Celestion, China or England made?

[Slobrain]

I ran across a real nice Randall warhead 4x12 cab in a pawn shop and its loaded with Celestion vintage 30's but I was wanting to see if anyone here knows how to tell if these are China made or England made?

Is there a way to tell where these are made at? I don't see anything on the labels to say China made?

Thanks

SLO

[Bruce / Mission Amps]

Most of the Celestion speaker parts have been made in China for years and years but they were assembled in the UK.
Now they are are assembled in China too.
The Chinese ones have a very slightly bronze tint to the metal plate that is glued to the magnet and the lugs are mounted on a thinner piece of fish paper.

[Slobrain]

Hey Bruce,
Thanks for that info. Well if the parts were made in china then I guess assembling them in china doesn't change the sound any?
Unless they say hero...instead of hello...bahahah

I see celestions on Ebay and they sometimes follow with a question from a potential buyer like, Where were these made chine or UK?

I wonder why the english stopped assembling these? Job cuts? hmmmmm.

SLO

[rocket]

Hey Bruce,
Thanks for that info. Well if the parts were made in china then I guess assembling them in china doesn't change the sound any?
Unless they say hero...instead of hello...bahahah

I see celestions on Ebay and they sometimes follow with a question from a potential buyer like, Where were these made chine or UK?

I wonder why the english stopped assembling these? Job cuts? hmmmmm.

SLO

GREED!

For 130 Euros they should be able to make on New Bond Street in London.

[R.G.]

There are two kinds of manufacturing companies these days:

a. those that are manufacturing in China

b. those that are going broke

If you were running a company, which way would you go?

[bob p]

fwiw i have a pair of V30 on hand that i bought several years ago before the move to chinese assembly. time being my worst enemy, they sat in boxes for the past 5 years and i never mounted them.

i just bought a pair of new chinese production V30. the construction looks identical to me. i finally got around to mounting all of the speakers a couple of weeks ago in a pair of identical 2x12 cabs. out of curiosity i hooked up an a/b switch to jump back and forth between the english and chinese speakers. they're sonically indistinguishable to my ears.

the result? i'm going to keep the new chinese speakers and sell the "Made in England" speakers to those eBay guys who are obsessed with location location location.

[Zoe_N_Iain]

Same here. I just re-speakered a WEM 2x12 combo for an old mate of my Dad's. One of the speakers is a Made in England v30 from 5 or 6 years back that the guy's had sitting in the amp since he got it and discovered both speakers were knackered. The other is a brand spanker he bought last week. There is absolutely no audible difference between the two.

(Oddly, he bought the second v30 to replace a Celestion Blue he had in there. I thought it sounded awesome with one v30 and one Blue, but apparently he prefers 2x v30. No accounting for taste, I suppose!)

[rocket]

There are two kinds of manufacturing companies these days:

a. those that are manufacturing in China

b. those that are going broke

If you were running a company, which way would you go?

I don't want to start a discussion on this issue but I would like to state that it seems to be possible making speakers in the US for price of a chinese celestion or even less.
Weber is an example.

[TD_Madden]

well, Weber sells direct, so "we've cut out the middleman" certainly holds true.
IMHO, Ted is still building his reputation; Celestion is sitting on their past reputation.

[R.G.]

I don't want to start a discussion on this issue but I would like to state that it seems to be possible making speakers in the US for price of a chinese celestion or even less.
Weber is an example.

I don't want to start a discussion on this issue either, but I would like to state that Weber can do this only because Celestion does not view him as a threat and can make more money by ignoring him than by competing with him.

Celestion chooses to make the most money, and so keeps their price up at what the market will bear, based on their name. It is not possible for Weber or any other speaker maker to compete head to head on price with Chinese made speakers. In a way, Celestion is doing Weber and other US makers of speakers a favor by keeping the retail price high.

