Suggestions for speaker replacement - '68 Bassman Cab

[seamonkey]

Knotty pine cabinets! The good old days. I had the same cabinet back when I was a pup. They sound good at moderate volume.

That is interesting and seems like I can't find good wood lately unless I rip apart old furniture or flooring.
It wouldn't hurt to put a sealer coat on the internal wood to stabilize it. Mainly if the screws are tightened down in the winter too much.

Solid wood can shrink and expand with humidity. I've seen elsewhere where someone notices a loose screw in the winter and they tighten it down, then comes summer with higher humidity and the wood stretches, then the screws are loose again the next winter. Worst sometimes the wood can split. Solid wood is tricky business, but storing inside, just like furniture, can be fine.

 

[Redbrangus]

It wouldn't hurt to put a sealer coat on the internal wood to stabilize it.

I agree with this concept, but I wouldn't take the back off again to accomplish it...do it if you have to take it apart again. But the point is well taken that real wood expands and contracts, especially across the grain. When you examine how real wood furniture is built, you can see that quality builders put a lot of effort into dealing with and accommodating this eventuality. Dimensional stability is just one reason why sheet goods are a better choice for speaker enclosures than real wood, regardless of whatever magic mojo 'knotty pine with finger joints' is alleged to impart.

To address the original post, I'll note that 8-ohm E-140's show up fairly regularly on CL around here for about $100. It's not an ideal match in that box as it exists, but it still would be a big improvement. Or...there's plenty of room on that baffle board for ports; an enterprising person might investigate how hard it would be to port the individual compartments to 40 Hz, the sweet spot for 140's. One potential problem I can see is that the box is so shallow that there isn't much room for duct length.

 

[treyandres]

I doubt the enclosure contributes much, if anything, to this particular combination.

Considering it's about the same internal volume as the Bergantino NV212T sealed cabinet, I would beg to differ. Pushing it with 500-700 watts into 600w of neo bass guitar speakers sounds pretty amazing, and very vintage. I've got close to a hundred hours of playtime on it now.

 

[Redbrangus]

I think you would get pretty similar performance with any sized enclosure up to nearly twice the internal volume of the cab you're using...there would be measurable differences, but I doubt you would notice them in actual use. IMO, of course. Using modern high-performance drivers and 10 times the power of the original amp sort of invalidates comparisons to the stock cab, which did suck pretty good.

 

[treyandres]

I think you would get pretty similar performance with any sized enclosure up to nearly twice the internal volume of the cab you're using...there would be measurable differences, but I doubt you would notice them in actual use. IMO, of course. Using modern high-performance drivers and 10 times the power of the original amp sort of invalidates comparisons to the stock cab, which did suck pretty good.

I believe it's more to do with the size enclosure the speakers are built to work in. These neos are optimized to work in a non-ported cab about the size of a '64 Bassman and have a front vented dust cap so they don't need an open cab for good cone cooling. They probably would not work well in a '68 Bassman cab because the volume is much greater than what the speaker mfg considers to be optimal for an unported cabinet. A stock 40 watt '64 Bassman actually sounds very good to me, it just doesn't have the volume one would need to keep up with a modern band, and the stock speakers won't handle the lows from a more powerful amplifier. For a miced recording, they actually sound pretty amazing. And for guitar, well...it's one of the classic tones. It's probably more likely the original enclosures were built to accommodate the speaker manufacturers optimal suggested cabinet volume.

 

[Redbrangus]

It's probably more likely the original enclosures were built to accommodate the speaker manufacturers optimal suggested cabinet volume.

I'm dubious of this, if for no other reason than Fender changed speaker suppliers somewhat randomly. I bought the same cab--also a 'drip-edge'-- in '69 with Utah drivers in it...that's why I suspected that was what was in the OP's box. Plus I doubt CTS had much in the way of a 'recommended optimal volume' in those days; as @Paulabass pointed out, nobody really knew much of anything back then. And I still believe that the main design criterion for the '68 vintage cab (and the Bandmaster, too) was just to make it big.

When I was looking for something smaller than that massive Bassman rig to carry around back in the early '70's, I really lusted for one of those earlier series cabs because I liked the form factor so much. I never found one, and instead landed on a new '73 Bassman Ten, another woefully inadequate rig.