I know it sounds like a stupid question-but i simply dont get it..Its supposed to simulate a ...? Is it supposed to be like a little amp? Or the sound of an amp going through a speaker?
you plug the amp head into the cab sim and when its recorded it will sound as though its played through a cab. :wink:
Just to clarify... You plug the line-out of the amp into the cab sim. I think most of the cab sim stuff in the 'schematics' section are meant for line-level signals. Don't plug a speaker out into one of these unless it is intended to work as a dummy load, attenuator, etc, etc.
The cab-sims can be used for plugging a distortion pedal directly into them for silent direct recording with decent results.
Doug
I just built the ROG Cab Sim, and I'm using it after a DIST+, and liking that alot...
To expand....
Pedals have more bandwidth than speakers do. A distortion unit that will sound ridiculously bright and buzzy when plugged into a mixer can sound pleasingly warm when listened to through a 4 x 12 cab with sluggish speakers. Speakers and cabinets also have their own resonances and dips which provide a kind of "post-production" eq-shaping on the tone of the signal.
Things that are called "cabinet simulators" can have a number of functions. For instance, one may be to simply tap the speaker output of an amp so that the amp's sound can be electronically isolated and fed to a mixer channel, avoiding the nuisance of sticking it in its own room to prevent bleeding through to other mics. Here, the "simulation" is not the tone of the speaker as much as the electrical load of the speaker and the impact of that on the amp's output stage, while still permitting a low-level signal to be tapped and fed to an active device that wants to see a line-level signal..
Sometimes these are referred to as "power soaks" (taken from the old Scholz unit) or "wattage reducers". Although, in principle, such circuits do yield a usable line-level signal, there is a difference between something that simply drops the output power delivered to speakers and something explicitly intended to make a mixer treat an amp's output like that of a stompbox.
Another function is to skip the amp altogether and mimic the *tone* of a cabinet and speakers. Here the intent is to be able to go directly from an effect to a mixer or sampler or whatever, without mic'ing, or disturbing the neighbours, or waking the kids, having to personally own a bunch of different speaker cabinets, etc.
Since speakers have less bandwidth than circuits alone, a lowpass filter of some kind will always be an obligatory part of a cab-sim. Since no instrument speaker/cab is ruler flat from 20hz up to its rolloff, cab-sims will invariably have different sorts of gentle humps and dips built in. So, for instance, hiking up the Q of a lowpass filter a bit will produce a resonant bump (boost) just below the rolloff frequency.
Of course, since speakers are mechanical devices, they will behave differently depending on what you feed them. Cab-sims will not. As such, cab-sims of the simple variety are essentially more like simple EQ-presets rather than simulators of a speaker-cab in action. I suppose there are, or will be, DSP-based cab-sims that will attempt to mimick how speakers of different types behave under different conditions, but that's not the sort of thing you'll find here.
Despite their limitations, if you want something that will let you record a sample to your sound-card, with something that reasonably approximates the bandwidth of a speaker-cab, these do fine.
thanks to all for thier input..