Blown speakers? Or amp issue?

[Jimmydoolan]

So, someone gave me an old Vox essex bass amp, cart and all. The "guts" were in a shoe box. I got it all hooked up, and I think I connected all of the mystery wires to the correct places. I get a good strong loud sound out of the one working Oxford speaker, but it sounds fuzzy and blown. I took the speaker out of the cab and connected home stereo speaker wires to it, just to see. It sounds okay. Not blown like when playing bass through it. My question is... Do I get two replacement 12s, or should I be looking at the amp for the cause? Or, is the vox and bass delivering more power, and the junky home stereo can't push it as hard? Just signed up for TB. I am excited to see how this works. Thanks for your help.

[Bassmec]

Originally Posted by Jimmydoolan

So, someone gave me an old Vox essex bass amp, cart and all. The "guts" were in a shoe box. I got it all hooked up, and I think I connected all of the mystery wires to the correct places. I get a good strong loud sound out of the one working Oxford speaker, but it sounds fuzzy and blown. I took the speaker out of the cab and connected home stereo speaker wires to it, just to see. It sounds okay. Not blown like when playing bass through it. My question is... Do I get two replacement 12s, or should I be looking at the amp for the cause? Or, is the vox and bass delivering more power, and the junky home stereo can't push it as hard? Just signed up for TB. I am excited to see how this works. Thanks for your help.

Assuming that the cable feeding the blown sounding speaker in the cab is in good order then I would imagine if you played bass at the level of the stereo via your obviously functioning amplifier (its clean on the good speaker and the Amp only has one output transformer so the other speaker should sound the same) the blown driver will also sound OK-ish.
Test the voice coil alignment by pressing evenly on the cone and feel and listen for any scratchy sounds while moving the cone in and out
The cone/voice coil assembly is touching the magnet pole piece isn't it.

[Jimmydoolan]

Okay, so I tried other speakers with the amp and they all sound fuzzy. Not weak, just really fuzzy. If it was a fuzz pedal and not an amp it might sound cool. Anyway, I guess it is in the amp. All of the connections look solid to me. There are about a hundred caps and connections, So I'm not sure what I should be looking for. Any ideas? Maybe I should put the guts back in the shoe box and go for a vintage looking 2x12 extension cab?

[Bassmec]

I completely misunderstood, it's unfortunately a horrible little transistor amp that has nothing to do with the original british vox tube amps.
It basically couldn't pull the skin of a rice pudding as a bass amp, so sell it as is and tell the prospective customer thats what the Beatles used to
use.
Or use the cab to make a bass combo out of modern lightweight parts
Like find a Markbass LMII and a pair of eminence Neo 12" bass drivers
Get someone to work out porting on cab design software.