415 ACOST BASS M408

In the early 1980s, this 4×15 Acoustic 408 was among the cabinets prepared for Jaco Pastorius's concerts in Japan. One of those touring units travelled a long road before reaching the TacoSounds capture room. We've preserved it in the condition it carried off the stage, transcribed into this IR.

The Acoustic™ Model 408 is the 4×15 flagship bass cabinet from Acoustic Control Corporation — produced in the 1970s and one of the largest single-cabinet bass enclosures ever offered to the touring market. Its scale belongs to the era in which arenas were filling with bass amplification systems built around physical air movement rather than tightly engineered low-end response.

Four 15-inch drivers in a single oversized enclosure produce the kind of low-end fundamental and physical air-movement associated with classic 1970s arena bass tone — a format superseded over time by smaller multi-driver designs but never matched in its core character. The 408 carries the period mandate to make bass felt as much as heard.

This particular cabinet retains all four original 15" speakers from the era — the configuration the cabinet was voiced around when it left the Acoustic factory. Very few 408 examples with intact original drivers remain in working condition.

A historically significant capture: the IR preserves the period-correct tonal signature that defined Acoustic's flagship bass rigs, a tonal signature increasingly difficult to source from existing instances of the cabinet itself. Across sustained low fundamentals especially, the four 15s working in phase shake the floor underneath the listener — and in the IR, the cabinet shakes the air around them.