Speaker Swap Experiment
Feb 1, 2022 6:51:34 GMT -7
Paul (TRANE), Jason Cornelius, and 9 more like this
Post by redtele on Feb 1, 2022 6:51:34 GMT -7
To answer my own question of "what does a Celestion Blue speaker sound like in a Wreck Jr" I decided to take the plunge and buy a new blue speaker and try it for myself. The other threads about this same experiment were both encouraging and worrying in equal measures, as with most things there's no 'best' but rather 'different', and I guess it all comes down to what you personally prefer.
My prior experience with the Celestion Blue speaker was in my now-sold Vox AC15TBX amp, and i've still got an AC30 with 2 blues, so I am well acquainted with how these sound and love them in my Voxes. I tried hooking the Wreck up to the 2 blues in my AC30 and it sounded a bit dark and lost some clarity, but I suspected that may have been partly due to the mismatched ohms (AC30s are wired up at 16 Ohms), and the combo cabinet itself is responsible for some of the sound so I figured the only way to really tell is to physically put a single blue in the Wreck and see what happens...
The combo is a fair size compared to the speaker, much bigger than my AC15 amp, and I really notice the difference where the Vox used to be very directional and shoot out a beam of sound and you were either hit by a blizzard of nails or it sounded a bit dead. The Wreck however disperses the sound much more and I don't have this problem, and I can stand anywhere relative to the amp and it sounds good, so the larger cabinet is definitely helping here. In my haste to change the speakers over I didn't take a photo of the blue loaded into the cabinet like the photo above, which is a shame as I would have liked to compare, but you'll just have to imagine this bit!
I had put together a pedal board of my favourite drive pedals to test, and included the Deluxe Memory Man as I actually like the Lo-Fi distorted sounds this produces when you overload the preamp section, and excuse the dust but i'm in the middle of an extensive home renovation project so everything is covered in a layer of dust at the moment! I have been using the KOT for a while now as I love both sides of this pedal with my Wreck, but I had a new-to-me Kingsley Page to try and dethrone the King along with a Decibelics Golden Horse (Klon clone), JHS Clover, Timmy, Hotcake and Barbershop, which i've built up over the years to pair well with my AC30 so figured some of these would work well with the Wreck as well.
I hired a rehearsal studio to test this out as I needed to play through the blue speaker at volume for a few hours to break it in before I could properly compare it to the OEM Greenback, and I wanted to test the pedals at proper 'live' volumes, as neither my neighbours or my band mates would have put up with me jamming away non-stop for 4 hours at max volume, so it was odd being there alone but I relished the opportunity to blast away for hours without annoying anyone else.
Anyway, I played both my Telecaster and Les Paul at loud volumes for a few hours, and although the speaker was brand new it didn't seem to change that much over this initial period like i've been led to believe and any changes may have been the tubes warming up, me warming up, or my ears getting used to the sound in the room. My initial thoughts were:
1) The blue is louder than the Greenback, and I could play loud and clean on the amp where it would have started distorting previously.
2) The distorted sound was smoother, thicker, but slightly less dynamic. The clean sound was fuller, more dense, and a bit darker overall.
3) There was more mid range and less sparkle/highs with the blue, which helped tame the brightness of the Tele, although this resulted in my Tele sounded less Tele-like and more like a humbucker equipped guitar which was fun for big rock tunes but I had to hit the strings hard to bring out the twang.
4) The overdrive pedals sounded a bit congested and flat though the blue speaker, as the speaker coloured everything so much in its own signature sound that there wasn't much difference between the pedals as you would expect to hear, and when combined with my thicker sounding Les Paul the sound was a touch too thick for me and I couldn't quite dial out the wall-of-sound to get some clarity and dynamics back for more subtle playing.
5) The best sound was using the amp without pedals and getting the distortion from the amp itself with the blue speaker for both guitars, and the big rock sound with my Les Paul was great, and I jammed out some crazy psychedelic rock stuff with the DMM going bonkers and was laughing how big it sounded and how is the Greenback ever going to compete with this???
Just to complete the testing process and make sure I was making the right decision to keep the blue speaker in there, I decided to install the Greenback to play it back-to-back for a short while to check it out in the same playing conditions, and then i'd be happy with my choice and i'd get on with enjoying my amp again and stop with this incessant testing. Well well well, I couldn't believe my ears, the Greenback sounded amazing! How could this be? Compared to the blue, the Greenback:
1) Is slightly quieter (I think the speaker sensitivity is 3db lower than the blue, which is enough to make a real-world difference) so I could run the master/gain a touch higher to get more tube breakup. Lovely.
2) The eq range seems more equally spread out so I have the lows, mids and highs in perfect balance.
3) The amp sounded much more lively and snappy, the notes were jumping out of the speaker as opposed to being pushed out by the blue, it's hard to explain but that's how it felt.
4) All my pedals sounded better through the Greenback, I could easily differentiate between them without having to check which LED was on to see what pedal I was using, and the extra mids on the KOT or Decibelics Golden Horse could duplicate that thicker blue speaker sound so I had both speaker tones at my disposal now.
I didn't want the Greenback to be better as I had just shelled out quite a bit of money for a brand new Celestion Blue speaker, but it was undeniable, and the price difference was moot. I am primarily a tele player, but even the thicker tones of the blue were not enough to make me want to keep it in the amp compared to the liveliness and excitement that the Greenback produces, it just suits the amp so well.
