You can expect that the hi-fi-driver does not exhibit the typical midrange peak around 2~5khz followed by a sharp rolloff. This might be advantageous aiming at a clean sound of an acoustic guitar, but quite nasty with distorted electric guitar.
So my answer was NO, but all in all the personnal taste matters here.
Going against the grain here, I would say it depends. It depends on how well a hifi speaker it was. I have pulled speakers from console units that worked fine for guitar. Not the sound of guitar speakers now but a little smoother. But what passed for hifi back then , 50-60's,would be frowned upon now. Usually 10" speakers rather than 8's though. Some did have tweeters that were mainly ineffective.
One 'full range' speaker that can work are PA speakers used in schools and retail outlets. Bassically the same kind of speaker that was put in all 5W amps starting with the Fender Champ. There was no guitar speaker back then, just speakers. As for a real full range speaker, I wonder if it could work with a speaker simulator circuit going to a clean power amp?
One 'full range' speaker that can work are PA speakers used in schools and retail outlets. Bassically the same kind of speaker that was put in all 5W amps starting with the Fender Champ. There was no guitar speaker back then, just speakers. As for a real full range speaker, I wonder if it could work with a speaker simulator circuit going to a clean power amp?
Of course "it depends".
But a naked steel string on hard body is a rather stark sound. Violins and fine acoustic guitars snazz it up with body resonances. The old-time radio speakers had resonances which color the sound in musically useful ways. "Improved" Hi-Fi speakers may sound bland.
OTOH guitarists run so many effects these days that there is a class of "low color" amp speakers to follow "amp models" (often software) and sound-off with minimal added color, just what the electronic model puts in.
Try it.
One thing to beware: a "100 Watt" Hi-Fi speaker expects UN-clipped signal. It may melt with 20 Watts of signal for a minute. Guitar-market speakers are rated for the power of an amp working at MAX!! which will not cause damage.
But a naked steel string on hard body is a rather stark sound. Violins and fine acoustic guitars snazz it up with body resonances. The old-time radio speakers had resonances which color the sound in musically useful ways. "Improved" Hi-Fi speakers may sound bland.
OTOH guitarists run so many effects these days that there is a class of "low color" amp speakers to follow "amp models" (often software) and sound-off with minimal added color, just what the electronic model puts in.
Try it.
One thing to beware: a "100 Watt" Hi-Fi speaker expects UN-clipped signal. It may melt with 20 Watts of signal for a minute. Guitar-market speakers are rated for the power of an amp working at MAX!! which will not cause damage.
There are so many variables that it is really hard to say. As others have said, try it if you like it, good. If not....
Most guitar amps do not have a flat frequency response, almost all guitar speakers do not have a flat frequency response. These often work together to create the amp's "tone."
Many guitar speakers have their resonant peak within the guitar's frequency range. This is usually compensated by rolling off the low frequency response in a tube amp. Solid state amps are not as heavily affected by the impedance change at resonance, requiring less roll off.
If you are building your own amp, you can probably tweak it to give you the sound you want with almost any speaker. Sometimes this may take a while to get right.
Back in the late 1990's I bought up a trunk load of new car stereo speakers from a K-mart store that was closing. I used a lot of them to make guitar amps, both tube and solid state with varying degrees of success.
I made a dozen or so "Turbo Champ" single ended tube amps loosely based on the Fender Champ with bigger tubes and more voltage and up to 15 watts of power. No two were ever the same, and all were based on a random collection of junk box parts and car speakers with a few exceptions. Most went to the high school students that played in the marching band with my daughter.
We had a music room in the back of our house where they would meet, practice, and torture the neighbors with musical weapons like a full drum cage, a couple of keyboards and several guitars. I had two amps and two guitars in that room and sometimes joined in the "full metal racket." If one of my amps got sold or given to the band kids, I made another.
One of the amps just didn't sound right for 90's rock, it just didn't shred like the others no matter how many pedals you plugged into it, so it wound up doing keyboard duty. I'm sure it was related to the car speakers I had used and was planning to change them, but some jigsaw time would be needed.
