Carbon Fiber has proved to have some amazing benefits over wood and other materials in many fields such as aeronautics, sports and also music. Today we have carbon fiber guitars, violins, cellos and even some amazing bows (such as Arcus) that prove that this material is capable of producing some amazing results in music.
The main advantages of carbon fiber are that its extreme strength, flexiblility and lightweight.
Normal tools just won't do the job so really special ones are needed to create the special weave pattern that forms the ultra strong fiber pannels.
Gianfranco Rizzi, CEO at GR Bass had this idea to use carbon fiber for a revolutionary new series of cabinets and combos that would match his ultralight and powerful heads. Not surprisingly, GR Bass has grown a lot since they started out a few years ago and are now one of the biggest names in bass amplification in the world. Please welcome the amazing Aerotech Series.
As bassplayers we have always dreamt of a cabinet that would be featherlight and could cover just any stage with the best sound, correct? 30-40 years ago you had to carry an heavy all tube stack if you wanted to make yourself heard in a big stage. Great sound, no doubt about it, but a real pain in the ass to move around. We are talking more than 100kg for a 300W tube stack and an 8x10" cab. Now you can have even better results in a rig that weighs 5 times less. Amazing.
Gianfranco Rizzi viisted us early in 2020 and he brought two prototypes of carbon fiber cabs to the shop. These were a 2x10" and a 2x12". We were blown away by the incredible low weight at first but then we tested them and that was it. He explained that it took him a full year almost non stop to come up with the correct weave pattern, amount of epoxy, internal bracing and damping until everything sounded the way he wanted. Also he had to solve an added problem: ultralightweight cabinets would move and literally "walk" from vibration when a loud head was used. Thiswas sorted out by changing the balance between the parts.
We are glad to report that the final product is simply perfect in terms of sound, pressure and ease of transportation. This is a little revolution in bass cabinet design .
This is the AT Cube 112 cabinet and it will handle up to 450W RMS with ease... Wow!
A typical 4x10" cabinet would weight around 20kg until recently. Then ligher poplar wood and the use of neodymium speakers used in recent years reduced the weight down to 12-14. Not bad. This new AT Cube 112 weighs in at just 7,5kg!!!! Yes, that's 7,5 kg, not a typo. The feeling you get when you lift it up using the side handles is that the cabinet is actually empty. But if weight is incredible, just wait until you grab a good bass and a nice powerful head: the sound is even better. This is in our opinion the best 1x12" cabinet that you can get in the world and we are talking about the sound. Of course the inredible low weight is the icing on the cake. Gianfranco created the Aerotech series with weight in mind but along the building process he found that this new approach produced a better sound. That's klling two birds in one shot.
The low end is deep and solid. It never becomes muddy. Midrange is excellent and all the notes seem to find a new degree of definition that we hade never heard before. The high end is really smooth a musical, far from the annoying and harsh sound we get on some other brands. Excellent stuff.
Yes, it is the lightest professional 1x12 bass cabinet in the market but it is also one of the best sounding cabs (you could say the best) and we can't stress that enough.
Excellent job, Gianfranco.