Finally I can accept that this is the best speaker choice for my amp, the way I play, and the sounds I want it to produce. The Doc certainly knows what he is doing, but I just had to try this and hear it for myself, and I am once again reminded that i'm not an amp designer so I humbly defer to those who clearly know better than me!
My prior experience with the Celestion Blue speaker was in my now-sold Vox AC15TBX amp, and i've still got an AC30 with 2 blues, so I am well acquainted with how these sound and love them in my Voxes. I tried hooking the Wreck up to the 2 blues in my AC30 and it sounded a bit dark and lost some clarity, but I suspected that may have been partly due to the mismatched ohms (AC30s are wired up at 16 Ohms), and the combo cabinet itself is responsible for some of the sound so I figured the only way to really tell is to physically put a single blue in the Wreck and see what happens...
The combo is a fair size compared to the speaker, much bigger than my AC15 amp, and I really notice the difference where the Vox used to be very directional and shoot out a beam of sound and you were either hit by a blizzard of nails or it sounded a bit dead. The Wreck however disperses the sound much more and I don't have this problem, and I can stand anywhere relative to the amp and it sounds good, so the larger cabinet is definitely helping here. In my haste to change the speakers over I didn't take a photo of the blue loaded into the cabinet like the photo above, which is a shame as I would have liked to compare, but you'll just have to imagine this bit!
I had put together a pedal board of my favourite drive pedals to test, and included the Deluxe Memory Man as I actually like the Lo-Fi distorted sounds this produces when you overload the preamp section, and excuse the dust but i'm in the middle of an extensive home renovation project so everything is covered in a layer of dust at the moment! I have been using the KOT for a while now as I love both sides of this pedal with my Wreck, but I had a new-to-me Kingsley Page to try and dethrone the King along with a Decibelics Golden Horse (Klon clone), JHS Clover, Timmy, Hotcake and Barbershop, which i've built up over the years to pair well with my AC30 so figured some of these would work well with the Wreck as well.
I hired a rehearsal studio to test this out as I needed to play through the blue speaker at volume for a few hours to break it in before I could properly compare it to the OEM Greenback, and I wanted to test the pedals at proper 'live' volumes, as neither my neighbours or my band mates would have put up with me jamming away non-stop for 4 hours at max volume, so it was odd being there alone but I relished the opportunity to blast away for hours without annoying anyone else.
Anyway, I played both my Telecaster and Les Paul at loud volumes for a few hours, and although the speaker was brand new it didn't seem to change that much over this initial period like i've been led to believe and any changes may have been the tubes warming up, me warming up, or my ears getting used to the sound in the room. My initial thoughts were:
1) The blue is louder than the Greenback, and I could play loud and clean on the amp where it would have started distorting previously.
2) The distorted sound was smoother, thicker, but slightly less dynamic. The clean sound was fuller, more dense, and a bit darker overall.
3) There was more mid range and less sparkle/highs with the blue, which helped tame the brightness of the Tele, although this resulted in my Tele sounded less Tele-like and more like a humbucker equipped guitar which was fun for big rock tunes but I had to hit the strings hard to bring out the twang.
4) The overdrive pedals sounded a bit congested and flat though the blue speaker, as the speaker coloured everything so much in its own signature sound that there wasn't much difference between the pedals as you would expect to hear, and when combined with my thicker sounding Les Paul the sound was a touch too thick for me and I couldn't quite dial out the wall-of-sound to get some clarity and dynamics back for more subtle playing.
5) The best sound was using the amp without pedals and getting the distortion from the amp itself with the blue speaker for both guitars, and the big rock sound with my Les Paul was great, and I jammed out some crazy psychedelic rock stuff with the DMM going bonkers and was laughing how big it sounded and how is the Greenback ever going to compete with this???
Just to complete the testing process and make sure I was making the right decision to keep the blue speaker in there, I decided to install the Greenback to play it back-to-back for a short while to check it out in the same playing conditions, and then i'd be happy with my choice and i'd get on with enjoying my amp again and stop with this incessant testing. Well well well, I couldn't believe my ears, the Greenback sounded amazing! How could this be? Compared to the blue, the Greenback:
1) Is slightly quieter (I think the speaker sensitivity is 3db lower than the blue, which is enough to make a real-world difference) so I could run the master/gain a touch higher to get more tube breakup. Lovely.
2) The eq range seems more equally spread out so I have the lows, mids and highs in perfect balance.
3) The amp sounded much more lively and snappy, the notes were jumping out of the speaker as opposed to being pushed out by the blue, it's hard to explain but that's how it felt.
4) All my pedals sounded better through the Greenback, I could easily differentiate between them without having to check which LED was on to see what pedal I was using, and the extra mids on the KOT or Decibelics Golden Horse could duplicate that thicker blue speaker sound so I had both speaker tones at my disposal now.
I didn't want the Greenback to be better as I had just shelled out quite a bit of money for a brand new Celestion Blue speaker, but it was undeniable, and the price difference was moot. I am primarily a tele player, but even the thicker tones of the blue were not enough to make me want to keep it in the amp compared to the liveliness and excitement that the Greenback produces, it just suits the amp so well.
Finally I can accept that this is the best speaker choice for my amp, the way I play, and the sounds I want it to produce. The Doc certainly knows what he is doing, but I just had to try this and hear it for myself, and I am once again reminded that i'm not an amp designer so I humbly defer to those who clearly know better than me!