Over the weekend I fixed an amp for a customer, a 1965 Super Reverb reissue. I took it to practice and Myles gave it a good workout. Just for fun today I pulled out my 59 Bassman reissue to do some comparisons between the speakers in it vs my Bassman reissue. My Bassman was built in 1994 and it has the Eminence 10's, the Super is about a year or two old and it has the new made in Italy Jensens. It was very easy to just use the Bassman amp and switch between either cabinet. My Bassman has been modified with a 1/4 inch jack so that I can use it with a 2 ohm Hot Plate attenuator.

I don't know if everyone will agree with me but I tend to like the Eminence version of this speaker better than the Jensen. The Eminence tend to sound fuller in the mids with less piercing highs when overdriven. I don't know if the difference might be mostly from the age and usage difference between the test candidates or which speaker sounds closest to the original Jensens used in the old Bassman amps, any ideas??

I've heard some people complain about the new 59 Bassman LTD which also uses the new Jensens instead of the Eminence could there be a connection?

Back in the Hiwatt days, I compared a bunch of small 10s from Jensen and Utah against a Webber VST and a couple Eminences. I also auditioned a bunch of Eminences against the Fanes that were being used in the Fernandes Hiwatts by the Brit bastards because I was ordered not to use the Fane in the production DC40. No Eminence speaker I listened to in either context gave me any real satisfaction. I finally decided on one custom Eminence for the DC40 and the small amp project never got off the ground.

There is an Eminence in my BFDR, put there by a friend who was using the amp at the time after the Jensen C12Q blew. That C12Q was just amazing in that amp, and it is a copy of that (with a little better power handling, they only last a coupla years in a BFDR) would be perfect. However the Eminence that is in there does not suck by any means.

I trust your impressions. We may, after all, not have the same tastes in tone, since we have not spent any time together testing crap we don't know. But I can't discount your impressions.

Perhaps Eminence has done a better job in the 10 years since I played with their products.

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Tone, especially guitar tone can be very subjective no doubt about it... I found it to be very interesting to hear the two speakers right next to one another, they were not in the same cabinet so that too could account for some of the differences.

Generally speaking I tend to favor lower wattage or should I say lighter speakers in most guitar situations at least with my band. We do recording and we play gigs but our venues are generally rather small and our stage volume isn't very high when compared to most bands. Our rhythm guitarist Myles uses a 1974 50 watt Marshall head into a 4x10 Peavey Classic open backed cabinet and the Marshall Power Brake attenuator is down about 3 or 4 clicks most of the time, not very loud.

These tests are always a lot of fun and often the results can be surprising. I wonder how it would sound if I tried two of each speaker in the Bassman(can't really do that now) but it could be very interesting I have not experimented with doing the mix and match in the same cabinet what are your thoughts on that game?

Dave, back in my guitar playing days (70s), I had a beautiful black face bandmaster with the large 2x12 JBL cab. During a speaker swap I had both JBLs out of the cab. The drummers little brother crushed both dust covers and poked holes in the cones. I didn't have the money to replace the JBLs so I bought a pair of 12" Eminence drivers. I can't tell you how dissappointed I was with the sound. I knew they wouldn't be JBL's, but I wasn't prepared for how much they weren't JBL's. It was like switching from a tube amp to a SS amp. I was playing a '72 blonde neck Tele. Don

I've noticed that Fender is stuffing Eminence into their amps.

http://www.instrumentpro.com/P-FEN0215900000?source=froogle




Here is an interesting pair of 3 speaker Fenders used by the Stones on the Licks tour. No mention on what speakers are in them.

My experiences with Eminence speakers have generally been very favorable, I've always liked them but they also have about a million different models so who knows, maybe I've been lucky.