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I've done a lot of technical reading over the last fortnight or so and my brain hurts. I'd appreciate some input from those with hands-on.
My reading has been into the metrics of speaker performance, specifically the relationship between size and performance. As I understand it, although guitarists tend to think of 12" as "standard" (albeit with excursions into 10" and 15") new speaker designs allow efficient performance at smaller sizes.
Many bass players -- who tend to be less conservative than six-stringers -- are already on 8". Now a few makers including Mambo, Raezers Edge and Earcandy have come up with cabinets that are designed to get guitar-appropriate sounds out of high-wattage smaller 8" speakers not necessarily designated for guitar use.
If I go down this route, it's a long-term thing -- quite distinct from all my messing with vintage Peavey combos. I'll likely end up building my own cabinet(s). Can anyone recommend appropriate speakers and a how-to? I saw that excellent long-running project for building a small-gig bass driver, maybe there's something similar for guitarists...
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05-05-2025 05:09 AM
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The most popular Phil Jones Bass combo has two 4" speakers at 90 watts. I have no idea how it would sound with a guitar, but I have heard bass players playing outside through PJB cub amps, and they sound terrific. The speakers he uses seem to be proprietary, though:
"PJB has applied its cutting-edge experience in designing small speakers to achieve a 4inch driver with Swiss watch precision.Using our extensive R&D facility whic hincludes the largest an-echoic chamber in the bass guitar amplifier industry and the transducer Klippel measurement system with laser technology, PJB was able to develop the proprietary PJB “long-thro” 4-inch speakers that have full frequency range up to the highest audio frequencies. Not only does this give greater clarity and transparency to your instrument, but also a high-fidelity sound to any backing track fed into the auxiliary input."
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Thx Ukena. Yup, sounds proprietary. Doubt they'd sell those 4inchers separately, great as they sound. So could I play through a PJB cab?
Well, I'd give it a go. However, my working assumption is that the PJB cabinets are tuned for bass -- helmholtz resonances and such. If I insist on playing tenor guitar, I'll need to build my own cabinet. If so I'd better spell out that, resourceful as I am, custom speakers are beyond my capabilities.
What speaker would be appropriate off-the-peg?
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This is what you're looking for. Home - Toob Speakers
I have a Metro, the website says it's got this inside of it.
The owner is a member of this forum, username: Gitterbug. He's really nice and I'm sure he'd reply if you sent him a private message.96 dB Jensen Falcon 8 speaker.
I run mine with a Quilter MicroBlock, but I'm going to try a BAM2000 micro bass head(currently on back order) to try and get more clean headroom.
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Aha! Thx Allan. I'd already noted Toob, but I thought they were closing the order book last Xmas.
Also, while I like the look of the Falcon 8, I'm really looking for a speaker rated for 75w or more. 4 or 16ohm would be preferable.
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I had a PJB Cub and a Briefcase for several years. Both were great for guitar. I play 7 strings, and the PJB amps & speakers really sounded great. They’re also bulletproof - I last spoke to him 12 to 15 years ago and at that time, he’d never had a warranty claim on a driver.
Originally Posted by Ukena
I sold them because the small amps weren’t loud enough for use on bigger gigs or in high energy blues bands. They’re no match for a Blu 6, for example. But for solo or small group jazz in smaller venues, they were great. Today, I could easily get by with a Cub and my big Quilter. But PJB stuff was expensive back in the day, and I sold them for close what I paid for them.
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Thanks for the PJB update, Never. This postscript is an oblique followup to my earlier question. Here's the excellent DIY small cab project that aired on TalkBass more than a decade ago:
Just a moment...
Note that I'm not proposing to build this cab, or even a rebuild -- I don't think the Basslite would be a good choice for my purposes. But I like the (punk-y) directness of the project and its low cost. I'd love to do something along the same lines.
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i did a ton of gigging on bass years ago...i only played amps when they were backline or borrowed, and even then typically went into the PA thru a nobel preamp (ampeg b15 in a box). the prevailing line of thinking was along the lines of your total amount of speaker size, rather than each individual's speaker size. but this doesn't necessarily carry over to guitar...a 4x10" for a bassist is a different beast entirely than a bassman or super reverb.
ive spent a good bit of time on a 2x8 raezer's edge cab in lessons, but never played one in a gig. 2x8" left absolutely nothing to be desired...sounded great on the low end, really nice and tight. i favor 10" and 12" speakers personally...but that's because there aren't a lot of 2x8" combos/cabs on the market, let alone smaller (i havent come across any 2x6" models, but would be far more interested in those than a 1x6").
