In a nutshell, I still can't figure out why certain old speakers sound better than new ones. I mean, it's not rocket science. A speaker is most generally made out of a metal frame with a paper cone and a magnet and some wire and that's about it. The technology doesn't seem to have changed significantly since 1933. But here's what I mean:
I have a modern solid state 100w mono power amp module bunged into an old guitar amp cabinet that I am using to boost the volume of my small 10w guitar amps. Line level input, no tone control or anything, just a simple line in and big volume out.
I have tried it powering a few different modern 12" speakers, none of which sounded any good. They were all lifeless and mid-rangey. They did have big magnets though and claimed to be able to handle many watts of power. Almost on a whim I bunged in an old Rola speaker from a Hammond organ, probably about 20 watts or so, and the sound was FAR better than any of the newfangled modern speakers I've tried.
I've since bought a couple of old Heppner 12's that likewise sound awesome compared to the modern speakers. So given that there's not much that makes up a speaker why does some 40 year old organ tat sound so much better than newer, more expensive speakers?
I've spent hours researching speakers and how they're made and as of yet I have still not had a satisfactory explanation as to why a cheap old organ speaker sounds so good compared to a modern one when hooked up to the same amp, and why would any speaker sound much different than any other one of the same size when they're made out of virtually the same few components?
The only difference between the ones I've tried is that the old speakers are low wattage and the new ones claim to be monster wattage, so does that really make all the difference?
I have a modern solid state 100w mono power amp module bunged into an old guitar amp cabinet that I am using to boost the volume of my small 10w guitar amps. Line level input, no tone control or anything, just a simple line in and big volume out.
I have tried it powering a few different modern 12" speakers, none of which sounded any good. They were all lifeless and mid-rangey. They did have big magnets though and claimed to be able to handle many watts of power. Almost on a whim I bunged in an old Rola speaker from a Hammond organ, probably about 20 watts or so, and the sound was FAR better than any of the newfangled modern speakers I've tried.
I've since bought a couple of old Heppner 12's that likewise sound awesome compared to the modern speakers. So given that there's not much that makes up a speaker why does some 40 year old organ tat sound so much better than newer, more expensive speakers?
I've spent hours researching speakers and how they're made and as of yet I have still not had a satisfactory explanation as to why a cheap old organ speaker sounds so good compared to a modern one when hooked up to the same amp, and why would any speaker sound much different than any other one of the same size when they're made out of virtually the same few components?
The only difference between the ones I've tried is that the old speakers are low wattage and the new ones claim to be monster wattage, so does that really make all the difference?
Speakers need to be broken in. The usual procedure is to feed them a very low frequency like 5Hz for a couple of hours. It doesn't take much power, just enough to get the cone moving back and forth 6mm or so in each direction. Not enough to rip the speaker apart, just enough to loosen it up. Even better, use a sweep generator, say from 3Hz to 20Hz nice and slow.
It doesn't explain it but i have this theory that old stuff from before the days of mass production was built by craftsman with care pride and a general enthusiasm for the things they built and this " love " is reflected in the quality and lengthy working life of components from bygone times.
I've had loads of amps etc dating back as far as the 70 's that performed as well as the day they were sold yet how many amps built in the last 15 -20 years will still be working in another ten ? we now live in a throwaway society its built cheap designed to work for a few years then " upgraded " when it invariably fails.
Your post reminds me of one of my first speaker " systems " which was an ancient crt made of solid wood and had a speaker that was so warm deep and involving when the tv broke i gutted the innards sealed the box and used it as a Hi Fi speaker unit for several years .🙂
I've had loads of amps etc dating back as far as the 70 's that performed as well as the day they were sold yet how many amps built in the last 15 -20 years will still be working in another ten ? we now live in a throwaway society its built cheap designed to work for a few years then " upgraded " when it invariably fails.
Your post reminds me of one of my first speaker " systems " which was an ancient crt made of solid wood and had a speaker that was so warm deep and involving when the tv broke i gutted the innards sealed the box and used it as a Hi Fi speaker unit for several years .🙂
Hi,
FWIW in your genre the simple fact is old speakers sound
better but simply cannot kick butt like modern speakers.
AlNiCo magnets have a sound ceramic can't get near.
Why haven't they got better ? Because the flaws of
older speakers can be used to advantage with guitar.
PA speakers have got much better, but guitar likes
poor drivers, with a slowly progressive overload.
The old organ drivers won't sound as good as
modern versions for the same application.
Having said all that, there is no substitute for a
valve guitar amplifier driving old school speakers.
The speakers are only half the story.
rgds, sreten.
FWIW in your genre the simple fact is old speakers sound
better but simply cannot kick butt like modern speakers.