It seems to be possible to compete with US made speakers because there is not currently a price war on speakers. Try selling US-made clothes that are not boutique items valued far beyond their actual worth.

[Slobrain]

Fellas, FYI,
I just spoke with Dave at Avatar and he said the parts for the celestion 30, 75 and a few others have been made in China for around 11 years and asembly there has been 6 years.

Only the celestion blue and a few other hi dollar ones are still built in the UK.

He said the sound of the China made speakers are exactly the same as the old UK made speakers eccept for the break in tone of the old ones.

SLO

[bob p]

Dave is certainly someone who likes to talk, isn't he? If you ever spend time with him on the phone, he'll tell you all sorts of interesting things. He's a premier salesman.

My recollection of the time frame for the move to China is not 6 years, but then time flies doesn't it? Maybe I've had one of my projects back-burnered for longer than I had thought. How embarassing!

I guess I could Google for press releases, or go on a hunt for my receipts, or examine my new and old speakers for date codes, but I don't feel the need to do that to convince myself that what I have is what I have. I have two pair of V30: a pair of new Chinese, and a pair of NOS/NIB Ipswitch that have never been mounted, and sat in their the original single-unit brown corrugated paper boxes for a great many years.

If you read the various guitar-oriented boards on the web, you'll hear all sorts of stories and opinions about UK vs. Chinese Celestions. Most A/B comparisons have been impaired by the fact that people were typically trying to compare used UK speakers to new China speakers. Because I just back-burnered one of my speaker projects for way too long, I ended up with a unique opportunity to compare original, never mounted, NOS and still-in-the-sealed-box UK V30 to new Chinese production V30. Here's how we did the test:

Both sets of V30 were mounted in identical 2x12 cabs that were purchased from Avatar at the same time. Both sets of speakers were broken-in with pre-recorded programming at ear-splitting SPL for 48 continuous hours; both cabs were attached to a mono HiFi amp that played each of the following CDs for 12 hours each: Led Zeppelin's BBC sessions, Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, RHCP's Blood Surgar Sex Magik, and AC/DC's Back in Black. After 48 hours of hammering in "the booth," the speakers were considered "broken-in" and we performed "live" testing with guitars and amps.

The test guitars included a Teles, Strats, and LPs equipped with P-90s and Burstbuckers. Amps included a Mesa Mk IV, a vintage Plexi, a 5F6 bassman clone, and several other miscellaneous amps including various Champs, Deluxes and whatnot. While one person played, someone else used an A/B switch to switch the cabs back and forth between the speakers so that the identity of the speakers wasn't known to the player.

None of the players was able to tell the speakers apart using blinded tests. The UK and China V30 were indistinguishable at every volume level, with every amp and guitar combination we tried. Doing blinded A/B tests, no player has ever been able to reliably discern between the two. The only thing about the UK/Chinese speakers that appears different is a subtle change in the label (Ipswitch England is present on the UK speakers vs. absent on the Chinese), and the box they came in.

That's the result of our littke A/B experiment that we did with the old and new V30. We controlled as many variables as we could (including the speakers' playing history) and found that when they've been broken in the same way, the speakers were sonically indistinguishable. (This was part of a bigger test that also compared some of the Eminence Red Coats to Celestions, and we noticed some definite differences there. I only mention this to show that I'm not totally tone-deaf and that I can hear differences in some speakers!)

I don't sell speakers, so I don't have anything to gain by telling stories that aren't true. The good news from our little experiement is that anyone who's interested in a V30 doesn't have to spend their time and money trying to find the UK version. The China speaker is the same speaker. The only difference is that it doesn't say Ipswitch England on the label.

HTH

[Slobrain]

Bob,
Thanks for the speaker info and it was excellent to say the least.

Yes, Ol Dave at Avatar is a salesman and, he does like to talk too. LOL...

I wanted to say your choice of break-in music on the speakers was most excelllent as well.

