What's your favorite 12" musical instrument speaker (guitar, bass, all purpose)?

[drogulus]

   Choose what speaker you like as long as you are able to defend it against a massive wave of derision probably from me.  

   You can choose more than one, or just one, bass only, adapted from pro audio, it's wide open.

   Only one speaker must not be mentioned, the Celestion Vintage 30, on account of I'm sick of hearing about it.
   

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

Deride these:

http://audioengineusa.com/Store/Powered-Speaker-Systems/HD6-Powered-Speakers

[drogulus]

Deride these:

http://audioengineusa.com/Store/Powered-Speaker-Systems/HD6-Powered-Speakers

      There's no need, they're not musical instrument speakers.

      These are instrument speakers:

     



     

     

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

Well then at least tell me why they suck, how I could do better for $750 for powered speakers (or passive with an amplifier, preamp, and cables!), and why I shouldn't buy them for my second (office) system. 

And while you're at it, suggest a couple of subwoofers for my cool L.A. ride! ("My other car is also an El Camino!")

[drogulus]

     Speaking about powered speakers, I had a guitar amp with the first powered speakers ever used in that capacity, from around 1970. Here's a picture of one:

     

     It's a Bruce amp, even then it was obscure. Hendrix borrowed one from Three Dog Night for a show they did together. The preamp/powered cab format never caught on again until fairly recently, with some modelers, heretics IOW.

     In my avatar you can see the Traynor amp I'm using, but not the other two, one is the Bruce and the other a Sound (Ampeg offshoot). We played loud.

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

Do you prefer tooooobs? Is there anything to that? I've had a vacuum tube preamp (heavily modified Audible Illusions Modulus) for ages. It sounds very good, but I have never compared it directly to comparably priced solidstate gear.

[drogulus]

Do you prefer tooooobs? Is there anything to that? I've had a vacuum tube preamp (heavily modified Audible Illusions Modulus) for ages. It sounds very good, but I have never compared it directly to comparably priced solidstate gear.

     I think tooooobs are oversold for home audio, but not for guitar and bass amps. An interesting case is presented by Sunn amps, which were popular in the late '60s, early '70s. Well, they were Dynaco pre and power amps with phone jack inputs and outputs in a wooden box. Should you get Dynaco amps for your home stereo? Unless you're a vintage equipment hobbyist, no. Should you power your bass with a Sunn 2000S amp like Larry Graham or John Entwistle at Woodstock? Ohhhhh yes.

     Bass played through a hifi tube amp:

     https://www.youtube.com/v/3fZBaPS_XvQ

     Why did I need 3 amps to play in the show in my avatar? Our bass player was using the same amp as Larry at Woodstock. I wanted to be heard.

   
     

[drogulus]

     OK, let me put it like this, you've been seized by an uncontrollable urge to get a guitar and amp so you can fundraise for PBS like Joe Bonamassa. So you take lessons and discover that contrary to reason you have a knack! You're goood at it! Now you want to get that sound in your head which isn't exactly Joe, and it's time to get some fairly serious gear. That little closed back practice amp won't cut it. You want something that sounds good, probably a little combo amp for convenience, 20 watts or so, a single 12" speaker, you want it to fit in the back seat and not be too heavy.

     Given the parameters you could go to Guitar Center and play little combo amps that fit and buy the one you like best.

     

     Here's a 50 year old one.

     

     Here's a brand new one.

     You can't afford the old one, so you get the new one. It has a speaker in it, not a bad one but not what you want, so now what do you do?

     

[Mirror Image]

I quit using large guitar amplifiers a long time ago. I simply don't need them. For the past 5-6 years, I've been using a small Jay Turser amp that packs quite a punch.

Jay Turser 25-RC -

[drogulus]

I quit using large guitar amplifiers a long time ago. I simply don't need them. For the past 5-6 years, I've been using a small Jay Turser amp that packs quite a punch.

     I thought I might provoke a response by suggesting a small large amp.

     I have a 25 watt and a 50 watt I play in my apartment. They both sound good at low volume.

     This one has the highest customer rating at GC:

     

     It's a Vox AC15C1, much cheaper than the Fender DR.

[drogulus]

     Here's my living room setup:

     

     Here's a better view of the unique wonderfulness of speaker and cab:

     

[drogulus]

     I just had an idea. I'm going to send my PC headphone out through a stereo to dual mono cable into a 4 channel passive mono mixer, this one
     

     into the power amp input on my guitar amp (pictured above) and into the third channel the preamp out from the amp. I can play music (in mono) and my guitar or bass at the same time.

     
     

[drogulus]

     In preparation for playing recorded music through my guitar/bass rig I converted the entirety of my collection from stereo FLAC to mono mp3 yesterday. It took 4 hours for several thousand tracks.

     I told people at my gear site what I was doing and was told

"As mentioned, guitar speakers have no high end to speak of and usually a pronounced mid-range hump. Imagine taking your home stereo speakers or PA speakers and unplugging the tweaters or horns.

Unless you can find a good way to mix to mono, you'd lose one channel."

      I explained I was not doing this because I knew how it would come out. This reply assumed I was naive about instrument speakers being like hifi speakers, which I'm not. I also mentioned how my speaker and cab were atypical and how I wanted to discover what that meant.

      If this experiment goes anywhere the next step might be to use error correction eq software. I'd play a mono file on my stereo rig and through headphones to get a feel for the balance, play it through my instrument rig, correct the response and compare the corrected response to my other systems.

[71 dB]

"Unless you can find a good way to mix to mono, you'd lose one channel."