AlNiCo magnets have a sound ceramic can't get near.
Why haven't they got better ? Because the flaws of
older speakers can be used to advantage with guitar.
PA speakers have got much better, but guitar likes
poor drivers, with a slowly progressive overload.
The old organ drivers won't sound as good as
modern versions for the same application.
Having said all that, there is no substitute for a
valve guitar amplifier driving old school speakers.
The speakers are only half the story.
rgds, sreten.
And on the flipside of 10 watts post, I scrapped a Baldwin organ with two Heppners and I thought they sounded like crap for guitar. I actually gave them away. Sound is very subjective, so one person's crappy sound is another's golden. It also depends on how they are used, clean or distorted, open vs closed back, etc. So just because you think those cheap old organ speakers sound good doesn't mean another person will. Nobody gets to be the judge of what sounds good, they only get to judge what THEY think sounds good.
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Rolas from Hammonds are broad range, designed for 50hz-6000 hz. They were pretty flat. I have a fleet of them. If you like flat in a perforated back box, they are just the thing.
If you want kicker bass, buzz thud buzz thud, modern car woofers are just the thing.
If you want a crunch guitar sound, you don't want flat. You want a "fender" sound or a "marshall" sound, or an "ampeg" sound, or maybe something else. Although what really sells these days is the "behringer" sound, don't ask me why?
What were those modern speakers that you didn't like? specifics matter.
There are modern flat speakers. I've got a pair of Black Widow 15's paired to 2" titanium diaphragm horns with a smooth crossover, that are about as flat and low distortion as anything I have heard. (SP2-XT) Until I found those, I couldn't afford flat. Except for old Rolas, $100 an organ and each comes with two or three.
I haven't bought a Baldwin organ yet; something about the oscillator circuits not being repairable after the tuning slug discintegrates. There is one out in a country church I play at. The model 46 out there sounds like any old organ, but it has 3 sounds instead of the 20 or 50 of my H100. Boring especially with Fdoublesharps. I'm not impressed, but it is not the speaker's fault I'm sure. 1959 Baldwin tone generator technology when hammond held all the cards.
If you want kicker bass, buzz thud buzz thud, modern car woofers are just the thing.
If you want a crunch guitar sound, you don't want flat. You want a "fender" sound or a "marshall" sound, or an "ampeg" sound, or maybe something else. Although what really sells these days is the "behringer" sound, don't ask me why?
What were those modern speakers that you didn't like? specifics matter.
There are modern flat speakers. I've got a pair of Black Widow 15's paired to 2" titanium diaphragm horns with a smooth crossover, that are about as flat and low distortion as anything I have heard. (SP2-XT) Until I found those, I couldn't afford flat. Except for old Rolas, $100 an organ and each comes with two or three.
I haven't bought a Baldwin organ yet; something about the oscillator circuits not being repairable after the tuning slug discintegrates. There is one out in a country church I play at. The model 46 out there sounds like any old organ, but it has 3 sounds instead of the 20 or 50 of my H100. Boring especially with Fdoublesharps. I'm not impressed, but it is not the speaker's fault I'm sure. 1959 Baldwin tone generator technology when hammond held all the cards.
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To say speakers all should sound alike because they are made of the same stuff is like saying all cars ought to be the same because they are all made of steel, have rubber tires, and pistons inside the motor.
Guitar speakers have purposely limited response range, guitar amps are not hifi, and were never intended to be. (Mr Hull's early Ampegs might argue that with me, but that is a different story)
We can't, but let us assume anyway that the frames are all alike. Magnets come in various strengths, and the geometry of the magnetic field inside the gap varies by design. The voice coil sits in the gap in the magnet. The coil may be wound long so that some of it is always in the field, and others are wound over a shorter area. The cones themselves might be paper or plastic or even fabric. The surface might be smooth, rough, ribbed. The material might be thick and stiff or thin and flexible. The suspension around the edge of the cone and at the bottom by the voice coil can be stiff or loose. It can allow large excursions of the cone or limit it to a fairly short throw. The gap can be tight and close to the voice coil, or it can be large and roomy. All those things affect the way a speaker sounds
Guitar speakers have purposely limited response range, guitar amps are not hifi, and were never intended to be. (Mr Hull's early Ampegs might argue that with me, but that is a different story)
We can't, but let us assume anyway that the frames are all alike. Magnets come in various strengths, and the geometry of the magnetic field inside the gap varies by design. The voice coil sits in the gap in the magnet. The coil may be wound long so that some of it is always in the field, and others are wound over a shorter area. The cones themselves might be paper or plastic or even fabric. The surface might be smooth, rough, ribbed. The material might be thick and stiff or thin and flexible. The suspension around the edge of the cone and at the bottom by the voice coil can be stiff or loose. It can allow large excursions of the cone or limit it to a fairly short throw. The gap can be tight and close to the voice coil, or it can be large and roomy. All those things affect the way a speaker sounds
Now we're getting somewhere (I think). Here's some more info.
