In The Beginning:

In the beginning, there was the Law, and the Law was: “You can’t get Light, Loud, and Low in the same package.” The ‘’Principle of the Three L’s.’’ Everyone in all of Bass-dom knew the lowdown. Straight-up, simple, backbreaking facts we’d all been living with for years, toting ‘fridges back and forth to work for the man.

Well, word on the street was there was a guy downtown sayin’ different. It was my job to investigate. My name’s Friday, Sound Reinforcement Squad; I carry a badge, and a bass. I had to get to the bottom of this, no matter where it took me. So, I jumped in the squad car and found the guy under the 33rd Street bridge, right where my informant said he would be.

“Hey Pal,” I said, “What’s this I hear about you goin’ all braggadocio on breakin’ the Bass-ic Laws of Physics?Rumor has it you’re in noncompliance with The Three L’s. I don’t need that kinda trouble in my town.”

‘’It’s true” he said. “Y’all plug in, and see fo’ yo’self.”

I immediately recognized his accent as Cajun, from down Louisiana way.Little did I know then this caper would end in Idaho.

Plug In, and Turn On

“Seriously,” I thought, “this guy must be delirious.” The little thing sitting next to him was barely bigger than a box for Shaq’s shoes. No way anything good was gonna come from these sort of hijinx.

“Go ahead cap’n, give ‘er a spin.”

I pulled out my trusty 5-string, plugged in, turned on, and laid some down. That’s right about when I felt reality spin on its axis. I wondered if anything was ever going to be the same in this city again.

“What’s your name pal?” I asked.
“I’m gonna have to write you up!”

“Duke” he said. “Duke LeJeune.” I should have known; his is a name well known in... other circles...

A Small Package, full of Big Things

At 24” high, 14” deep, and 14” wide, the TC112AF is the smallest cab I’d ever played through. The Thunderchild comes in two versions,the standard TC112, and the TC112AF, or “Acoustic Friendly” version. The TC112AF weighs in at 34 pounds, the standard TC112 at 31 pounds.

Much of what allows the TC112 to violate the Rule of the Three L’s is its custom 3012LF driver; a high output, large xMax driver made by Eminence.An off-the-shelf 3012LF is 8 ohms, but Eminence worked with Duke to develop a 4-ohm version for the TC112. “I felt this was really important. I wanted to deliver the most out of a small, light, speaker cabinet, and the 4-ohm version lets players get the most out of the current microheads.”

The compression driver is an Eminence ASD-1001, married to a Pyle Pro PH612 waveguide, which ends up making the TC112Af look a lot like a miniature PA speaker. “I never heard a horn I liked until I heard a 90 degree, constant-directivity horn, like what was in the Altec Model 19.This keeps the sound the same, no matter what your location in the room.”

The TC112AF differs from the standard TC112 in that it has a rearbass firing tweeter: a Galaxy Audio Neolite SNTR 1.5. The rear panel also has two switches which control the horn, giving the player options for fully on, a gentle top-end rolloff, and fully off. I ran the horn all-on, all the time. I can see where some players looking for a more vintage sound would choose the padded back option. Turning the horn off does not sound like a good, usable option to me. Why these two switches, instead of the more familiar attenuator? “An attenuator alters frequency response unacceptably, due to varying the impedance curve to the compression driver. We want to keep the horn’s low-end response the same, while trimming the high-end response. An attenuator trims everything going to the compression driver, and that’s not what I wanted”

Both versions have two large 3” flared ports. “I wanted to keep the reverberant energy as correct as possible. Flared ports color the sound less than tube ports, and the rearmounted tweeter and rear porting add depth and a 3-D feel, due to the timing differential – it sounds richer and better this way.”

The TC112’s rear ports are also sealable via two plugs that come with the cab. This changes both tuning, and feel. With the plugs out, the cab’s frequency response is stated as 56Hz to 15kHz. “The crossover frequency is around 2kHz for both the front-firing horn and rear-firing tweeter. The crossover topology is fairly complex for a bass cab, with thirty elements for the acoustic-friendly version and twenty-one elements for the regular version. The net acoustic slopes are approximately 4th order, and most of the crossover circuitry is devoted to equalization of some kind. Down to the upper 40’s, both ports open is clearly the loudest. While one port open is a bit louder below 47Hz or so, by then the response is more than 6dB down, so it’s no longer loud enough to really be usable bass in most rooms.Both ports plugged is definitely tighter, less bassy... to the point of probably being downright lean in most rooms.”

While it may be diminutive in stature, it’s surely not at all small in either output or tone. When I got it back to my Testing Lab downtown, I grabbed a Sadowsky MV5, set a GK MB Fusion on top of the nicely inset handle, plugged into one of the two Speakon jacks on the rear panel, and turned on. My first thoughts were: “Good gravy, that sounds just exactly like my bass,” and, “This thing has output much, much greater than its size.” I’d had the opportunity to beta test two of Duke’s early prototypes, and I thought I knew what I was going to get out of this box. I was wrong.

