>Do you know of anyone to create a rather large isolation cabinet for a single, or pair of small combo amps? I suppose it's like creating a amp closet - on small scale for just a few amps.
My recommendation is that you email Demeter. I seem to recall that Demeter offers custom enclosures. Contact Demeter, and try asking in the guitar amp newsgroup.
A speaker isolation cabinet is simply the extreme equivalent to the isolation booth in a recording studio, in which an entire amp or at least the guitar speaker cabinet is placed, along with mic's. The guitarist can sit in the control room, with the amp head right there. The speaker cable goes from the back of the amp head, out to the main room, and into the speaker cabinet in the isolation booth. Multiple mic's are used to return several signals back to the control room. These signals are combined, eq'd via the mixing board. Delay-derived effects are added via the effects loop of the mixing board -- thus, echo is placed *after* the mic'd speaker and after the power tubes -- talk about "effects placement in any sequence"! You can't do this placement in a multifx unit. The speaker isolation cabinet contains the speaker and mic(s), and instead of running the signal to a control room and mixing board, the individual guitarist can simply run the signal into a second, post-amp, inexpensive multi-effects unit, producing studio-quality tone through repackaging the total setup of the studio, with no emulation involved.
Page 14 Guitar Shop Spring 1994, which I have: I had two walls built in the back of the studio to house two miked cabs, there's also a trap door so I can get to them if I need to. There is padding all around the cabs, but they still bleed a lot. Close-miked, mike to the side of the cone. Brad Gillis' rig design of his home studio for Night Ranger, where they cut demos. In his garage. My friend lived across the street from this house in Sacramento, California, and liked Brad but did complain about sound leakage. [I remember being frustrated while listening to the tone in Van Halen I at this friend's house; I was still trying to get that sound with no guitar speakers or power tube; I got close through eq-tubeDist-eq-rev, but barely in the ballpark.] His heads were: beefed-up Marshall, Mesa-Boogie Mk IIB. Why use such powerful amps?
A speaker isolation cabinet is a compact repackaging of the 2-room setup of a recording studio. Some studios have an isolated control room, the main music playing room, and a separate isolation space for speaker cabinet or full amp -- either a box or closet or room.
"Isolation is also a key factor. The recording room should be separate from the control room where the console and tape machine are. Aside from eliminating feedback problems or forcing you to record with headphones on, this allows you to accurately hear the sounds the way they'll actually sound on tape." -- Dan Daley, page 63, Guitar Shop Spring 1994. That's why I really have no interest in hearing the guitar speaker directly, and am *not* satisfied with a conventional 15 watt or 5 watt tube combo amp played right in front of me at home -- I don't *want* to hear the guitar speaker directly; what counts is just the final sound that makes it to my mixer/headphones, and I can't hear that if a guitar speaker is blasting in the same room I'm trying to monitor in. I'm really happy now with my house and setup -- I have my double-layer iso cab in the basement, with a completely separate control room also in the basement. So an amp as loud as 15 watts is perfectly silent as far as the neighbors are concerned, and I barely hear anything in the control room, just a little low-end thumping when I do chunking metal chords.
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