The modern speakers I was trying are general budget 12" speakers. One was the original speaker used in the Stagg BA60 cabinet. Technically it was supposed to be a 60w bass amp and they are touted as having surprisingly good sound for a budget amp among bass amp nerds but I suspect that's mostly down to the tone circuits of the amp and not the speaker. The amp died and I put a cheap Chinese 100w mono amp circuit board in it to make a powered speaker and it works very well. No background noise and very loud without distortion.
The bass amp speaker was of normal design without the spongey foam bits you often find in modern "bass" speakers that allow it to throw the cone further. This one was just a stiff cone all the way to the edge like any other "normal" speaker. I could never find out what make of speaker it was but research showed me that it looked to be made very similar to (but not EXACTLY like) a Celestion. The cabinet is basically a ported design with just an open slot at the bottom at the rear of the cabinet.
The "bass amp" speaker was virtually indistinguishable from the no-name ones that came in some generic budget PA speaker cabs I've got which claimed to be 300w and the magnets are virtually identical. The PA cabinets are ported and also had crude crossovers and useless horn tweeters that made no difference whatsoever so they remain unconnected now.
I also have an ElectroVoice 12" that although very good and apparently capable of 200w still doesn't sound as good IN THESE CABINETS as the organ speakers.
The organ speakers have much smaller magnets. I've tried all these speakers in various combinations of cabinets and the old organ speakers just sound better.
Now, I understand about guitarists wanting that ballsy crunch brought about by certain combinations of amp, speaker and cab but for my use I don't generally want any distortion because I tend to run everything together in mono (voice, guitar, bass etc.) so you'd think a flat range speaker would work best for my purposes. However, the 300w PA speakers and the nearly identical 60w Stagg bass speaker all sound terribly flat and lifeless compared to the 20w organ speakers.
Of course I realize the biggest problem is that the organ speakers can't handle the higher wattage output of the amps I've got them connected to so I'm just being careful not to overdo the volume. I figure pretty much any venue these days will either have a house PA or I can rent/borrow/steal one for tempary use so no need to push full power out of my own amps.
I'm just curious to know how and why some speakers seem to sound so different when they're all made virtually the same apart from a few variables, but I suppose given the wee small variable in things like voice coil windings and air gaps and all that stuff, which at first seems too small to matter THAT much, perhaps it all does add up to make the big difference.
About a year ago I came across a 4ohm 8" Elac speaker from the 1930's and bunged it into an old wooden radio cabinet I'd converted into a small, general use powered speaker and it far outperformed any of the dozen or so modern 8" speakers I had lying around (until the plastic/bakelite/whalebone diaghram over the voice coil expired from age related rot).
But why in these modern times of advanced manufacturing techniques, where tolerances and specifications can be implimented far easier and cheaper than in the past, does nobody seem to be making affordable general purpose speakers LIKE these old speakers? Surely it can't be that difficult to manufacture affordable copies of vintage speakers out of modern gee-whiz materials can it? I mean, there's not that much TO a speaker. Or is it simply that in today's market any speaker that doesn't advertise itself as being 1500 watts of FULL ON, IN-YOUR-FACE AUDIO DESTRUCTION is just not enough speaker?
And now just to confuse matters I also have two old, virtually indestructible OHM speakers probably from the 1970's, one 10" and one 12", that are 16ohms each and both of them have huge magnets and still sound better and louder than any of the other speakers I've got, and they sound great no matter what wattage amp they're hooked up to. Why doesn't anybody make speakers like THAT anymore? How much can it cost just to make a good general purpose speaker?
Of course the question of why most speakers are still made in virtually the same manner as they were in the 1930's is another issue. But then again most cars are basically made the same way as well, so it's probably all mostly down to markets and money. I suspect that if something's cheap to make and overpriced to purchase then it's got a long life in the consumer world and there's little reason for the manufacturers to change the formula.
The modern speakers I was trying are general budget 12" speakers. One was the original speaker used in the Stagg BA60 cabinet. Technically it was supposed to be a 60w bass amp and they are touted as having surprisingly good sound for a budget amp among bass amp nerds but I suspect that's mostly down to the tone circuits of the amp and not the speaker. The amp died and I put a cheap Chinese 100w mono amp circuit board in it to make a powered speaker and it works very well. No background noise and very loud without distortion.
The bass amp speaker was of normal design without the spongey foam bits you often find in modern "bass" speakers that allow it to throw the cone further. This one was just a stiff cone all the way to the edge like any other "normal" speaker. I could never find out what make of speaker it was but research showed me that it looked to be made very similar to (but not EXACTLY like) a Celestion. The cabinet is basically a ported design with just an open slot at the bottom at the rear of the cabinet.
The "bass amp" speaker was virtually indistinguishable from the no-name ones that came in some generic budget PA speaker cabs I've got which claimed to be 300w and the magnets are virtually identical. The PA cabinets are ported and also had crude crossovers and useless horn tweeters that made no difference whatsoever so they remain unconnected now.
I also have an ElectroVoice 12" that although very good and apparently capable of 200w still doesn't sound as good IN THESE CABINETS as the organ speakers.
The organ speakers have much smaller magnets. I've tried all these speakers in various combinations of cabinets and the old organ speakers just sound better.
Now, I understand about guitarists wanting that ballsy crunch brought about by certain combinations of amp, speaker and cab but for my use I don't generally want any distortion because I tend to run everything together in mono (voice, guitar, bass etc.) so you'd think a flat range speaker would work best for my purposes. However, the 300w PA speakers and the nearly identical 60w Stagg bass speaker all sound terribly flat and lifeless compared to the 20w organ speakers.
Of course I realize the biggest problem is that the organ speakers can't handle the higher wattage output of the amps I've got them connected to so I'm just being careful not to overdo the volume. I figure pretty much any venue these days will either have a house PA or I can rent/borrow/steal one for tempary use so no need to push full power out of my own amps.
I'm just curious to know how and why some speakers seem to sound so different when they're all made virtually the same apart from a few variables, but I suppose given the wee small variable in things like voice coil windings and air gaps and all that stuff, which at first seems too small to matter THAT much, perhaps it all does add up to make the big difference.
About a year ago I came across a 4ohm 8" Elac speaker from the 1930's and bunged it into an old wooden radio cabinet I'd converted into a small, general use powered speaker and it far outperformed any of the dozen or so modern 8" speakers I had lying around (until the plastic/bakelite/whalebone diaghram over the voice coil expired from age related rot).
But why in these modern times of advanced manufacturing techniques, where tolerances and specifications can be implimented far easier and cheaper than in the past, does nobody seem to be making affordable general purpose speakers LIKE these old speakers? Surely it can't be that difficult to manufacture affordable copies of vintage speakers out of modern gee-whiz materials can it? I mean, there's not that much TO a speaker. Or is it simply that in today's market any speaker that doesn't advertise itself as being 1500 watts of FULL ON, IN-YOUR-FACE AUDIO DESTRUCTION is just not enough speaker?
And now just to confuse matters I also have two old, virtually indestructible OHM speakers probably from the 1970's, one 10" and one 12", that are 16ohms each and both of them have huge magnets and still sound better and louder than any of the other speakers I've got, and they sound great no matter what wattage amp they're hooked up to. Why doesn't anybody make speakers like THAT anymore? How much can it cost just to make a good general purpose speaker?
Of course the question of why most speakers are still made in virtually the same manner as they were in the 1930's is another issue. But then again most cars are basically made the same way as well, so it's probably all mostly down to markets and money. I suspect that if something's cheap to make and overpriced to purchase then it's got a long life in the consumer world and there's little reason for the manufacturers to change the formula.
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In the 1940's and 50's, a good quality speaker had a broad flat frequency response. High fidelity was the goal everybody in the music industry crept up on.
Then came car audio. Boog Buzz Boog buzz. All the hifi stores around here went out of business, replaced by Circuit City with a 5 sided listening room full of noisy car ****.
The first characteristic of a good speaker now is power handling capacity. When you poke around the cheaper end of the pond, you won't get much else IMHO. What brand was that PA woofer with the bad sound? I have my suspicions of the fidelity of the knock off brands. Power handling is the characteristic you are quoting off the label. Of course frequency response was mostly a big lie at the end. 20-20000 hz flat +- 3db, a famous brand quoted. The brand with lots of little retail stores. Now bankrupt, hint hint. In the fine print there was a production tolerance of +-20db, which meant if the speaker made any noise at all it was shipped to the stores.
Even how, speakers sold to consumers don't have +- db guard bands quoted on the response . Only very serious pro speakers have a +- 3 db band around their published response curve.
Then came car audio. Boog Buzz Boog buzz. All the hifi stores around here went out of business, replaced by Circuit City with a 5 sided listening room full of noisy car ****.