The TC112AF is amazingly flat and even-sounding across its range.Everything on the fingerboard jumps out strongly and evenly, from the B string all the way up the fingerboard.The lows are tight, and well-balanced.The highs are present, but super smooth, and never harsh – even out of 62 bass gear my super bright ash/maple Sadowsky MV5. The mids are just right: not too much, not at all scooped.

From The Lab to the Gig

After only a few minutes of Lab testing, I had to pack up the MB Fusion, Sadowsky, and the TC112AF and headed off to a big corporate gig downtown. I took two GK Neo112’s with me as backup, figuring that while the TC112 seemed plenty capable at the Lab, it might not cut it in a big room with the classic rock band I was working with that night. Again, I was wrong.

When I set the rig up on stage, the bandmates all laughed at me for bringing a shoe box to a gunfight.When I fired the rig up, they all quit laughing. The TC112 has push waaay beyond its size. Duke told me “It’s basically a 3x10 equivalent,” and that feels about right. We started fairly quiet through dinner, and got louder for the following three sets. Liquorfueled dancers filled the dance floor; the TC112AF filled out the low end. I kept turning up, and the TC112AF never flinched; the low end never compressed. It just kept giving.Amazing! The bass is firm, forceful, and controlled; the mids wellbalanced to the low end; the treble present, but super sweet and never harsh, even when slapping the modern sounding ash/maple Sadowsky MV5 with fresh stainless strings and a little treble boost. I never moved the MB Fusion’s EQ from “flat.” I never took the two backup cabs out of the truck.

I got an even bigger surprise the next day back at the Lab, when I set up my Mesa/Boogie WalkAbout and plugged in my 1961 King double bass.The TC112AF is, for me and my preferences, the best cab I’ve ever played through for double bass. The 3012LF does a great job at delivering the big fat fundamentals of the lower register, and moving up the fingerboard, things just kept getting sweeter: perfectly balanced mids, and singing highs; finger and string noise all nicely represented, and the rearfiring tweeter adds a great amount of Depth and air to the mix. Very impressive! I took this rig to one small ‘speak-easy’ jazz pickup gig, and it was spot-on perfect for me.

When I shot the word upstairs to Big Boss Bowlus that it did in fact seem to be true that The Duke had cracked the code on “Light, Loud, Low,” word came back down from the top that the TC112AF was gonna have to make the trip to The Big Lab for further scrutiny, and post haste. My days with the sweet little gem were numbered. I made the most of it though, and took the TC112AF with me everywhere I went. Swing band rehearsal with the double bass. Rock band rehearsal with electric bass. The weekly blues jam open mic night. It continued to be just as impressive every time I used it, right till I had to box it up and throw it on The Brown Truck to ride to The Big Boss.

The Long and Winding Road

Just how did Duke do this? Well, it’s a long story, going way back to his childhood. Duke’s parents were big music fans, and always had music playing at home; but Duke’s tastes were different. He soon wanted his own stereo, and he got one. But when he went to college, the guy across the hall had speakers that sounded better.

Much better. All the parts looked the same; Duke wanted to know why that guy’s speakers sounded so much better. “That started a lifetime of research for me. I went to the university library, read everything I could find, and started building my own cabs.” And so Duke entered the home stereo speaker business, for himself at first, and then as a business, continually refining his product.

It wasn’t an immediate success; “Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before he got the light bulb right, so I kept at it.” Clearly, Duke isn’t a man put off by much, and he had ideas of what he thought should work, and he thought “flat” was where it was at. He spent much time and effort choosing drivers and crossover components to get to that goal of perfectly flat response, and when he got there, he was let down. “It didn’t sound right. In fact, it sounded progressively worse as I worked on it.” The difference maker? It turned out to be a combination of dispersion, and crossover components. Duke kept working on component and crossover refinement until he had cabs that sounded great all around the room,and had the all right frequencies coming out of all the right components in the speakers.

Duke has been building home audio speakers for years, and doing quite well at it. His Dream Maker speakers won a Golden Ear award in 2008. So, how did he end up building bass cabs?

Furthering a Passion

“Listening to music can be a transformational experience – it changes you, makes you a little bit deeper and better person than you were before. But the high-end home audio market was shrinking with the economy. In a market where people won’t buy high-end toys, they will still buy high-end tools. I remember sitting in night clubs in New Orleans, watching these killer musicians play, their fingers flying all over their instruments, and thinking ‘I can’t really hear what they’re playing, and I bet they can’t either,’ and that I could do better and enrich that passionate experience for both the musicians and the audience. It seemed to me that bass cabs looked like there was room for substantive improvement, and room in the market for that.”

