Isocab or Rivera Rock Crusher

I vote against an iso cab. Very boxy. One of the worst purchases I have ever made.

Quote from deadpan

I vote against an iso cab. Very boxy. One of the worst purchases I have ever made.

You took the words right out of my mouth, @deadpan

I bought an iso cab. drove 27 kilometers, searched for a parking lot. carried the cab to my car. and so on so forth. what a hassle. and the sound was so unbelievable boxy
that i returned the stuff the very next day. maybe i had bought the wrong cab, but all i can say: never again. a friend of mine gave an attenuator to me. a cheap one.
not good. i did my best profiles (and i have done many) at medium level with an egnater 1x12.

I did some DI profiles with a Subr Reactive Load, turned out preety good (to my ears at least). I suppose you could run it through an IR and make studio profiles with it? Cheers

Quote from deadpan

I vote against an iso cab. Very boxy. One of the worst purchases I have ever made.

not all Iso cabs are created equally. I heard/played quite a few profiles that were - to my surprise - made with an Iso cab. I would have never guessed from the way the profile sounded.

Agreed - There are some good sounding isocabs.
While they are quieter than a conventional cabinet, they do not eliminate the sound of the amplifier in the room.

Any isocab will change the natural sound of a given speaker dramatically through two mechanisms: resonant modes and mechanical impedance. Although the same can be said for a normal cabinet in a room, these effects are dramatically greater with an isocab. The modes for standing waves in a room tend to be bass and low mid, bur in a small box they move up into important guitar frequencies. Additionally, the normal open/closed designs for regular cabinets goes out the window due to the small isobaric enclosure. Absorption and baffled venting can help, but they are workarounds.

So basically an isocab design puts more limits on where you can go with a given speaker. And the speaker that you know and love will sound different in an isocab due to these reasons. The best isocab will be designed around a given speaker, where the bumps and dips and loading effects will be designed to cancel each other our as much as they can. A good designer can work around these issues, but at best it's designing with one hand behind your back. It's probably analogous to building an acoustic guitar out of plastic. It might be decent, even charming, but it won't ever be an archetypical acoustic guitar.

Attenuators on the other hand are pretty awesome these days. I got through the 80's/90's using a resistive Scholz Powersoak. They changed the tone somewhat, but you tweaked the amp to compensate. We survived. The newer reactive load boxes are almost transparent, with differences not big enough to require tweaking or even care about. I currently have both a Weber Mass and a Badcat Unleash. Both are in cork-sniffing territory in terms of "tone-sucking".

I built myself a huge isocab so I could fit 2x12 and have some air for the soundwave. Fit in a 1968 greenback and a 1972 Sound city, 2x SM57... Played with a 1969 Hiwatt and a 1972 Orange.
Results??
5 days later I bought the KPA and threw the isocab to the garbage.

Quote from GAMF

I built myself a huge isocab so I could fit 2x12 and have some air for the soundwave. Fit in a 1968 greenback and a 1972 Sound city, 2x SM57... Played with a 1969 Hiwatt and a 1972 Orange.
Results??
5 days later I bought the KPA and threw the isocab to the garbage.

now, about this 1972 Orange...

The Rivera Silent Sister has tried to address the lacking of air of the standard isoboxes, with the resul of bein more natural buit way less "silent" than the other products around.
I'm using a old silent cab made by tube town, basically a wood cube with speaker inside, completely muted by foam.
It works nicely for direct profiles (better than my old palmer PDI04) and it is pretty silent