Amp advice

It's a 60 watt speaker so it should be OK with a 50 watt amp. A lot of people say the speaker(s) should handle double what the amp puts out. The Celestion rep said that while you should leave some room, that even a 50 watt speaker they build should handle a 50 watt amp unless you were diming it all the time. For most of us, that's never going to be an issue. A much bigger issue, IMHO, is getting a 2x or a 4x, and trying to get the speakers broken in when the amp never gets turned up past 2-3.
 
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Wasn't aware of that. Just hoped to provide @bigcountry with some leeway regards what would nominally work with a 40W amp. If 60W RMS is the V30 power handling capability, that info might be enough to work with.

P.S. Take a Midol. I hear it works wonders on toothaches, too. :)



You must have taken some good courses in college and received some good on-the-job training. This is all Greek to an electronics newb.

Ya, I've been a practicing EE for 30 years, including a few years of audio product design. My family always tells me that my schematics are made-up heiroglyphics.

To add to the uncertainty, Mesa has shipped 90W and 100W amps with 90W speakers. Mostly the speakers are rated conservatively, so you could likely run 100W in a quality 60W speaker.

In addition, most power is dissipated in low frequencies. So a loud bass guitar might require 500W, but an equally loud guitar only 40W. Even if your amp is capable of 100W, it's unlikely you'll dissipate that in the speaker, as it would be unbelievably loud at 1kHz. This is the reason that most sounds engineers chop off the low frequencies of guitar live and in the studio. It tends to interfere with bass guitar, but also you barely hear the guitar frequencies below 250Hz and they account for the majority of power dissipation. Note that guitar speakers are very efficient - usually like 90dB at 1W-m. So 10W is loud in the midrange frequencies.

When you separate guitar and bass in a mix, bass takes 41.5Hz to 2kHz, guitar takes 83Hz to 4kHz. Typically you want to cut bass below 150Hz so you don't saturate the room, and that means cutting guitar as high as 500 Hz to make room for the bass. So you don't hear the fundamental on the lowest notes of either instrument, but the mix still sounds full.

AND... guitar tends to be peaky (high crest factor). So unless you are playing metal (totally compressed), the dynamics of the guitar are such that it only peaks at high power for a tiny fraction of the time you're playing. Most of the time you're pushing much lower power.
 
Ya, I've been a practicing EE for 30 years, including a few years of audio product design. My family always tells me that my schematics are made-up heiroglyphics.

I always felt that you knew your stuff, and now I understand why! Excellent.
 
Ive got a Blackstar HT5 for my apartmen and honestly the thing kicks ass. Real good at low volume and gets loud enough to be able to mess around with my friends.
 
Ive got a Blackstar HT5 for my apartmen and honestly the thing kicks ass. Real good at low volume and gets loud enough to be able to mess around with my friends.

I have a Blackstar HT5r 210 (I think its the 210 but could be a 212) for my home use Valve amp as my 100w Marshall JVM410 is too much. I keep thinking I should get a Katana so I can drop it down to 0.5w and its a simple plug and play - also could be good for the Acoustic channel for the Piezo on my HBii whilst the Magnets go to my Blackstar for example.
 
Look at the used 2 channel 20 heads at Davesguitar.com. The only negative....the bass tone control is never above about 20%. They also respond even better at medium volumes.
 
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Look at the used 2 channel 20 heads at Davesguitar.com. The only negative....the bass tone control is never above about 20%. The also respond even better at medium volumes.

I never set the bass on my amps even halfway up, but it depends on the room. Even Mesa suggests that on the Lone Star, try turning the bass all the way down to prevent mud on Channel Two.
 
I find that I always have to trim the bass to get a tight sound and to cut through a band mix. I have been in situations where my amp didn't have enough power on a gig and I lost the low end as I turned up, but there's nothing the bass control is gonna do there.
 
I find that I always have to trim the bass to get a tight sound and to cut through a band mix. I have been in situations where my amp didn't have enough power on a gig and I lost the low end as I turned up, but there's nothing the bass control is gonna do there.

Exactly. From a recording perspective as well, most mixers put a high pass filter on the low end of guitars to cut low frequencies, so that the drums and bass come through. The frequency chosen for the filter’s cutoff point will depend to a degree on the density of the mix, but nearly everyone cuts some.
 
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