Barefaced Big Baby 2

Quantifiably the best small bass cab ever?

A greatest hits compilation of our previous small cabs - the punch of the Midget, the efficiency and loudness of the Compact, the bottom, dispersion and clarity of the Big Baby T. It's hard not to love a cab that is potent enough to punch and thunder through a loud rock gig yet small and light enough to never leave behind, however difficult the journey or short the set. Clarity without harshness, depth without boom, fatness without mud. Incredibly even dispersion so it sounds the same wherever you're standing and however bad the room acoustics.

What else do you need to know?

• It's the first 1x12" to compete with great 2x12" and 4x10" cabs for tone, bottom and loudness
• It has a fantastic mid/high waveguide compression driver for incredible dispersion and clarity
• At the twist of a knob the complex crossover takes you from old school bass cab smoothness to uncompromising studio monitor accuracy
• It's so sensitive you can gig with a 150W amp but it'll handle 800W amps without complaint for maximum output and headroom

Who is this for?

Any bassist that REALLY wants to hear their true tone - all the character of their bass and amp and exactly what they're doing with their hands. Bassists who enjoys the clarity and punch of a great tweetered 2x10" but are frustrated at how loud they can play or how much bass they can put out. Anyone using a good 2x12" or 4x10" but wanting deeper cleaner lows and more accurate mids and treble without any loss of loudness. Players who have enjoyed the benefits of a good biamped rig with an 18" on the bottom and want similar depth in the lows with a more coherent tone throughout.

Which other Barefaced cabs should you consider?

If you play particularly loud or your amp isn't very powerful you may prefer the Big Twin 2 (or two Big Baby 2s). If size really matters then the Super Midget has much of the performance in a smaller package.

Why upgrade from earlier Barefaced models?

If you like your original Big Baby (T) but would like a cab with an even more coherent, cleaner, punchier, louder sound - at lower weight and size too. If you have a Compact (15") and would like deeper lows, punchier mids, much more treble clarity and better dispersion. If you enjoy the breadth of tone from a Midget T+Compact (12"+15") and would like that but even cleaner from a single cab. If you like the output and bottom of your Super Twelve T (2x12") but would like cleaner smoother mids and highs and a smaller cab.

That was all you needed to know - only continue reading if you really want more!

Our new 12XN550 driver - a true giant slayer

If you want to compare like for like performance, compare one of our 12"s with TWO of anyone else's 12"s. The radical new design of the 12XN550 combines the very high sensitivity of a pro-audio mid-bass driver, the very high excursion of a pro-audio subwoofer and a response curve which has been optimised to sound great on and off-axis with bass guitar. Massive output AND awesome tone. If you want to learn more, click here.

Generation Three Hardware

Barefaced cabs are built tough for gigging and the generation three finish and hardware is the result of much thought, experimentation and feedback based on the tens of thousands of gigs our customers have played. Durability is paramount! We have also made our electronics easily field-replaceable, for minimum stress on worldwide tours. If you gig a lot and want to keep your cab looking pristine we recommend purchasing one of our padded fabric covers. To learn more, click here.

Generation Three Enclosures

Barefaced enclosure designs are the result of our radical decision to use thin-walled heavily-braced plywood construction on our very first designs in 2008, and then 5 years of constant evolution and change to develop and refine this concept for even better tone, performance and durability. We've looked at a lot of other lightweight bass cabs and often been unimpressed by their inadequate stiffness and thus 'lightweight tone' despite marketing hyperbole claiming the contrary... To learn more, click here.

How can going from 3-way to 2-way represent progress?

The ideal loudspeaker is a single full-range point source with perfect frequency response, dispersion and transient response. To achieve ideal performance is currently (and likely to be always) impossible with a single driver. However, the fewer components we use to get close to ideal performance, the better. To learn more click here.

Low frequency sensitivity, response and power handling

Our cabs have the volume displacement (cone area x cone excursion) to produce huge lows for their size - each of our 12" woofers can do what it takes three typical 12" bass guitar woofers to achieve - and the porting, sensitivity and thermal power handling to use that displacement. If there's one thing Barefaced cabs are really really great at it's producing big fat deep loud lows, that is our raison d'être. To learn more click here.

Sensitivity - marketing, over-simplified engineering and REAL engineering

99% of the sensitivity specs you read are marketing department fabrications. There are no bass cabs currently on sale (August 2013) which have higher sensitivity than ours when comparing equal sized enclosures, fact. To learn more click here.

Transient response - hearing your sound NOW

Transient response is the ability of a speaker to start and stop exactly when the sound going into should start and stop. A bass cab with excellent transient response sounds far more alive and responsive than one with poor transient response and makes it easier to both groove hard and be heard on the gig. It is particularly important that a musical instrument speaker has good transient response because it is how the player hears themselves and thus has a huge effect on how they play. To learn more click here.

High linear flow ports with thermal benefits

Ports deal with all the deep lows and give the woofer(s) an easier ride - tune them right and use a good geometry and there are no downsides. Tune them too high or too low and the tone won't be as good and the cab won't handle as much power. Make them too big and the cab will be huge (this hardly ever happens); make them too small and they'll stop working right as you play louder, killing your bottom end (this is a really common problem). We design, test, adjust, test, etc and make sure they're as good as can be. To learn more click here.