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If you just want to play with design and build a small cab for guitar, try a pair of heavy duty 4" drivers like the Dayton Audio TCP115-4. I've used them & similar speakers in a few home built cabs, and they're impressive. Run a pair in series for an 8 Ohm load that'll handle 100+ Watts with ease. Put them in a cab that's ported in the design of your choice, and you'll have a great match for a little Class D head. There are many high quality 4" drivers out there, although I suspect none is a tough as the Phil Jones. Hertz has a full range 4" driver that should work well in a small 2x4 cab. These are car audio drivers, but I've found this genre to be well suited to guitar. If you want to spend more $, there are some pricey car speakers that will handle the power of a Boogie and put out great sound. The key is the cabinet in which you put them.
The 6" Eminence Beta in the Henriksen Blu / Bud is solid too - it sounds great, but a large part of that is the ported cabinet. You're building it yourself, so how good it will be is in your hands, For an 8, you might try the Warehouse American VIntage G8C. I'm in the process of putting a class D board and a Dayton 4" driver in my old Pignose. It died a long time ago, but it's about to have a resurrection as the Boogie Mark P .......
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Never, thank you so much for this excellent reply -- that is exactly the kind of response I was hoping for.
I will read the Dayton and Eminence spec sheets carefully but favour the Daytons for banal reasons -- I'm still running a Crate Powerblock and need to come up with a cab that will work well with that amp's output, 150wrms @ 8ohms. A series pair of Daytons in a small ported cab looks like a good match. I note that you chose the Daytons for your own project and would be interested to learn why.
I'd also be grateful if you would point me at your favourite online resources for cabinet design. I've found any number of small bass cabinet projects but guitar stuff tends to be 10" and up. FYI: main instrument will be a tenor guitar tuned GDAE, giving me a low around 100Hz -- but I'm using an octave box so my lowest output tones will not be too different from those of your 7-string.
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I put a pair of Daytons that I got cheap in a car years ago and didn't like them for that. So I tried them in a little cabinet and loved them for guitar. There are many brands out there with similar specs - I don't know that the Daytons are any better or worse than other 4" speakers with the same specs. But they're great value, and the expensive ones I've tried weren't appreciably better. I think the Phil Jones drivers may sound a bit smoother at high volumes, because they're truly long excursion voice coils and are built like tanks. Originally Posted by niftyprose
I used a Powerblock from the time they came out until a few years ago when I sold off my superfluous gear. They're excellent! One of the resons I sold the PJB amps was that the Powerblocks were significantly louder through any of my speaker cabs from 8" on up. And you can run them as stereo power amps with a pair of line signals, so they were fabulous for my Roland guitar synth. The B3 / Leslie patches were really convincing through a pair of 12" cabs.
I've been building speakers for decades, so I generally rough out the design myself, using ports or vents that I can resize easily for tuning. There are a few good sites for DIY speaker builders, like hificircuit.com and diyaudioandvideo. Here's an inspiring page of project cabinets. This site is pretty detailed and very useful in general. But it doesn't consider spakers below 8", and you'll probably need to port or vent your cab for 4" drivers. Here's a plan for a ported 12" cab that you could adapt to a pair of 4" drivers if you can find the formulae for internal volume, venting, etc. And here's a video on building a twin 4" guitar speaker cab. I don't think it'll put out decent jazz tone, but the builder does offer some useful tips to make construction easier and stronger. I suspect the ideal internal cabinet fvolume for a decent 2x4" guitar cab is probably twice the size of this one (mostly in increased depth). And it needs tuned venting or porting of some kind to extend the bass.
Your other choice for an unusual but effective way to deepen and tighten bass is to use a 3rd speaker as a damped passive radiator. Here's a guide to DPR cabinet design, with info on calculating size etc. You don't need to buy a special speaker to use as a DPR. Any decent speaker will work - you just shunt the terminals with a potentiometer so you can vary the resistance across the voice coil. It's the resistance that provides the damping by resisting cone movement. You can tune a DPR in use by adjusting the pot and listening to the sonic effect. I've built several DPR subqoofers, and the concept works great. I think it'd work well for guitar in a reasonably sized cabinet with a pair of driven 4" speakers plus an inexpensive 8 as the DPR.
Remember that the passive radiator is out of phase with the powered drivers. So it usually works best for me in either the back or the bottom of the cabinet. It does what a bass reflex port does - deeper bass with less distortion. But it's tighter than a reflex port and sounds great. I've never done this with 4" drivers, though. Most of my DPR cabinets have been with 12" drivers (active and passive), and I built one monster sub in our house with a pair of 15s for each channel.