Well, I can understand that some guys want to make sure they are getting a good product as we all know some China made stuff is crap. but in saying that it's also up the manufacturer group getting the stuff made to make sure quality control is there too and looks like maybe celestion is doing just that.

BTW, how did you like the eminence redcoats after the test?

Thanks

SLO

[Steve Conner]

I applied for a job in Celestion's MI speaker R&D department a couple of months back. I didn't get it, but I did have a very interesting talk with them over the phone. They say that, while the speakers are made in China, Celestion keep a very close eye on what's going on. They have their own plant in China (whereas most Chinese stuff is contract manufacturing) and some of the Chinese employees get brought over here for training. They also seemingly hassle each other by video conferencing every day

[bob p]

Bob,
Thanks for the speaker info and it was excellent to say the least.
...
I wanted to say your choice of break-in music on the speakers was most excelllent as well.

Thanks. I chose those CDs to try to give the speakers a good work out and to loosen up the cones. From a logistical standpoint, the break-in period was the hardest part of the test. To be friendly to the neighbors, I had to do the break-ins over an extended period of time, typically 6 hours every day over the course of a week. It seemed like it took FOREVER.

Being able to tolerate the noise limited how many speakers we could test. We did the V30s, new Greenbacks, and Eminence Tonker & Governor. The break-ins for those alone took a month of 6-hour runs. The good news is that I now have a standardized break-in procedure that I'll be using on everything that I compare in the future.

The Greenbacks got discussed pretty extensively in another thread about boominess in avatar cabs. The 2x12 configuration suffers pretty badly from cone cry if you use an amp that has any sort of power. The 2x12 Greenback config is definitely only good for little amps. For a 50-watt amp you definitely need a 4x12 or things can get pretty ugly.

I kind of hate to admit it, but the Redcoat part of the test got cut short before I had enough time to form a good opinion on the Eminence speakers. I just got tired of the constant mess of loose speakers, cabs and wires all over the place, and I needed a break. So I gave up and shoved everything into storage for a while. I haven't had the desire to start it all over, so the extended test of the Redcoats is still on the back burner.

My preliminary take on the Redcoats is that they were both exceptionally bright sounding in an open backed cab. Being an EVM fan, I think that Celestions are bright enough, and the Redcoats seem brighter still. The Tonker is exceptionally clean and its so bright that its very much an "in your face" sort of speaker. I really like clean, balanced speakers, but for my tastes, I think the Tonker needs a little less top end and a little more bottom. Maybe the answer is a closed cabinet with insulation. That would probably make it sound more like my EVM-15L/TL-606 setup, which is a tone that I really like. Another option that might fit the bill is the Patriot RWB.

The Governor definitely falls into the zone of the V30 type of speaker. They have a lot in common. Like the Tonker the brightness seems to be accentuated by a subtle lack of fullness in the bottom. Right now I have an 8-ohm V30 and an 8-ohm Governor mounted in the same cab for A/B switching, but that cab has been tucked out of the way for a while and I really need to do some more extended comparisons. Before I put everything away I was listening for differences in very subtle breakup tones. I did notice a subtle difference in the clean to very subtle breakup tones that was hard to put my finger on. My first impression was that the Celestion might be a bit smoother with a little less grain, but I really need to spend more time with them to know for sure. I didn't get far enough to do heavy crunching comparisons, but in that regard I think that the Governor definitely has what it takes, and the price is hard to beat.

One thing that I can say about the break-in procedure is that all of the new speakers were exceptionally harsh in an "icepick in your ears" sort of way when the drivers were brand-new. 24-hours in "the booth" made a HUGE difference with all of the speakers, significantly softening the harshness on all of them. I repeated the break-in with a second 24-hour session for all of the speakers, and after 48 hours all of them sounded smoother still, but not sufficiently smoother to make it worth doing any more extended break-in. I think that the lion's share of the harshness gets beaten out in the first 24-hours, and after that you reach the point of diminishing returns.

HTH