Speaker‑cab innovators Barefaced add a dedicated power amp option to their full‑range speaker designs.

Regular readers may recall my enthusiasm for the innovative Barefaced Reformer 1x12 guitar speaker cabinet back in 2018. Barefaced’s AVD (Augmented Vent Diffractor) design acts as both a tuned port for greater low‑frequency extension and a diffuser for an amount of rear‑firing sound. The result is an unfeasibly small and lightweight speaker cab that just sounds so much bigger than you’d imagine it possibly could. Barefaced have a lot of other cab designs, too, and started out making bass cabinets that were significantly lighter in weight than other bass cabs without this adversely affecting their performance, but it was apparent from the outset that their AVD cabs might also make a good platform for a full‑range system.

Barefaced soon launched their Reality series, marrying Celestion’s two‑way, coaxial F12‑X200 ‘Full Range Live Response’ 12‑inch driver with an enhanced version of their AVD design, designated AVD8. The enhancement was mainly in the addition of an Eminence APT80 rear‑facing high‑frequency driver that coherently combines with the AVD’s rearward output to create a figure‑8 polar response for the cabinet as a whole, the audible effect of which is a far more consistent tone across a wide range of listening positions. My long‑term experience with the F12‑X200 is that its low‑end performance seems to be quite dependent on its enclosure, but the AVD design certainly seems to bring out the best in it.

Powering Up

Whereas almost all full‑range PA‑style cabs likely to be used with digital amp modellers these days are self‑powered, using a modeller with a passive Reality cab still leaves you needing to find a suitable power amp. The Barefaced team had apparently been working on a design for a high‑end bass amplifier since 2017, but seeing a gap in the guitar market, they directed their efforts towards the project that became the Activier range: Activier 1 with a single input, gain control, and external Speakon for an extension speaker; and Activier 2, with two identical channels. The amplifiers can be fully integrated into even the smallest AVD cabs, with each Activier channel able to deliver 200 Watts RMS into a 4Ω load, 100W into 8Ω or 50W into 16Ω, whilst adding less...