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Wow, that's fantastic -- there's about a month's reading here, way too much to comment on immediately. Many thanks, Never.
Typically oblique response: when you pointed me at the Daytons, I was reminded of my old Bose WaveRadio, which I used extensively from 1990 up to its demise in 2000. It wasn't exactly hi-fi, but had a remarkable ability to render deep sound using tiny 2" diameter speakers. Since I'm hoping to pull off a similar trick with my speaker cabinet, I've been reading up on Voigt tubes. But your DPR approach might be smarter, not least because the pot which tunes the cone would presumably be tweakable at the venue.
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Bose was a strong believer in heavy EQ. The drivers in his original 901s were all 4” “full range” speakers. The secret sauce was the black box that came with them - it was major league EQ, complete with multiple distortions (phase, harmonic, IM etc). He pushed those tiny drivers in your radio really hard, and the way he got the illusion of bass was to heavily emphasize the 2nd harmonic. This creates intermodulation with what little fundamental there was, and the “subtraction tone” reinforces it. Originally Posted by niftyprose
The use of reflections and phase shifts gave Bose speakers the illusion of space and depth, and it was impressive. But the actual sound quality was mediocre at best. You can’t equalize a 2” (or even a 4”) driver to produce solid deep bass, high treble, and everything in between without violating the laws of physics. Bose built his sound around psychoacoustics, not fine sound.
The tiny speakers in Amazon Echo Dots are actually decent. But I can’t imagine using them in a guitar cab.
The moral of the story is that you need to use excellent speakers with robust voice coils in well designed cabinets to get clean, pure audio reproduction - and you’ll only get it in the frequency range in which the speaker was designed to operate. Those Daytons go down to 55 (which is probably the -10 dB point) on their own in an infinite baffle (ie an open back cabinet). E6 is 82.4 Hz, so they can do justice to a guitar in a well designed cabinet that flattens out response and minimizes distortion.
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I have a raezer's edge Luna 200 8" combo. It sounds great. But it sounds even better with a 10" extension cabinet with the 8".
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So I e gigged with my Quilter Aviator 1x8” combo for several years now. It comes stock with a Celestion TF 818 100 watt speaker. And I’ve always more or less liked it.
When I tried to replace it with even higher power Eminence,or other makers speakers. It never has been a good experience!
Im not sure what to look for other than spl ratings,frequency range and power handling. I’m done trying others and sticking with the Celestion!
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You can't just toss any 8" speaker into a cabinet and expect good results. The operating parameters known as Thiele-Small define the electrical, mechanical, and electromechanical properties of a speaker. The one you probably know best is the Q, which is a general measure of how well damped a speaker is by both its electrical and mechanical characteristics. The total Q also reflects how narrow the speaker's free air resonance peak is. But there are several parameters (list here, if you're interested) and they vary widely based on the speaker's design and construction. Originally Posted by jads57
Here's a nice table of the most common cabinet designs that work best with a given Q range:
The Quilter Aviator 1x8 is a closed back cabinet. Although not a hard and fast rule, closed back cabs are usually best for speakers with a total Q between 0.4 and 0.7. The Celestion TF0818 has a total Q of 0.427 so it's well suited to the Aviator cab. But the total Q of an Eminence 820H is 0.88. Most speakers with Q that high sound their best in open backed cabs. If you check the specs on multiple 8" speakers, you'll find great variation in their operating parameters. Before you buy a new speaker for a given cabinet, I suggest that you check the specs to be sure it's likely to perform well where you plan to put it. The chart and the "rule" it reflects are not ironclad, but they're usually accurate and a good place to start when picking a replacement speaker.
Keep in mind that there are several other things that affect speaker performance and suitability for a given cabinet design. Everything from cone composition,weight and thickness to voice coil weight to magnet strength to surround design etc will affect speaker performance. It ain't rocket science, but it's no slam dunk either.
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My personal experience is that I have not liked 8" speakers for guitar as well as 12". This includes ported 12" (Raezer's Edge), open back 12" (Fender Pro Reverb 12x2, tweed Deluxe, etc.), sealed 12" (Roland Cube 60 CMOS) versus 8" sealed (Redstone) and 8" open (Polytone Baby Taurus). But there are so many variables affecting the final sound- amp and cabinet characteristics as well as speakers.
I remain curious about getting a small rig that might be less prone to inducing feedback and getting woofy at volume through the strong bass response coming from the 12". I keep thinking about a Toob Metro or something like that and a BAM200, but my less than happy experiences with 8" cabs holds me back.
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I cover a huge variety of gigs with the Quilter MP8. From high-power big band, to small group, to rock. These two 8" amps have been my main rig for music theater work for years now. Originally Posted by jads57
Last edited by Woody Sound; Yesterday at 12:13 AM.