The first characteristic of a good speaker now is power handling capacity. When you poke around the cheaper end of the pond, you won't get much else IMHO. What brand was that PA woofer with the bad sound? I have my suspicions of the fidelity of the knock off brands. Power handling is the characteristic you are quoting off the label. Of course frequency response was mostly a big lie at the end. 20-20000 hz flat +- 3db, a famous brand quoted. The brand with lots of little retail stores. Now bankrupt, hint hint. In the fine print there was a production tolerance of +-20db, which meant if the speaker made any noise at all it was shipped to the stores.
Even how, speakers sold to consumers don't have +- db guard bands quoted on the response . Only very serious pro speakers have a +- 3 db band around their published response curve.
As Enzo and others said, a guitar speaker is very different from a Hi Fi/PA speaker.
Let me add: an old guitar speaker is very different from a modern one:
a) old speakers *tried* to be full range and failed miserably, they needed to be very light so as to move reasonably when driven by low power (compared to today´s availability) tube amps.
Just as an example, early (Jazz) guitar players used 4 or 5 W amps in a Big Band context, surrounded by unamplified but LOUD brass instruments.
They also had tiny magnets so to thin and light cones add skinny light voice coils and light adhesives.
All this adds up to thin sound, *peaky* high mids, no real highs, high distortion, no bass output below 100/120 Hz ... all of which makes for killer guitar sound.
And the response unevenness *is* a hidden EQ, hidden in plain sight I might add.
Here is a modern and very popular guitar speaker, the Eminence Legend, which imitates old style ones.
Notice that:
> response is quite flat between 120 and 700 Hz
> it drops like a brick under 120 Hz
> it has a 6dB peak at 1kHz , as when you rise halfway the 1kHz slider in a graphic EQ.
That increases speaker presence, it jumps forward in the mix.
> it has a HUGE 13dB peak at about 2200 Hz , it makes sound biting and unpleasantly loud , our ears are VERY sensitive at such frequencies, that´s why church bells, police/ambulance/firemen sirens, home bells, phone beeps, whistles, etc are usually around that frequency.
> response falls faster than a brick , about 24dB/oct above some 3200 Hz
If that´s not strong EQ, then I don´t know what other name to give it.
Compared to that, the Bass speakers you tried sound flat and unappetizing.
To hear it yourself, here´s a sampler of 15 good, modern guitar speakers, all played with the exact same amp, settings, guitar and player ... they can´t be more different from each other :O
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWK0sa7tlfI
Let me add: an old guitar speaker is very different from a modern one:
a) old speakers *tried* to be full range and failed miserably, they needed to be very light so as to move reasonably when driven by low power (compared to today´s availability) tube amps.
Just as an example, early (Jazz) guitar players used 4 or 5 W amps in a Big Band context, surrounded by unamplified but LOUD brass instruments.
They also had tiny magnets so to thin and light cones add skinny light voice coils and light adhesives.
All this adds up to thin sound, *peaky* high mids, no real highs, high distortion, no bass output below 100/120 Hz ... all of which makes for killer guitar sound.
And the response unevenness *is* a hidden EQ, hidden in plain sight I might add.
Here is a modern and very popular guitar speaker, the Eminence Legend, which imitates old style ones.
Notice that:
> response is quite flat between 120 and 700 Hz
> it drops like a brick under 120 Hz
> it has a 6dB peak at 1kHz , as when you rise halfway the 1kHz slider in a graphic EQ.
That increases speaker presence, it jumps forward in the mix.
> it has a HUGE 13dB peak at about 2200 Hz , it makes sound biting and unpleasantly loud , our ears are VERY sensitive at such frequencies, that´s why church bells, police/ambulance/firemen sirens, home bells, phone beeps, whistles, etc are usually around that frequency.
> response falls faster than a brick , about 24dB/oct above some 3200 Hz
If that´s not strong EQ, then I don´t know what other name to give it.
Compared to that, the Bass speakers you tried sound flat and unappetizing.
To hear it yourself, here´s a sampler of 15 good, modern guitar speakers, all played with the exact same amp, settings, guitar and player ... they can´t be more different from each other :O
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWK0sa7tlfI
I know it's been said already in different words, but the fact of the matter is that when it comes to guitar, perfectly linear reproduction of the input (in terms of frequency response and distortion) simply does not sound good. The reason any guitar amp/speaker sounds good is because it either creates or amplifies/attenuates particular harmonics which give the output a fuller, richer sound.
Another thing to note is that a perfectly "clean" output (in this context, a speaker with a really flat frequency response) does nothing to cover up mistakes or bad tone from the input. Weak treble response hides fret noise, smooths harmonic distortion, and gives the sound more "body" and warmth (i.e. mids).
Another thing to note is that a perfectly "clean" output (in this context, a speaker with a really flat frequency response) does nothing to cover up mistakes or bad tone from the input. Weak treble response hides fret noise, smooths harmonic distortion, and gives the sound more "body" and warmth (i.e. mids).
