Hartke Hydrive 112C: Hybrid Cones And Bassy Tones
Hartke got in on the hybrid game popularized in Hollywood by the Toyota Prius with their own hybrid speakers in their Hydrive series amps. We take a look at the hybrid paper and aluminum cones and hear how they sound with a hybrid, double necked bass / guitar.
Join Owen O'Malley as he uses this demo as justification to play slap bass.
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[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I’m Owen O'Malley. Today, we’re going to be looking at the Hartke Hydrive 112 combo bass amp. Now, this is one of the first combo bass amps to make use of Hartke’s new hybrid Hydrive speaker drivers. They introduced the speaker cabinets already that include these Hydrive cones. Basically, what they do is they pair Hartke’s signature aluminum cone design, as you can see in the center of this driver, and they pair it with traditional paper cone on the outside. This way, you kind of get the attack of the traditional sort of Hartke aluminum cone driver but the paper on the outside adds a little bit of warmness and fullness on the low end, so what you get is really a speaker that combines that aggressive Hartke sound with a more traditional low end as you can hear.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
This is a 250-watt combo amp. The combo includes this 12” Hydrive woofer. There’s also this tweeter driver which is attenuatable on the back. There a switch where you can turn it to off or you can have -6 dB or you can just have it on all the way, good for sort of dialing out the high ends if you get some really sort of harsh-sounding bass, something you might want to do like if you have an active bass.
We got a single input here, no separate passive input, and there’s our level control right here. Right now, you can see it’s set at about -- it’s about 3. [PLAYS A NOTE] The thing is already pretty loud. It’s a 250-watt combo so it gets pretty loud.
Moving over here we’ve got a little compressor built in. You can’t actually change the shape of the compressor knee. All you can really do is change the threshold here where it actually engages. If we got it all the way off...,
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
...you can see the blue light doesn’t engage at all. And then, as we bring it up here --
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
The compressor is really handy if you want to do, you know, basically add some punch to slap bass or with picked bass. I like using a compressor with pick bass because it just adds that punch.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
And you can really hear that sort of grind and attack from that Hydrive speaker when you play with a pick.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
And slap it sounds really good too if you turn it up.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
Moving next to the compressor knob here, we’ll just dial that down a little bit...,
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
...we’ve got our pre-EQ shape control, which is basically an on/off button and then our frequency selector. It’s basically a sort of mid range pass filter. Let’s turn it on to hear it.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
So, it really changes the sound quite drastically. If we have it down by about 100 Hz right here...,
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
...you can hear it’s really like it’s a cut. You know, it cuts out the 100 Hz.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH A HARTKE HYDRIVE 112C]
Owen's really good at bass.
Owen's really good at bass. I wonder if this combo would be loud enough to be heard over acoustic drums.
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