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I really don't like the sound of anything under 12" for a single speaker (and even them I prefer a high power, low end heavy speaker in as big a cabinet as practical). I have a Polytone Baby Brute 8", which is charming, but... it's no 12 (or better yet for a poly, 15).
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Yes, big is usually better sounding for my ears too, but small high quality speakers will sound better than big low quality speakers. IMHO. Originally Posted by vintagelove
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I was solidly in the bigger-speakers-are-better-speakers camp for 35 years. I used a 4x10 Magnatone in high school, a B15N for the next 10 years, then Twins, Boogies, etc. But I finally started to realize that I was just loving the thump of a severely bottom heavy sound and paid little attention to the rest of my tone. Even playing a 175 and then an L5, my tone was bloated and artificial. Part of the problem back then was that there were few decent small speakers and even fewer well designed cabinets to make the most of them. Part was that I was too easily impressed by dramatic sound and not focused on the overall sound of the guitar. When I listen to my great jazz guitar recordings from the '60s now, it's clear that I didn't sound like any of them. This simple fact escaped me in the day. Even through seriously big amps, the geats each had / have their own target tone. The tones of Wes, Barney, HR, Tal, Mundell, Kenny, JP, GB etc were / are much better balanced from top to bottom than any sound I ever made through those 12" and 15" speakers I thought were so great.
We now have excellent small options available. Phil Jones and others make great sounding combo amps and speaker systems with 4" drivers. The Toob Metro BG+, Bud 6, and Blu 6 deliver wonderful tone from 6.5" drivers, even at relatively high volumes. Great 8s abound from makers like RE & RevSound, and combo amps like the Little Jazz, the Milkman, and the sadly discontinued Quilter Micropro sound beautiful with 8s.
Maybe this will help overcome the "size matters" fear. Here's a track with my Ibanez AF207 (laminated 16" with heavy Bensons + 0.075" Chrome 7th and a Benedetto set B7) through a BAM200 and a Toob Metro GP+:
Here's my Eastman Jazz Elite (carved 16" with JS113s + 0.075" Chrome 7th and a set KA 14 pole HW) through the same BAM200 and a Toob Metro BG+:
Last edited by nevershouldhavesoldit; Yesterday at 01:36 PM.
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8” speakers for bass and jazz guitar have been around for at least 25 years. Most guitarists don’t want a hifi speaker, but choose a driver and cabinet as sort of an extension of their instrument, so while specs have some use there’s no way to know if a combination will work for you until you play though it.
I have an old Jazzkat amp with a small vented cabinet. I say “vented” since there’s no cavity that’s usually associated with a “port”. I’ve tried several 8” drivers in it over the years, and finally settled on the Eminence Beta-8A. It seems well suited to that cabinet and works well with a variety of guitars. It seems to have a smooth frequency response from bass to upper mids with no abrupts peaks or dips in the response. That make it easy to adjust EQ for whatever guitar I use it with and whatever environment I play in. The Beta-8A has been around a long time and has been used by many cabinet builders.
I have an identical cabinet with a different 8” driver (a now discontinued model with neodymium magnet) that I use as a backup. While I can dial in an acceptable tone most of the time, it usually takes a lot of tweaking of the tone controls or EQ pedal, and it never sounds quite as good to me as the Beta-8A. That may not be a fault in the driver or it’s magnet type—it might work well in a different sized cabinet or some tuning of the port. Since it’s just my backup I haven’t felt the need to experiment with improvements.
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That’s a lot of weight though, so not great for portable use. There might be lighter weight ways to as damping. I’ve got an old pair of Dynaco A10 speakers with their proprietary “Aperiodic” vents. That’s simply a hole in the cabinet covered with multiple layers of fabric to restrict airflow for mechanical damping, It smooths out frequency response in the bass at the cost of somewhat reduced efficiency. I’ve thought of experimenting with that approach on one of my vented guitar speaker cabinets, but haven’t gotten around to it. Originally Posted by nevershouldhavesoldit
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As always, exceptional playing in your recordings and the sound is right for your style. I'm envious. Originally Posted by nevershouldhavesoldit
But, some players might prefer the bigger sound you get from larger speakers. (Some might call it a duller sound.)
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A pair of 4” active drivers and a 6” or 8” DPR would need no more internal volume than a single 8” cab and would weigh about the same. The DPR can have a very small magnet & voice coil because the only current flowing through it would be that induced by the coil as it’s pushed and pulled through the magnetic field by the back pressure from the driven speakers. Originally Posted by KirkP
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