In 1980 I bought 4 Fane 12-50 speakers for a mobile disco.
They sounded very good and were very loud for the wattage.
It wasn't until many years later I found out the same speakers were used a lot in guitar speaker cabinets.
As for guitar valve amps there is little to match a good old Marshall valve amp.
They sound amazing and are still used by many modern rock bands.
I have a 100 watt Marshall chip amp with effects and a Marshall valve state with effects and they both sound good but not up to the standard of pure Marshall valve amps.
Agreed. I frequently play a plugged-in acoustic guitar, and I almost always use a Danelectro Fish-n-Chips graphic EQ pedal between guitar and amp.
It's absolutely stunning what a difference a simple graphic EQ can make to the sound of a plugged-in acoustic/electric guitar. I can make a great guitar sound absolutely horrible in one second - just slide the 3.2 kHz knob up about 10 dB, and the nasty scratchy sound that results is quite unpleasant. That frequency band is above all the fundamental notes and 2nd harmonic frequencies you can reach with a guitar - all that's up there is pick noises, fret noises, finger squeaks (from your fingers on the string windings), and other irritating and unmusical transients.
It takes a little more thought to make a mediocre electro-acoustic guitar sound good, but that is often possible too. I've made a $110 Kona guitar (bought from Walmart!) sound pretty decent, by carefully adjusting the same EQ pedal, so as to add in the missing deep bass, remove the thin midrange, and quiet down the strident high frequencies (often called "piezo quack" by guitarists.)
IMO a simple little graphic EQ pedal like this is the great equalizer (pun not intended) when it comes to electro-acoustic guitars. With the EQ well adjusted, there isn't much difference between the plugged-in sound of a $2500 Gibson and a $110 Kona. (Blasphemous as that may sound!)
-Gnobuddy
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Yes I agree that using a simple EQ pedal can do amazing things to guitar sound. I have often had less than great amplifiers that sounded really good because I ran an EQ pedal before the amp input.
But having said that the reason many of my old amps didn't sound very nice was pretty much always down to the cheap speakers in the open back cabinets. They usually sound rather good when used with headphones but sound nothing like that when played live.
This had me thinking that if the amps were capable of sounding good enough through headphones then perhaps it wasn't the amp that was the problem, it was the crappy speakers.
This is why I started running a line out from my shitty amps into whatever PA system there was, using the actual amp only as a monitor. In the early days this helped me get away with using cheap pawn shop amps of dubious 1970's quality in live band situations and getting away with it.
Eventually I ended up using a mono four channel 100w Kustom PA head as a guitar amp through a pair of 2x15 cabs with ElectroVoice speakers. Did that for years and it was a very good rig. The Kustom head had minimal but effective tone controls on each channel and a really nice spring reverb.
Having four channels available meant that I could assign one for optimum clean sound and have another one dedicated to the distortion box signal and just switch between them. In a pinch I could still even run a mic or keyboard or something through other channels and surprisingly it handled it all really well without becoming too muddy. I suspect the Kustom PA head didn't colour the sound much at all and the massive speakers didn't distort at volume so any sound I was wanting had to be dialed in specifically before the input using effects boxes or small amps.
Fast forward a million years and I'm still a big fan of little 10w amplifiers but now I remove them from their cabinets and convert them into little 10w amp heads. I make a line out RCA jack using a 10k and a 1k resistor, which is good for recording as well. Most of them seem to have crappy two-knob tone controls that just sound best when both knobs are turned all the way up but if you're lucky enough to get a THREE way tone control, like what's usually found on small bass practice amps, it's even better. Sometimes I've had to fit an 8ohm dummy load in them at the speaker output but sometimes not. Just depends on the amp.
These little 10w amps are very cheap secondhand but it can be a bit of a lottery choosing which one. On most of them the clean sounds are really rather good when put through a decent speaker but most have dreadful distortion buttons that are best ignored in favour of a stomp box of your choice, apart from the overdrive button on the Kustom KGA10 which is sort of usably OK in my opinion.
I have found the best place to put my reverb stomp box is at the line out before going into whatever power amp is used. These little amps are cheap enough you can use multiples such as one for clean sound and another for grungy noises by way of an A/B footswitch, or you could use two different ones set up differently into a stereo power amp. It can be quite fun running more than one of these heads at a time and I quite fancy running a 4x12 cabinet with a different amp head on each speaker just to see what it's like.
I have noticed that some of them have a little bit of hum that isn't really there at 10 watts but gets noticed when pumped through a 100w power amp but I suspect that's more down to me taking my line out from the speaker output instead of from someplace on the circuit board before the internal amp. I'll have to try that next time and see if it eliminates the hum if there is any.
