Tone Tubby Champ Speakers

[riz]

Hi all. Just wanted to make a quick post about this. Yesterday I picked up some TT speakers for some amps I'm working on. I live near A Broun Sound, so I stopped in for some speakers. Brought home one alnico and one ceramic 8" 4-ohm. First I tried the ceramic with my '64 Vibro-champ. Insane bass, but a bit of the "can of bees" on top when cranked. Didn't try the alnico till later, thought it would be more of the same... Was I wrong! OMG this speaker rocks. They both sound just ridiculously huge compared to the ceramic Fender replacement I had in the amp (and I thought it was o.k., no major complaints), but this one is special. Stays tight all the way up, with a really organic crunchy rock sound. Beautiful cleans. No bees. Compared to the TT, my old speaker sounds like a cardboard box. I really want to like the ceramic TT, I like ceramic speakers in general, and this one shows a lot of promise. For an 8" speaker, it actually packs the WHUMP, if you know what I mean. I'm going to do some tweaking over the coming weeks, I'm wondering if the "bees" is just blocking distortion or some such, and the alnico just masks it. Had a similar experience with another amp I was working on recently, where one brand of speaker was masking a circuit problem that grid blockers eventually fixed. My VC is still pretty much stock, the only change being cathode resistor value, as it was red-plating the power tube with the stock value. If it is the circuit and not the speaker, I will be in love with that ceramic. I feel like the speaker is just allowing me to hear the circuit, as my old ceramic had the same sound when cranked, but nowhere near the bass response of the TT. Since I had the chance to do this head-to-head, and partially on someone elses dime, I thought I would share with ya'll. These speaker aren't broken in yet, and I will share the results of my further Champlifier tweaking on down the line, on this thread.

[Steve Conner]

Thanks for the tip. What power rating are these 8" speakers?

The "bees" thing: Most amps actually sound like that when cranked. Try cranking one through a hi-fi speaker for a really nasty surprise. It's the job of a good guitar speaker to filter it out. I believe it's common for speakers to sound harsh when new and mellow out as they break in, so give the ceramic one a chance.

[riz]

These are 25w I believe... pretty hefty and they don't crap out when driven hard. The ceramic is going to live in a Herzog-type thing, that also gets used as the Champ that it is. It just sounds so much better tapping off the output when driving an actual speaker, so it's going to have a chance to break in!! I'm going to experiment with tuning the circuit to the speaker, just to see what I can learn.

[riz]

At the risk of starting to sound like an advert, the biggest deal with this speaker is that I can now crank the bass knob while cranking the amp, and it just gets huge, the bass frequencies seem to produce harmonics in the amp, probably because it's working harder to reproduce them. I spent a lot of time searching the web for Champ speakers, and ended up in confusion, especially since Weber is out of stock on practically everything that looks interesting, and the Jensen is fired. (I put one in a friend's amp and didn't really like it...) So that's a big reason why I'm posting my feelings about this. I have a lot of cool amps, but I play my Champ every day.

[Steve Conner]

Hmm, that's too bad. My new amp is making about 40W on the high power setting and would probably eat it for breakfast. I've never seen a high-powered 8" speaker for guitar, so I'm currently using an Eminence Beta 8 PA speaker in it, and the back of the speaker is pretty warm after cranking it for half an hour.

There is something I like about the tone of 8s in general though. They're great for a practice amp, you get a nice clear, balanced tone. They don't really have the cone area or the midrange honk to rock a gig though: my high powered amp was an experiment to address that. Maybe I need to make a 2x8" or 4x8" version.

Do the Tone Tubby ones have hemp cones?

[riz]

Yeah they're hemp cones. I was thinking a 3x or 4x8" would be cool! I swear when I first went to the website they had a 50w 8" ceramic listed, but I could have been, and probably was, wrong. I was originally looking for something to put in the Champ that would NEVER blow.

[riz]

Loving this alnico more every day. Just plugged in a Gretsch with filtertrons (usually a single-coil guy), and I forgot I was playing a Champ for a while... On a side note, the hum-buckers gave a sound more like my push-pull amps with a single coil. One thing that bothers me about the SE Champ, at least with single-coil pickups, is that it's just so DIRECT sounding, for lack of a better description. (geez, must be a guitar player, the thing sounds awesome and I'm still complaining!) Maybe the phase cancellation in the hum-bucking filtertron when played through a SE amp sort of simulates the sound of a single-coil into a PP? Kind of the same but in reverse?