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SWR Silverado 4x8

Chef

Chef

In Memoriam
May 23, 2004
41,814
18,945
65
Columbia MO
Disclosures
Staff Reviewer; Bass Gear Magazine
#1
Scored one of these on ebay about a month ago; *finally arrived yesterday...:rollseye-at-incredibly-slow&difficult-seller:

silverado4x8.jpg




Dang, kinda disappointing...
I was hoping it would be Baby BlueII, only ''times two."
The BBII is strong and loud for it's size.
The Silver has 60 more watts, twice the drivers...
But, it clips early, possibly has bad drivers, and is a weeeeak 220 watts.
If the BBII is a strong 160 watts, and the Walkabout a crushing 300 watts, the Silverado is a weaka** 220.

Time to call Don at LDS and order 4 long throw 8's, and call Bob eurotubes and get a new JJ 12ax7 pretube, and see what that does...

I opened up the chassis to have a peek inside. I was thinking it would all pull out like the super redhead, in one bit.
Nope!
There's nuttin much in there boys...pre-tube and some other lil stuff attached to the front plate...the transformer and some other little bitss attached to the back plate...and no real chassis. Just air in the middle, and four wires connecting front to back!

Wierd!
 
#4
I have an LDS 2x8+5 with long throw 8's in it that I really like. I have not tried pairing it with this yet, but I will over the wknd.

I still plan on chucking 4 LDS long throw 8's in here, and perhaps taking out the LeSon tweet, and adding 4Mal's Galaxy 5" mid driver (see his avatar 2-12 mod thread at dudepit for details). But, LDS 8's and a JJ pre-tube first.

It's wierd, the BBII 2x8+5 kinda spanks this. Not what I would have expected.

Also, the port in the back is just a hole. It might well benefit from having a tube in the hole, as opposed to just a hole. I believe the BBII is "tubed" in the port, but I need to check to make sure.

It's amazing how few guts were in the "chassis."

Also, the Enhance control seems to be very much more sublte than any other than other SWR products I've had, including Super Redhead and the BBII...more-so even than the TFB420.
 
#7
Ummm...I don't think this is the case.
The drivers seem to move well pushing on the cones; nothing bindy or icky feeling like voice coil damage. I haven't checked for speaker phasing. If some were out to others, this could be part of it.
The insides look fine...smell fine;) No fires in there recently;)
It just "ain't allo that and a bag of chips" like I thought it was gonna be.
I feel I can change that tho!


ihixulu said:
Maybe the seller didn't disclose everything? As in "I don't recall if I dropped that thing off the back of my truck or fried the circuits at a show once."?
Click to expand...
 
#8
Well, I usually go to the gym for lunch.
In my haste to exit the house this morning, I packed towels, but no gym clothes. I'm an idiot!

So, went home and stuffed the LDS 2x8+5 long throw 8's cab under the Silverado.
BAM!
This sounds really, really good.
Really good.

I emailed Don about sending me 6 long throw 8's, I've been meaning to fit them into my BBII anyway.

If this all goes well, I'll prolly buy 8 more, and make my Henry 8x8 a 1600 watt ready wall of blissful, thick responsive destruction.



So there;)
 
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#9
Wow! Sorry to hear about your poor experience! I had one and it sounded great - not as loud as my next rig (Alembic F1-x, Carver PM 1.5, 2x Eden 410XLT) but what did I expect?

Hope the new drivers make a HUGE difference.

Dan K.
 
#10
A little bored between chores today.
Pulled the front panel to see what tube was in the pre: decent enuff, GT 12AX7...
I tried putting in a JJ I had laying around, no real diff, then tried a 12au7, 70% gain to the AX7...definatley borught the gain structure of the amp down, clips later...thus I was able to turn up a little more before the one (or two?) bad drivers started sounding stressed...but even when the input light and output lights "light up," it never sounds distorted.
So, I put the GT back in.

I didn't hear back from LDS Friday, but hopefully I can order long throw 8's on Monday? Get it kickin hard by next weekend...
 
#11
Just talked to Don, they ship Monday.
He recomended a 4" compression horn to replace the piezo tweet, which is blown.
Also ordered two more long throw 8's for the BBII 2x8;)
 
#14
Chef said:
Well, I usually go to the gym for lunch.
In my haste to exit the house this morning, I packed towels, but no gym clothes. I'm an idiot!

So, went home and stuffed the LDS 2x8+5 long throw 8's cab under the Silverado.
BAM!
This sounds really, really good.
Really good.

I emailed Don about sending me 6 long throw 8's, I've been meaning to fit them into my BBII anyway.

If this all goes well, I'll prolly buy 8 more, and make my Henry 8x8 a 1600 watt ready wall of blissful, thick responsive destruction.



So there;)
Click to expand...
Let us know how it sounds. They made my BBII a pant flapper.
When you do the Henry please update us!
 
#15
Just poking in a note here, I read this recently and since I had a blown PAS 8" in the Silver, I searched high and low for info on the impedance (damned PAS don't have any numbering), finally talking to Don at LDS (as was referred here) and found out a few things:

1) The 8" PAS drivers in the Silverado are 32 ohm, and difficult to find, I could not find any, but I also did not call Fender before giving up.

2) Those drivers are kinda lame, they do flop when driven hard.

The idea I came up with was to decrease the overall impedance to 4 ohms by replacing with 16 ohm long-throws (again, from LDS). This way I don't use an extension speaker (which I could never get balanced with a 15" anyway), and lot's of driver headroom by the added capacity of the eminance drivers.

Overall sounds great, if you want to reall jam the piss out of it, defeat the limiter (pull switch on the effects knob) and you'll get all kinds of head room for much louder and more dynamic. I suspect that when this is done for any length of time the amp may overheat, and there's no fan, so another neat mod might be to fit a cooling system into the amp.

They are sort of ****** amps, no balls, and when you go to sell them, they have no resale, so might as well pound the piss out of them <grin>.

Rock down!

R-D
 
#16
I went that route, and found the Silverado had nowhere near enough guts to push the LDS drivers.
Put the stock ones back in, sold the rig, had Don build me 4x8 cab which totally rocks.
6x8rig.jpg
 
#19
Nice looking rig, Chef, I'm sure it sounds excellent. Don at LDS was a pleasure to work with, and although I agree that the SWR doesn't pump the real Watts, I have found a decent home for it in my mix down area where I can use it for a preamp for ODs, use as a practice amp, and also take with me for basement jams (it at least has that much woomph). It has a nice warmish sound with low noise and hum, and wouldn't fetch more than $300 around here...I don't need $300 bucks more than I appreciate a flexible piece of furniture (now if it didn't weight 85 pounds, ;)).

Cheers, thanks for the postings, came in handy. Wow, this was on for almost 5 years now....
 

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