But in all they make really good little preamps for going into another amp and I still often use the 10w output for home use through a decent speaker.
Which brings me back to the whole point of my post in the first place- it's all the speaker's fault. And a lot of speakers these days seem designed to be LOUD as opposed to good sounding. All my best sounding speakers are old and probably rated at less than 25w and the worst sounding speakers I've tried lately are the modern newfangled ones with enormous magnets that claim hundreds of watts handling power. Can't anybody simply make a reasonably priced speaker that does both?
I've also have a pair of fairly new 8" 8ohm speakers (Maplins, 40-ish watts, can't remember which ones exactly) in a cabinet wired up to be 4ohms and that's nowhere near as loud as the single 10" 16ohm OHM speaker I have in another cabinet. For whatever reason the "vintage" OHM speakers are really efficient compared to the modern ones.
On a side note (C sharp) I wonder if you could recone a speaker in leather? Ultimate geeky for the audio nerds!
But having said that the reason many of my old amps didn't sound very nice was pretty much always down to the cheap speakers in the open back cabinets. They usually sound rather good when used with headphones but sound nothing like that when played live.
This had me thinking that if the amps were capable of sounding good enough through headphones then perhaps it wasn't the amp that was the problem, it was the crappy speakers.
This is why I started running a line out from my shitty amps into whatever PA system there was, using the actual amp only as a monitor. In the early days this helped me get away with using cheap pawn shop amps of dubious 1970's quality in live band situations and getting away with it.
Eventually I ended up using a mono four channel 100w Kustom PA head as a guitar amp through a pair of 2x15 cabs with ElectroVoice speakers. Did that for years and it was a very good rig. The Kustom head had minimal but effective tone controls on each channel and a really nice spring reverb.
Having four channels available meant that I could assign one for optimum clean sound and have another one dedicated to the distortion box signal and just switch between them. In a pinch I could still even run a mic or keyboard or something through other channels and surprisingly it handled it all really well without becoming too muddy. I suspect the Kustom PA head didn't colour the sound much at all and the massive speakers didn't distort at volume so any sound I was wanting had to be dialed in specifically before the input using effects boxes or small amps.
Fast forward a million years and I'm still a big fan of little 10w amplifiers but now I remove them from their cabinets and convert them into little 10w amp heads. I make a line out RCA jack using a 10k and a 1k resistor, which is good for recording as well. Most of them seem to have crappy two-knob tone controls that just sound best when both knobs are turned all the way up but if you're lucky enough to get a THREE way tone control, like what's usually found on small bass practice amps, it's even better. Sometimes I've had to fit an 8ohm dummy load in them at the speaker output but sometimes not. Just depends on the amp.
These little 10w amps are very cheap secondhand but it can be a bit of a lottery choosing which one. On most of them the clean sounds are really rather good when put through a decent speaker but most have dreadful distortion buttons that are best ignored in favour of a stomp box of your choice, apart from the overdrive button on the Kustom KGA10 which is sort of usably OK in my opinion.
I have found the best place to put my reverb stomp box is at the line out before going into whatever power amp is used. These little amps are cheap enough you can use multiples such as one for clean sound and another for grungy noises by way of an A/B footswitch, or you could use two different ones set up differently into a stereo power amp. It can be quite fun running more than one of these heads at a time and I quite fancy running a 4x12 cabinet with a different amp head on each speaker just to see what it's like.
I have noticed that some of them have a little bit of hum that isn't really there at 10 watts but gets noticed when pumped through a 100w power amp but I suspect that's more down to me taking my line out from the speaker output instead of from someplace on the circuit board before the internal amp. I'll have to try that next time and see if it eliminates the hum if there is any.
But in all they make really good little preamps for going into another amp and I still often use the 10w output for home use through a decent speaker.
Which brings me back to the whole point of my post in the first place- it's all the speaker's fault. And a lot of speakers these days seem designed to be LOUD as opposed to good sounding. All my best sounding speakers are old and probably rated at less than 25w and the worst sounding speakers I've tried lately are the modern newfangled ones with enormous magnets that claim hundreds of watts handling power. Can't anybody simply make a reasonably priced speaker that does both?
I've also have a pair of fairly new 8" 8ohm speakers (Maplins, 40-ish watts, can't remember which ones exactly) in a cabinet wired up to be 4ohms and that's nowhere near as loud as the single 10" 16ohm OHM speaker I have in another cabinet. For whatever reason the "vintage" OHM speakers are really efficient compared to the modern ones.
On a side note (C sharp) I wonder if you could recone a speaker in leather? Ultimate geeky for the audio nerds!
