Phil Jones PB-300

The Science of Bass Amplification The Piranha concept

Traditional bass myth glorified large drivers. On the surface, this seems sensible. Large drivers equal big sound and low bass. But look more closely. Like a heavyweight fighter, the big driver is inherently ponderous. It isn’t quick on its feet. It’s slow to start, even slower to stop. Its large cone is prone to flexing and distortion. It’s a kind of Neanderthal, brute and primitive - a slightly dazed clobber.
Piranha cabinets bring the true science of bass into the 21st century. They use large numbers of small drivers.
How can small drivers reproduce bass? Small drivers can reproduce bass. Their output simply drops off more rapidly with distance. But parallel enough of them like a swarm of bloodthirsty Piranhas. Now their combined surface area equals or exceeds that of a single big woofer.
More importantly, an armada of motors powers this aggregate compound driver. The combined voice coils and magnets of all individual drive units exert far superior control than the single motor of the equivalent giant woofer. Each one is optimized for superior heat dissipation and massive motor force to control a small 5-inch cone with unrelenting grip. By sharing the workload, each driver operates only in the optimized part of its power band where torque is greatest. It never approaches redline where dynamic compression limits all conventional designs like the proverbial brick wall.

The result? Blinding reflexes. Stop and go with Swiss precision. True pistonic action of the cone that translates the subtlest of input changes into real-time signal. No delay, no rhythmic drag, no wooliness.
Long-term reliability is far superior to large drivers. You can’t push our small drivers over the edge. There’s simply too many of them.

Small drivers are also far superior reproducers of high and mid frequencies than large pounders. The harmonic signature of your instrument gains expressiveness. The PJB Piranha woofer is linear from 25Hz to 15kHz. It performs as a true full-range driver. It reproduces all the fundamentals and harmonics a bass is capable of. The mix’n’match approach of combining smaller and larger drivers is deeply flawed. It’s like playing flat-wound and round-wound strings on the same instrument. Different attack, sustain and decay. Dissimilar feel. Mismatched tone. Shouldn’t your bass speak with a single voice?

The small Piranha custom woofer expands the harmonic envelope of your bass. Look at a high altitude night sky far away from the big city’s light pollution. You’ll see stars you never knew existed. With Piranha woofers, you hear overtones you couldn’t before. You become a tone poet with a new language. You create expressions for feelings that remained dormant for lack of proper words. You share what’s in your soul without a crude translator. You express yourself precisely, with flair and finesse.

And then the mood changes. Finesse gives way to fury and bloodcurdling impact. With higher sensitivities, Piranha cabs play louder than the competition. Think of it as quadrupling your amp’s power or adding spare headroom when you need it.

Piranha’s 5-inch custom speakers achieve this boosted sensitivity by using the highest-grade strontium ferrite magnets. These engines power carefully compounded Kevlar and organic fibers that make for diaphragms more rigid than metal yet are significantly lighter. The magnetic field strength of the Piranha 5-incher exceeds that of conventional 10-inch woofers by more than two.Now do the math. Reduced moving mass. Monstrous motors. Add it up.

You arrive at blinding speed and hot-rodded efficiency. A single Piranha woofer generates 93dB of output at 1w/1m. Due to mutual acoustic coupling, this skyrockets to 105dB on our 24B cab.

The scariest part of this equation? Each single woofer can handle 100 watts continuous of pink noise with < 0.5dB of compression for four non-stop hours. More than a marathon gig! Paralleled in our cabinets, this equates power handling in our larger systems an excess of 2000 watts and absolutely deafening SPL levels of over 137dB.

You’ve undoubtedly noticed how going from a 100w to 1000w amp sometimes only plays twice as loud. As power increases so does the heat. Voice coil resistance skyrockets, magnets lose strength. Dynamic compression rears its distorted visage. Amplifier power burns up as waste heat instead of turning into fat tone.

The problem is inferior engineering. Heat’s the enemy. Our over-engineered copper clad aluminum voice coils are wound on ventilated Kapton formers for superior heat dissipation. Vented magnet systems and create forced airflow on large excursions for additional cooling. It operates the drivers at perfectly safe temperatures. Regardless of volume, dynamic compression is banished. The cab responds in a linear fashion to your amplifier. Pop a string with double the force. The cab responds with twice the output - across all frequencies, not by selectively attenuating the more challenging low notes or by skewing the harmonic distortion spectrum.
All Piranha speakers can reproduce the deepest bass tones. The largest cabinet, the 24B can reproduce 25Hz (lower than the “A” below the B-string). Which cabinet to use is simply a function of venue size and how loud you want to play. A larger venue size means increased cubic air volume. This necessitates greater compound driver displacement, hence more drivers.

The combination of boosted sensitivities and eliminated dynamic compression now liberates your expressiveness. The possible permutations multiply. From the quietest whisper to the most ferocious, bone-crunching pop or contoured sustain. You’re a painter with more colors on his palette. Instead of rough sketches, you fill in the spaces.

Nuance. Expressiveness. Hues. Subtle shadings. Play between the lines. Accelerate from a barely perceptible rumble to deafening blasts like a Ferrari. Carve tone with the precision of a surgeon. Slap strings with the impact of perfectly timed cluster bombs.

How about the additional gremlins of soggy attacks and blurred speed runs - poorly controlled driver interaction with the cabinet? PJB only employs high-grade ply with excessive internal bracing to annihilate enclosure talk. You hear your bass, not the box! It also means silly strength to survive the rigors of the road and serve you faithfully without giving a second thought.

THE GREATER THE TOTAL VOICE COIL AREA THE GREATER THE POWER HANDLING WHICH IS WHY PJB PIRANHA SPEAKERS ARE MORE POWERFUL.