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USING YOUR NEW SPEAKER CAB
BREAKING IN
Your 1x8 Cabinet features a Jensen C8R speaker. We have found that these Jensen speakers are
typically a bit stiff straight from the box. They tend to soften up the more you play through them, and
they reach a nice bright, clear tone once they are mostly broken in. If you are using this cabinet with
the Percolator amplifier the speaker will take a very long time to break in because it is such a small
wattage amplifier compared to the capacity of the speaker. It is possible to speed this process along by
using a larger amplifier – provided it is less than 25 watts, and capable of accepting an 8 ohm load.
Plug the amplifier into the cabinet and keep the volume rather low for a while (about 10 minutes) with
guitar chords or background noise. Then turn the amp up to about 15-20 watts and play full, fat, bass
heavy chords on your guitar, or anything to get the cone really moving and stretching. Focus on the
mids and the lows. Percussive playing is also very helpful. After about 15 minutes with this type of
signal through your speaker, it will be about 90% broken in. It will slowly continue breaking in over
the next few years of playing through it.
DRIVING CAPACITY
We developed this product as a companion to the Percolator, a nifty 2-watt, single-tube guitar amplifier
kit, but the speaker is rated at 25 watts with 8 ohms impedance. You can safely drive it with any amp
rated up to 25 watts.
CHANGING THE TONE OF YOUR CABINET
If you are the type of person who likes modifying gear, then you may be interested in experimenting
with changing some things about your cabinet. One of the easiest tone mods you could perform on
your cab is to change the speaker. We have chosen this Jensen speaker because of its response and
tone qualities when driven by our Percolator 2-watt amplifier head. However, tone is mostly a matter of
preference and taste, so there could be an endless number of different 8” speakers that could be used
depending on what you like. We encourage you to try them out (see the next section on replacing the
speaker). Find one that works well for the type of music you want to play.
Another mod is to experiment with different port sizes. This cab is mostly open-back, which gives some
nice dimensional presence to the sound when playing in a smaller room or if the back of the cab is near
a wall. The sound seems to swirl around as our ears are affected by the phase differences, but you
could add some more ports to make it closed-back. This takes away from the natural, swirling sound,
but gives a much more punchy, stronger mid-range tonality. This is one of the reasons the classic
Marshall (closed back) sound can cut through a mix so well. You can always mix and match port sizes
too. You could even bore holes in some of them to “port” the box. If you are really motivated, you
could define the frequency response you’d like from the cab by playing around with a program like
“BassBox Pro,” using the Thiele-Small parameters of the driver (available on the Jensen website) and
the internal volume of the cabinet (which is about 380 cubic inches) to determine the port type and size
you’d need. Between changing the speaker and playing with the ports, the possibilities are endless!
Be creative, experiment and explore!
Содержание 1x8 Cabinet
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