New gamechanging speaker?

E

Emerald Green

Inspired
Hi guys,
New here. First thank you all for making this forum to such a great place.
I have the axefx 3 for a year now but have not been able to decide for a good live set up. And as I have been following this forum for some time now I know that there are a lot of us having a hard time to decide for frfr speakers or the amp in the room feel.
I just found out about this new speaker from celestion F12 - X200 and it might be that gamechanger we've been waiting for. So I thought I share it.
There is a great review of it at sound on sound magazine - you can Google it if you dare to go into that rabbit hole. I wasn't able to attach the link. Interested in what you guys think of it.
 
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Not really new, announced forever ago and just rather hard to get in the states. Lots of threads talking about too.

Seems a decent option but not exactly a game changer, and their cab plan is pretty huge, but reports show it doesn’t work ideally just sticking it into any guitar cab.
 
Part of why a guitar cab gives you that "amp in the room" sound is the very tight dispersion pattern they have vs the wide smooth dispersion pattern that most FRFR speakers aim for. The frequency response is only a small part of the story.
If you want flat response but more "amp in the room" you might want to try a single line array box aimed at your knees that would give you the tight dispersion aimed at your knees guitar cab tone. You could also try using multiple 10" pa speakers set right next to each other in very close proximity.
 
It's been several months since it was announced and failed miserably to deliver on availability/distribution. I was really curious to try them on a 4x12 cab pushed by a SD Powerstage, but the very few reviews of people that got ahold of them have been less than stellar.
 
Just got an email yesterday from sweetwater.com saying they have stock. I had signed up for the mail me when available list so long ago I cant even remember when that was. I was lucky enough to acquire a couple a few weeks ago and loaded one up. Overall I think it sounds pretty good. As far as amp in the room feel I think it has a lot to do with the cabinet. Nothing beats a baltic birch cabinet that is big in size in my opinion. One of these days I plan to video some side by side tests of the F12-x200 in a Xitone wedge and 2 in a cheap 2x12 cab. Vrs the stock Eminence in the Xitone passive and a Friedman ASM-12. Matrix GT1000FX to power the passive speakers. It's just been too damn hot to drag everything to a warehouse.
 
dr bonkers said:
Has anyone here compared the Celestion F12-X200 head-to-head with this, https://www.fane-international.com/view-product/SOVEREIGN-12-250TC ?
Click to expand...
Looks like a 12" speaker with a whizzer cone.


EDIT: Further digging into that website, well, it gets confusing. The specs say one story, but the the graphs say another. And every review on the page is a rough translation into English, with the word "thomann" (in lower case) thrown in at random. Here's their frequency response plot, presented by the manufacturer without explanation:

1566453048785.png
 
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Rex said:
Looks like a 12" speaker with a whizzer cone.


EDIT: Further digging into that website, well, it gets confusing. The specs say one story, but the the graphs say another. And every review on the page is a rough translation into English, with the word "thomann" (in lower case) thrown in at random. Here's their frequency response plot, presented by the manufacturer without explanation:

View attachment 57634
Click to expand...
The datasheet under downloads have more info, says the blue line is the response 45 degrees off-axis.
 
yeky83 said:
The datasheet under downloads have more info, says the blue line is the response 45 degrees off-axis.
Click to expand...
That helps. The curtains still don't match the drapes, though. The specs say 45 Hz - 17 KHz at 6 dB down. But the plot shows a 20 dB variation over the same range.
 
Rex said:
That helps. The curtains still don't match the drapes, though. The specs say 45 Hz - 17 KHz at 6 dB down. But the plot shows a 20 dB variation over the same range.
Click to expand...
Yup. The graph seems to indicate that maybe it's a 95 dB sensitivity speaker with -6 dB @ 45 Hz, a nice line on 95 dB and all. Seems to me that was probably the starting point before they fudged the numbers... :p

Reminds me of this: https://www.prosoundweb.com/channels/av/3_db_or_-6_db_whats_the_difference/
 
I tried the celestion F12 - X200 installed in 1 x 12 and 2 x 12 cabs. I returned them. I still prefer my guitar cab for tone.
 
I bought one recently and then read Yek's review while waiting for it to arrive and his experience had me worried.
I respect his opinion as I've found him to be consistently spot on in all things AxeFx for many years now, (although some of his presets I've tried were not good to my ears but that can be attributed to all sorts of subjective variables in gear used and musical tastes in general so it doesn't diminish the value I generally put on his opinion).

That said, I like the F12-X200 so much I wonder if he got a bad one or something because I'm seriously thinking of selling my pair of CLR's since I keep wanting to use the F12-X200 instead of the CLR's... and I don't even have the correctly designed cab...I'm using a Mesa Thiele cab...

I'm going to give it another weeks worth of playing and another round of A/B testing and hopefully get the Celestion design cab built soon because I think a pair of cabs with the F12-X200's in them will make me very happy and the money from the CLR's can get me a pair of good studio monitors which I need since my cheapo Behringer Truths are less than awesome.
 
@randombastage - That is the good news I was hoping for!
I was thinking that the engineers at Celestion had to come up with a really good speaker if they wanted the attention from the modeling community.
So now it might be my solution too. Great to hear you are happy with how they sound.
 
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