No low-pass filtering at all, to emulate what the crappy guitar speaker normally does (steeply filter out most audio above 5-6 kHz)?
Solid-state or valve amp? The conventional wisom is that driving a valve amp without a proper load can fry output transformers (from excessive voltage, and resulting electrical flash-over). I'm sure you already know that.
I think there has been, for decades, a slow ongoing cultural change towards harsher and harsher music with more and more treble content. Just compare an Evanescence song with, say, a solo English Horn classical piece written a couple of centuries ago, and be horrified at what we've done!
My hypothesis is that we grow up to make music that mimics the sounds we heard around us in our childhood. Grow up in pastoral England of 1750 with the sounds of cows and birds around you, and you end up loving the soft moos of the English Horn. Grow up in 1990's urban America with the sound of jackhammers, metal dumpsters being banged about on trash day, train-tracks, and growing big-rig engines, and you end up distorting your guitar until it sounds like a power tool cutting through a rusty sheet-metal roof. 😱
Vintage recipe: large, light, flimsy cones, lightweight paper coil formers, lightweight paper surround. The result is high efficiency, yes. Also limited frequency range due to the stiff suspension at the low end, and cone break-up at the high end. You also get limited power handling, because the paper voice coil former will catch fire, or you'll tear a hole in the flimsy paper cone first!
-Gnobuddy
I like your theory that we generally try to reproduce in music the sounds of our environment when we were young. The obvious expansion of that idea is the plethora of cover tunes bands populated by the 50 plus generation who stopped listening to music the moment they turned 30 and who forever relive the same old turgid top 40 songs of their youth over and over again, playing in unimaginative bands with their friends, relentlessly dishing out the same old cover tunes done the same way over and over again in any bar that will have them until it feels like you're living in a hellish musical Groundhog Day every time you go anywhere and hear a live band. For the love of sanity, people- THERE ARE OTHER KINDS OF MUSIC THAN WHAT YOU LISTENED TO REPEATEDLY WHEN YOU WERE A PENNILESS OIK IN COLLEGE!
I think the "Holy Grail" of guitar speakers HAS to be the JBL D-130---the one that everything else must be compared to.
You cracked me up with that gem. 😀
I attend weekly jams with a group of friends and acquaintances, all of us past, shall we say, the age of spring-chickenhood. More than one of our senior members has a set-list that was apparently frozen somewhere around 1970. One person (a really nice man in his late 70s) sings Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" every single week - and I've known him for two and a half years now. 😱
As an aside, Groundhog Day happens to be somewhere near the top of the list of my favourite movies.
Back on the original topic of the thread, I keep wondering if there isn't a way to get a modern speaker in a small sealed cabinet to sound like one of the usual floppy old monstrosities in a huge open-backed "cab". The true joy of lugging a 20kg speaker around with you continues to elude me, so it would be nice to have an alternative.
-Gnobuddy
I've also always maintained that the only way to guarantee a good live sound is to eliminate the pointless, knob-twiddling Neanderthal usually known as "The Sound Man" from your live performance.
Decades ago in bands I started using a mixer onstage that was used at all the band practices and then I'd only present Da Soundz Guy with at most a right and left channel, and mono if they looked especially culturally challenged. That way all they can ruin is the volume and tone, but the mix at least stays the way you intended for it to be and have carefully tweaked through countless practice sessions and live performances.
No knuckle-dragging oaf lurking in the shadows at the back of a pub viciously guarding the big electric funny-table of blinky lights, pushy buttons and turny knobs has the least clue how to run your or anybody else's sound, so don't let them.
For the most part they are excrement-eating morons who only exist to destroy your hard work and carefully made plans, so giving them as little as possible to screw up is the key to maintaining a good live sound. I've proven this repeatedly over the decades. Only hand over a right and left line out to them, and only give them a mono line if their eyes seem a bit too close together and they mention anything about Slade or Uriah Heep.
Decades ago in bands I started using a mixer onstage that was used at all the band practices and then I'd only present Da Soundz Guy with at most a right and left channel, and mono if they looked especially culturally challenged. That way all they can ruin is the volume and tone, but the mix at least stays the way you intended for it to be and have carefully tweaked through countless practice sessions and live performances.
No knuckle-dragging oaf lurking in the shadows at the back of a pub viciously guarding the big electric funny-table of blinky lights, pushy buttons and turny knobs has the least clue how to run your or anybody else's sound, so don't let them.
For the most part they are excrement-eating morons who only exist to destroy your hard work and carefully made plans, so giving them as little as possible to screw up is the key to maintaining a good live sound. I've proven this repeatedly over the decades. Only hand over a right and left line out to them, and only give them a mono line if their eyes seem a bit too close together and they mention anything about Slade or Uriah Heep.
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