One day a kid came over with a shiny new ES-335 that his parents had bought him. He plugged into that amp and magic happened.....everyone who was present agreed that that unloved amp really worked with the sound of the 335, so the kid took it home. He would wind up using it through high school and taking it off to college where I lost track of it.
So, you never know what works for you, your guitar, amp and playing style until you try it.
Most guitar amps do not have a flat frequency response, almost all guitar speakers do not have a flat frequency response. These often work together to create the amp's "tone."
Many guitar speakers have their resonant peak within the guitar's frequency range. This is usually compensated by rolling off the low frequency response in a tube amp. Solid state amps are not as heavily affected by the impedance change at resonance, requiring less roll off.
If you are building your own amp, you can probably tweak it to give you the sound you want with almost any speaker. Sometimes this may take a while to get right.
Back in the late 1990's I bought up a trunk load of new car stereo speakers from a K-mart store that was closing. I used a lot of them to make guitar amps, both tube and solid state with varying degrees of success.
I made a dozen or so "Turbo Champ" single ended tube amps loosely based on the Fender Champ with bigger tubes and more voltage and up to 15 watts of power. No two were ever the same, and all were based on a random collection of junk box parts and car speakers with a few exceptions. Most went to the high school students that played in the marching band with my daughter.
We had a music room in the back of our house where they would meet, practice, and torture the neighbors with musical weapons like a full drum cage, a couple of keyboards and several guitars. I had two amps and two guitars in that room and sometimes joined in the "full metal racket." If one of my amps got sold or given to the band kids, I made another.
One of the amps just didn't sound right for 90's rock, it just didn't shred like the others no matter how many pedals you plugged into it, so it wound up doing keyboard duty. I'm sure it was related to the car speakers I had used and was planning to change them, but some jigsaw time would be needed.
One day a kid came over with a shiny new ES-335 that his parents had bought him. He plugged into that amp and magic happened.....everyone who was present agreed that that unloved amp really worked with the sound of the 335, so the kid took it home. He would wind up using it through high school and taking it off to college where I lost track of it.
So, you never know what works for you, your guitar, amp and playing style until you try it.
No it wouldnt sound good. Guitar speakers/cabinets works like a filter because of their limited bandwidth and other nonhi-fi properties. For a Hifi speaker to be used, you therefor need a cabinetsimulator before the amplifier. Many pedalboards and some pedals has build-in simulators, so that they can be connected directly to a PA or home stereo via line-out. You just have to take Care that the filter is applied on the program you are using since you can damage your ears and speakers if your accidently switch to a program that has the cabinet filter/simulator disabled.
Closest driver I've found that can do both hi-fi and guitar :
810: Driver | Lowell Manufacturing
The accordian surround of this type driver allows it to hang in to some extent.
810: Driver | Lowell Manufacturing
The accordian surround of this type driver allows it to hang in to some extent.
Hello, and in the Fender website is a Jim Dandy of a short,sweet article on above called "True Tone." I'm 1st going to plug in my Ibanez acous/elec direct. Then, I'll likely whip out my big 8" Fostex full range and ease into something sweet, something mellow. Then, at some point I will attempt to convert my 45 DHT radio chassis into a git (tarzan) mini amp. Thank You all, agin.
The article civil6 referenced is here: https://www.fender.com/articles/tech-talk/true-tone-why-you-might-need-an-acoustic-amp
From that article" "The reason is because when playing acoustic, you want to amplify the tone of the guitar, which largely comes from the hand picked tonewoods used to build the instrument."
A few comments:
1) In 1862, Antonio Torres, the father of the modern guitar, built a guitar with papier-mache back and sides. He did this to demonstrate that the materials used in guitar construction were less important than the shape, dimensions, and bracing.
Legend says that paper guitar sounded as good as Torre's famously wonderful-sounding wooden guitars.