Depends how you mix. If you just drop one channel (left or right) you of course lose it. Usually the mix to mono is done summing left and right channel:

mono = left + right

Perhaps scaled to avoid clipping:

mono = ( left + right ) / 2

The proplem of this is that you lose "differential" information, information about the difference of left and right channel. Recordings tend to have more differential information on high frequencies than on low frequencies. It means that mixing to mono changes your spectral balance, mono sounds darker than the original stereo. The mono version sounds death compared to stereo. If the recording was originally done as a mono using only one microphone, it would sound more vivid, because the spectral balance would do correct. Our hearing emphasizes differencies between our ears which makes things worse.

To overcome this problem I develop an algorithm to convert stereo tracks to mono (to be used as ringtones on my phone):

mono = ( left + right ) / 2 + K * delayed( HPF ( left - right ) )

The diffetential information (left - right) is included high pass filtered (1000 Hz) , delayed a bit (1 ms) and scaled with K. Summing the differential information 1 ms delayed causes comb filtering effect, but it isn't serious compared to the deathness and darkness of normal mono. The filtering and delaying must be done or the mono track would be made more or less of the left channel only.

The sound is more vivid and closer to the original stereo sound. It gives a bit better ringtones. 

[drogulus]

     71 dB, your opinions are...... just kidding, thanks for the info. My test of simple summing by the audio converter confirms what you say about the darkness. That's OK, my experiment is not to have perfect files to reproduce but good reproduction of the files as they are.

     Part of what I'm trying to do is find out what I have with this cab I had built and the speaker I found on ebay which isn't like anything built today. No one would build it for you and if they did it would be insanely expensive.

     https://www.youtube.com/v/v2MMguWo5FA

     No, I don't think a Celestion Vintage 30 could do that.

[drogulus]

     Aaaahhhaaaaaaa!!

     I tested my rig and my worst suspicions have been confirmed. I turned a guitar amp and a ported speaker/cab combination into a 1956 hifi! I used a few different files vocal, orchestral, organ and everything sounds just as I would expect, though I haven't done any comparisons with my headphones or stereo yet. No eq as of yet, just headphone out to power amp flat as can be.

[drogulus]

     In case anyone is interested, a properly designed tube guitar amp like mine barely differs from a hifi amp of equivalent power, if it provides a "power amp in" input bypassing the preamp tone controls (most of which are not designed to easily produce flat response). That means custom guitar amps built using the same circuits as the best late '50s-early'60s models will sound indistinguishable from hifi amps of the era.

    I have a 3 way PA cab I had built for playing bass (the two uses have converged over time). I think I'll try hooking it up to my living room amp and play my music files through that.

[71 dB]

     71 dB, your opinions are...... just kidding, thanks for the info. My test of simple summing by the audio converter confirms what you say about the darkness.

Of course your test confirms it because I know what I am talking about.  0:)

That's OK, my experiment is not to have perfect files to reproduce but good reproduction of the files as they are.

Good reproduction of darkness? 

Part of what I'm trying to do is find out what I have with this cab I had built and the speaker I found on ebay which isn't like anything built today. No one would build it for you and if they did it would be insanely expensive.

The normal way to design cabinets for given speakers is to know the Thiele/Small -parameters and calculate the cabinet volume/tuning etc. based on the desired system properties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiele/Small

     https://www.youtube.com/v/v2MMguWo5FA

     No, I don't think a Celestion Vintage 30 could do that.

What that exactly? Nothing special happens in the video in my opinion. It's just a simple test of an damaged old speaker I consider garbage. 

[drogulus]

      The distortion is from the phone, not the speaker. That crackley sound is nothing like speaker distortion. You hear it on old recordings of rock bands playing loud in the studio when the board is overdriven.

      I looked at the old pre T/S cabs JBL designed for this speaker. Port design back then was fairly seat of the pants. I compared it to an approximation of my cab. The volume is nearly ideal but I can't model my port because it's too complex. I know JBL was involved in the original Fender design for tone ring cabs, but not for this particular speaker, which was never intended for musical instrument use. Legendary JBL designer Harvey Gerst says the D123 is the best guitar speaker they ever produced, even though it isn't one. That sparked my interest in them.

[71 dB]

      The distortion is from the phone, not the speaker. That crackley sound is nothing like speaker distortion. You hear it on old recordings of rock bands playing loud in the studio when the board is overdriven.

Yes, I know. I ignored the distortion. 

The cone is damaged. It doesn't mean much when you drive the speaker free on the table and use modest power. Acoustic short-circuit makes the damage insignificant. As soon as you install that speaker to a cabinet (closed, reflex-port, whatever), the acoustic short-circuit disappears and the damaged area starts to leak, because there is pressure difference between the front and back side of the cone. The damage becomes a problem that ruins the sound. The pressure build-up inside a reflex-port cabinet can be quite significant.

I looked at the old pre T/S cabs JBL designed for this speaker. Port design back then was fairly seat of the pants. I compared it to an approximation of my cab. The volume is nearly ideal but I can't model my port because it's too complex. I know JBL was involved in the original Fender design for tone ring cabs, but not for this particular speaker, which was never intended for musical instrument use. Legendary JBL designer Harvey Gerst says the D123 is the best guitar speaker they ever produced, even though it isn't one. That sparked my interest in them.

Back in those days loudspeakers where designed with a different philosophy. Efficiency was everything. Nowadays 100 W amps are cheap as hell and the speakers are designed to handle such power levels. A few decibels of efficiency can be sacrificed for increased fidelity.

Those words of Harvey Gerst should be taken as having predominantly nostalgic value.