kabong said:
The reason I ask is that at least for me, one of the things I always liked about the old Marshall cabs ( I'm old so my Marshalls had no master volume... you just cranked them & let the speakers break up) was the unique way in which the Celestions sounded when overdriven as opposed to say eminence etc.
I agree that there are huge differences between the sounds of different speaker models when you play an overdriven amplifier through them, but I do not agree that distortion from the speaker itself is a major contributor to that sound.
That's what really gave the old Marshall's their sound.
Like you, I've owned and gigged with pre-MV Marshalls. They do each have a characteristic tonality (which differs notably from model to model and even example to example of the same model), and the speaker's sonic signature is a big part of that, but I hear just as much difference between the
clean (i.e., with the amp operating at lower volume) sounds as the overdriven ones.
I remember some guys would use SRO's(EV spkrs) or JBL's in their cabs. The amps sounded good but not Marshall.
When you measure the responses of different guitar speakers, you see huge variations among them, regardless of the level at which you test them. If there is audible distortion in a speaker that can actually be relied on as part of the sound, it must be present when you play through the speaker at a low level. This type of distortion is very obtrusive and nonmusical, so it is not present in any of the popular guitar speaker models. Once you've driven any speaker to the point of audible power-induced nonlinearity, you will be very near or beyond the point of causing permanent damage. If you play a speaker at this level for the duration of a gig, for example, it will almost certainly fail before closing time.
What I want to know is can you create your IR's using a cranked cab?
The impulse response models only the linear portion of a device's behavior. It cannot account for distortion caused by the speaker. It is possible to implement an IR-
based model that accounts for distortion. According to Cliff, the Axe does not have the resources for this type of model. I claim that any difference it would make would be barely audible, if at all. The sound of a physical speaker being truly overdriven is not at all a pleasant thing to hear, and it is not a sound that you will hear for long before it is followed by silence.