Here is a modern recreation by O'Brien guitars: a nylon-string classical guitar (the most beautiful sounding of all guitars), with sides and back made of cardboard. Listen to its sound for yourself:YouTube
I have no doubt that "tone woods" do play a role, if nothing else, in durability and beauty (and also because the speed of sound in the wood affects guitar tone, which is why you can tell a piece of maple from a piece of pine immediately if you drop both and listen to the sound. But, as the O'Brien guitar demonstrates, it is the skill of the luthier that matters most, and not the "tone woods" used.
2) Take two very different-sounding acoustic guitars. Plug both of them into the same amp. You almost always find there is now much less difference between their sounds.
This is because, once plugged in, the sounds you hear are heavily coloured by the characteristic sound of the piezo transducer in the guitar. In extreme cases, you are listening mostly to the piezo, and barely at all to the acoustic sound of the unplugged instrument.
3) Some years ago I was hunting for a decent steel-string acoustic guitar. I tried a *lot* of guitars in a lot of music stores. The several Fender acoustic guitars I tried varied from bad to mediocre; I could always find better guitars made by other brands for the same price in the same store.
There is no disputing that Fender has made some of the most successful and best-known electric guitars on planet earth. But sadly, their acoustic offerings have a well earned reputation for being mediocre or worse.
4) At around the same time, I was also hunting for an acoustic guitar amplifier. Once again, the Fender brand let me down; the Fender acoustic guitar amps I tried at the time were among the most unpleasant sounding ones in the store.
5) My experience is that a true Hi-Fi speaker is excellent for reproducing an acoustic guitar with an actual high-quality condenser microphone placed in front of it, picking up the actual acoustic sound of the guitar. But a plugged-in piezo transducer in an electro-acoustic guitar is a different kettle of fish: IMO it sounds rather harsh and nasty until you roll off high treble above 5 kHz or so.
5 kHz is indeed high enough to need a tweeter. But IMO, you do not want true Hi-Fi treble response flat to 15kHz or more.
-Gnobuddy
This is the only context I'd bother wasting a proper hi-fi speaker (never mind a 45) on guitar duties. Otherwise you're turning a silk purse into a sow's ear
For every other option, re-read what Tubelab_com and Gnobuddy (and PRR and JMFahey) wrote.
Last edited:
I was surprised at how good a couple of my Karlson cabinets sounded with electric guitar - a Karlson K12 with Cannabis Rex (with little solid state amp) and the Acoustic Control 115BK with EVM15L and my Alphabass head. Cannabis Rex was listenable as a "full range" speaker on vocals - - its a nice speaker for guitar imo.
Since the hype around ovation guitars I am sceptic concerning piezo pickups. Simply the physics do not promise natural tone re-production. This would require picking up sound in a way similar to a listening human in a certain distance. Sound in that position is the sum of acoustical output of the entire guitar body. Nothing beats a microphone here.
Controversely the piezo picks up sound at a single point of the guitar, normally the bridge. At that position the strings exhibit a vibration node. As a consequence the attack of strumming dominates the tone. This kind of additional percussion is what I perceive as nasty piezo sound, imho often heard with Eric Claton playing unplugged.
Controversely the piezo picks up sound at a single point of the guitar, normally the bridge. At that position the strings exhibit a vibration node. As a consequence the attack of strumming dominates the tone. This kind of additional percussion is what I perceive as nasty piezo sound, imho often heard with Eric Claton playing unplugged.
yes but allready 20 year ago when I worked selling guitars, Piezo pickups were considered cheap and low end. You are correct about the bridgeposition and its emphasis on the strum. I dont know what type of pickups are most used in good semielectrics today. The amount and quality of EQ in the guitar or after has a lot to say. With the right eq a piezo mic can sound OK. In the shop we got some mics for test that we maybe would import. They looked like the sensors they put on you when mesuring ones heart at the hospital. It had some reusable glue on them and you put them on the guitarbody or a drum. Those gave a really nice wood-like sound.
- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.