Mark Jazz 12 in the back room. Enough is too much!!

[Christian Miller]

I’ve done this exact thing. It’s like putting an attenuator on a PR so I can imagine it’s badass for blues. It’s also surprisingly full sounding.

[marcwhy]

Great story, and fun gear pic!

[and great thread title, too!]

FWIW, with my amps, I like an alnico in my 10S.

How's the GP vs the BG (and I realize the BG is beefier, and can handle bass, too)?

Marc

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

How's the GP vs the BG (and I realize the BG is beefier, and can handle bass, too)?

The BG is beefier and can handle bass too.


But seriously folks.......the GP has a stated frequency response on the Toob website of "90-6,000 Hz" and the BG is 60-4,000 Hz (with the drivers being used when those specs were put up, of course). Availability of drivers has been irregular, so the actual speaker in a given unit may differ some from the published spec - but I'm sure they're close to it or Markku wouldn't use them. As is the case with every other guitar amplifier and speaker in the world, the most important parts of such a spec are left out: linearity and tolerance. The usual practice in the audiophile equipment world is to provide a curve of frequency response that extends at least to the -3 dB points. I'd like to assume that the curves for the Toobs terminate at the -3 dB points, drop like rocks above and below them, and are fiarly linear between them. But I don't know that this is the case. I also don't care - they sound great!

The argument for not doing this for guitar amps / speakers is that the overall response curve is neither linear nor relevant, because the speaker / cab unit is part of the "sound". So even reasonably authoritative publications like Sound on Sound say things like "The frequency range normally suited to electric guitars and amplifiers is generally regarded as around 70Hz to 6kHz". Duh! And with the rise of modeling amps, linear frequency response across the full audible spectrum is critical for most accurate presentation of the model. Even my new little Zoom MS60B pedal is a sophisticated modeler, and I just ordered a Superblock US - so this has become important to me too. As a result, I may care more if I get further into modeling.

Specs aside, the BG has a bit more weight at the bottom. This is easy to appreciate with a 7 string, and even easier to hear with a keyboard or synthesizer. My Metros (a GP+ and a BG) both appear to have the same SICA drivers in them thanks to supply chain problems. The BG has a single rear port (assuming you put the rubber plug into the second jack on the back) and the GP+ has 4. So I'm using the GP for the right channel in a stereo rig, since that's the treble side of keyboards.