Sunday, March 24, 2013

Bassman Amp Update

In our last episode regarding my new reissue Bassman, I mentioned that I was going to recone a quartet of CTS alnico speakers and try them out in the amp.

So, had the speakers reconed by Seattle's Around the Sound speaker reconing service.  Carsell, the owner, thinks that the speakers are actually Oxfords, not CTS, even though they look just like the CTS speakers.  However, the CTS speakers usually have a manufacturer's code stamped on the frame, and these speakers do not.  There are square blue Fender labels on the magnets, and a couple of these labels show a Fender part number of 064121 which indicates an Oxford speaker.  These speakers have 1.5" voice coils, are rated at 25 watts power handling, and were probably installed by Fender in their Super Reverb or Vibrolux Reverb amps in the early '70s.

After I picked up the reconed speakers, I installed them in the Bassman (a pain in the arse, by the way - the amp has to be removed to get the upper speakers out) and tried them out at a gig that night.  I didn't like them at all - they had a compressed, middy tone that I found uninteresting, so it's back to the reissue Jensen P10Rs for now.


Reconed Oxford speakers


Reissue Jensen speakers

The Jensens are too bright and crunchy to my ears, but I'll have to live with them for a while.  I believe that I will end up installing new Weber P10R clones in this amp.  More expensive, but I'm pretty confident that they will sound great. So...


Let's play some blues!

You can check out the Boneyard Preachers here.  See you at the nightclub!

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