Duke wanted to build something smaller, more accurate, and bettersounding than anything else out there.“I saw bassists struggling to be heard through bad equipment, and I wanted to do something about it. I really care about it, and I’m especially happy with the AF model for double bass. It’s been a really satisfying project for me, and it brings me closer to the music.Music changes people. All the nuance that a musician puts into it comes out of this cab, and that has to be a positive change. I’m not a musician, and I probably never will be, but this lets me get close to the music, and that’s invaluable to me.”

The Bottom Line

As a player, I really respect Duke’s mentality; it’s valuable to me too. So, that’s the low-down on The Duke, and, the TC112AF. I’m gonna talk to The Duke about getting one of my own. Then, I guess I’ll have to write up another citation, for being in violation of the Three L’s myself.

I have to admit, I was really chomping at the bit to start digging into the technical analysis of this little beauty.Okay, and I was also looking forward to playing through this cab, myself.Alan didn’t want to give up the TC112AF to let me do this, but who can blame him? This cab is light, powerful, and has a chameleon-like personality; but Alan has already told you all of this, so I’ll move onto the technical deets.

The heart of the TC112AF is its custom Eminence Kappalite™ 3012LF. The stock 3012LF is available in 8-ohm configuration, only. In addition to the impedance change to 4 ohms, the proprietary A u d i o K i n e s i s 3012LF variant also has improved efficiency (as the expense of some lowend extension), and more top-end extension. This driver is held in place by eight bolts secured with T-nuts. Now that’s what I’m talking about! The round grill covers the driver only, and is clamped in place by four more bolts (also secured with T-nuts).

The soul of the TC112 is the ASD- 1001 1” titanium compression driver, paired up with the big Pyle Pro PH612 horn. This horn has a 90 degree by 40 degree coverage angle, and it occupies and imposing amount of real estate, at6. 4” high by 11.9” wide. Off-axis coverage was very impressive, all the way out to 45 degrees (see Fig. A). The AF version is a bit more “soulful,” I suppose, what with an extra tweeter on the backside of the enclosure. The Galaxy Audio Neolite SNTR 1.5 actually has a larger voice coil (1.5”, versus 1”), handles more power (60 watts, versus 50), and goes deeper (down to 1kHz, versus 2.5kHz) than the primary Eminence high frequency driver. But it is handed a somewhat diminished role. The signal fed to the rear-firing tweeter is attenuated about 10dB down, relative to the signal going to the front tweeter. What’s the point, you ask? Well, this is the “acoustic friendly” version of the TC112, so we need look only to an acoustic instrument to find the inspiration. An acoustic instrument does not radiate sound in only one direction. Sound waves emanate from both the front and back of the body (the sides, as well, but in much smaller doses). This creates an audible effect that you can hear even when you are sitting in an adjoining room (relative to the instrument and player). By also radiating sound from the back, as well as the front, of the cab, the TC112AF seeks to more accurately reproduce the tonal experience of hearing an acoustic instrument in action.

No Scarecrow, here, this loveable character definitely has a brain, and that is the massive crossover. I have never seen a fraction of this much copper inside of a bass enclosure before. The slope of the crossover is approximately 4th order, net acoustic slope, using a combination of electrical and inherent roll-off. One concern I would have with such an extensive – and heavy – crossover is road worthiness, but great care appears to have been taken to secure all the components with screws and zip ties. The added components required to handle the rear-firing tweeter are placed on their own “daughter board.” In a cab which is in so many ways all about being compact and lightweight, this over the top crossover may initially seem to run counter to what the TC112AF is shooting for. But make no mistake, performance and tone come first, and Duke LeJeune is obviously a believer in the benefits of a crossover done right. One listen will confirm that the TC112AF makes no compromise when it comes to tone.

Sealable or pluggable ports are nothing new. Trace Elliot, for one, has been doing it for decades. But Duke has put his own twist on the concept – literally. Either or both of the ports can be plugged via use of the two supplied 3” diameter expandable “test plugs,” which may be found in most wellstocked plumbing departments. The rubber sleeve gets shoved into the port, up to a snug fit, and then the orange plastic “plug” gets screwed in, pushing against the sleeve and effectively sealing the port. This has an impact on both the tuning and frequency response (see Fig. B) and on the relative impedance (see Fig. C).As you can see, by plugging one, two, or neither of the ports, you can change not only the tonal response of the enclosure, but also the kind of load it presents to your amp. To illustrate one other unique feature of the TC112, Fig. Dshows how the high frequency response is impacted by the three settings available via the two switches on the back.

This is one well-made cab. It is supremely portable. It has a unique feature set that is well thought-out and which reflects a distinct effort to fill a particular niche (or two). The wiring used appropriate gauges, and all exposed wire had been given a nice solder treatment. There is very little to complain about, but if I were to pick a nit, it would be that the spray-on (rollon?)Finish is not 100% consistently applied. I do like the covering, in general. But the texture is not entirely consistent. All in all, it’s one of the most impressive cabs I have had the pleasure to review.