Relationships can be complicated, right?
I see lots of threads on forums about what speaker sounds “best” with a particular amp, and I kind of wince, because you can take the very same make and model of speaker, put it in a different cabinet, and it will sound different!
Cabinet type (open, closed, ported, etc.) matters; dimensions matter; materials and construction matter; hell, even the covering and grille cloth matter.
Here’s an example: I’ve got Celestion V30s in both the birch ply, closed-back 212 PRS cab I use with the HXDA, and the 212 pine, ported-back PRS DG cab I use with the DG30. They sound completely different with the same amp. And they sounded completely different in the 212 closed-back Mesa cab I previously had. Also, a speaker in a 212 cab of similar construction will sound different from a 112. Or a 412.
Not only does the cabinet make the speaker do different things physically to make that different sound, it also makes the amplifier behave differently, because the speaker interacts in several ways with the transformer in a tube amp.
Context is everything! So I’ll take it a step further: the room affects the sound; what the band (or recorded instruments) are doing affects our perception of the sound due to things like masking; the volume at which we’re playing affects the sound of the amp, speaker and room. Etc. Etc.
Last step: The way we play the instrument affects the sound. Whether we tweak the guitar controls as we play affects the sound. The effects we use operate in different frequencies. Etc., Etc.
“I dislike Speaker X. What speaker will be better with my Whiz-Bang 12000?”
Well, in what cab, at what volume, in what room, located where in the room, on the floor or on a stand, with what effects, at what volume, with what other instruments, with what tubes, how do you play, what do you play, what’s your personal taste like, and what do you want to hear that you’re not getting?
And even if you can answer every one of those questions in detail, you still won’t get a satisfactory answer until you play through that amp, that cab, and the speaker you’re interested in trying, in your context, in order to know if it’s for you.
So, yes. Kind of a daunting, expensive, blood-sweat-tears-tear-the-rig-apart-put-it-back-together-rinse/repeat challenge to try every speaker on the market in your context, and I doubt that more than a very few of us have done so (though Doug Sewell told me Grissom did when they were developing the DG30 cab when I met him at the PRS 30th event).
When you get advice from some complete stranger on a forum, who’s waxing lyrical about some speaker and telling you that it’s the holy grail, realize that he/she knows absolutely nothing about your context, and that the advice is relatively useless because he/she is not you.
Suggest a speaker to check out? Sure, why not. Take the advice literally, and actually buy the thing without trying it first? You might as well buy the speaker because it’s a pretty color. Because it’s that random a chance that you’ll discover your best option that way.
I see lots of threads on forums about what speaker sounds “best” with a particular amp, and I kind of wince, because you can take the very same make and model of speaker, put it in a different cabinet, and it will sound different!
Cabinet type (open, closed, ported, etc.) matters; dimensions matter; materials and construction matter; hell, even the covering and grille cloth matter.
Here’s an example: I’ve got Celestion V30s in both the birch ply, closed-back 212 PRS cab I use with the HXDA, and the 212 pine, ported-back PRS DG cab I use with the DG30. They sound completely different with the same amp. And they sounded completely different in the 212 closed-back Mesa cab I previously had. Also, a speaker in a 212 cab of similar construction will sound different from a 112. Or a 412.
Not only does the cabinet make the speaker do different things physically to make that different sound, it also makes the amplifier behave differently, because the speaker interacts in several ways with the transformer in a tube amp.
Context is everything! So I’ll take it a step further: the room affects the sound; what the band (or recorded instruments) are doing affects our perception of the sound due to things like masking; the volume at which we’re playing affects the sound of the amp, speaker and room. Etc. Etc.
Last step: The way we play the instrument affects the sound. Whether we tweak the guitar controls as we play affects the sound. The effects we use operate in different frequencies. Etc., Etc.
“I dislike Speaker X. What speaker will be better with my Whiz-Bang 12000?”
Well, in what cab, at what volume, in what room, located where in the room, on the floor or on a stand, with what effects, at what volume, with what other instruments, with what tubes, how do you play, what do you play, what’s your personal taste like, and what do you want to hear that you’re not getting?
And even if you can answer every one of those questions in detail, you still won’t get a satisfactory answer until you play through that amp, that cab, and the speaker you’re interested in trying, in your context, in order to know if it’s for you.
So, yes. Kind of a daunting, expensive, blood-sweat-tears-tear-the-rig-apart-put-it-back-together-rinse/repeat challenge to try every speaker on the market in your context, and I doubt that more than a very few of us have done so (though Doug Sewell told me Grissom did when they were developing the DG30 cab when I met him at the PRS 30th event).
When you get advice from some complete stranger on a forum, who’s waxing lyrical about some speaker and telling you that it’s the holy grail, realize that he/she knows absolutely nothing about your context, and that the advice is relatively useless because he/she is not you.
Suggest a speaker to check out? Sure, why not. Take the advice literally, and actually buy the thing without trying it first? You might as well buy the speaker because it’s a pretty color. Because it’s that random a chance that you’ll discover your best option that way.
