stereotactic
Experienced
Front loaded cabs are usually sealed even better than a "regular" guitar cab so I don't think there's a big difference. This may not be scientifically correct but I think when speakers are front-loaded they have a slightly different character to them. They're being advertised as "not being so beamy but spreading the sound better" which I haven't really noticed but there are some things in the mids that I feel are a bit different. Like around 1500hz there's a peak resonance sometimes but not always. I've only had about 6 front loaded cabs at the studio so it's hard to say.
Ported... I've only had bass cabs that are ported so I'm not entirely sure. I tend to much prefer closed back vs open back so punching a hole in a cabinet doesn't sound like a solution to me but I may be wrong. Again, no experience of 4x12s that are ported I think. Someone once said that it's similar to punching a hole in an acoustic guitar, as in it only messes with the focus of the cab. I don't have an opinion on it because I want to study things before forming an opinion.
Thanks for the detailed response and let me start by saying these IRs do sound good and I intend to buy them.
Not to go far out on a tangent but please bear with me as I do have a larger point. It’s my understanding that a properly designed ported/bass reflex enclosure is more efficient in terms of SPL per watt due to it’s phase correction of the front and rear speaker waves, flatter in its response due to the port limiting/canceling out the speaker’s resonant peak, and an extended low frequency response thanks to greater amount of air being displaced during excursion compared to a sealed cabinet. All this of course being dependent on the skill of the designer and the choice of speaker around which the design must be based. While I think you are right that there can be midrange interference from the internal enclosure reflections, these can be minimized by, as you also mentioned, not having a perfect square between width and height. The only ported production guitar cabinet I know of is the aptly named 1x12 Theil Mesa cabinet.
I bring this up because it seems to me that most guitar speaker enclosures are not well designed for any particular speaker or objective beyond the better damped and faster transient response of a closed cabinet. So, when we talk about a particular guitar speaker’s characteristics, they are only partially known to us, why? Because how much of what we are hearing is the speaker’s inherent characteristics, vs how much is the cabinet and it’s physical limitations of internal volume, material choice/construction, dampening material or total lack of, bracing, whether or not the cabinet is coupling/sitting directly on the floor or another cabinet, etc?
This is a long way to explain that I have been out of touch with the guitar cabinet world as I gave up long ago trying to figure out which guitar speakers “sound best” because beyond more or less breakup, I could never really tell whether what I was hearing was the speaker or the effects of a set cabinet design and it’s construction, like a slanted Marshall 4x12, and different speakers fighting more or less against that same basic design. Why do I make this point here?
I think this is a major source of fatigue as I wade through the many IRs: when a cabinet sounds “good” it almost seems like an accident, never mind whether the IR is done well. There are lots of different spec models of the same speakers, V30’s for instance, then we have the different wattages, magnet compositions and place of manufacture. But are any of these cabinets even designed around the resonant peaks and Theil small parameters of the V30 models? I doubt it as a big company like Marshall has not changed its cabinets very much at all for the last 50 years. As an IR producer, it certainly is not your fault if a speaker cabinet is not designed well, but it would go a long way in explaining why it’s so hard to find an IR we like. If we think we like a particular speaker and an amp company puts one in their cabinets, we might buy it. But then, it doesn’t sound like the last cabinet we had with V30’s in it, why? Were they Chinese? Was the cabinet made out of heavy birch ply with tight joinery? Was it the particular cloth grill? The variables are too many as are their interactions. I put off using the cabinet block in my Axe 2 for these reasons but now jumped in with both feet on the 3, what have I done?! It certainly is a long and deep rabbit hole..
Last edited:
