Time goes by. I fitted the G10 Greenback, and found a “good” tone, but still a bit “dark”. I have always assigned the dark-ish tone to the amplifier, but I have been thinking a lot about the cabinet dimensions: The speaker sits slap bang in the center of the baffle. Apparently this should be avoided. The rear cut-out is centered as well, horizontally. And I was starting to suspect the cabinet is too deep, leading to “boom”. The G10 greenback has some nice chime to it, it really has potential.

But, that G12-35XC has been bugging me. I decided to make up a decent baffle for it, and offset the speaker a bit to one side. I took the existing ten inch baffle, and cut out a bigger hole for the twelve inch. I then increased the rear vent hole size by opening it up a bit to the other side, thus making the setup asymmetrical. I also cut off 30 mm from the rear of the cabinet, to reduce depth. I like what I hear. I have several hours’ testing on it with several guitars, and I really like the sparkle, the lack of boomy bass, the power (higher sensitivity). With the Tube Screamer engaged (“Overdrive” 12 o’clock, “Tone” 12 o’clock, “Level” between 9 and 10 o’clock), at bedroom-plus volumes (way loud), 15 Watt setting on the amplifier, amp volume at 3 o’clock, Ibanez Jem-Jr volume at 9, the dynamics are impressive.

Which leads back to the Jem-Jr mods I envisaged, I am not convinced the guitar will sound “better” with the pickups I plan to fit.

The idea to reduce the cabinet depth and force a twelve inch speaker into a ten inch cabinet is blamed on the Laney Cub 10. That amplifier has a ten inch speaker pressed into a small box with almost full open back (only the electronics part takes away some space). When I pluck up the courage, I want to fit the Celestion G10 Vintage in there, mainly due to the frequency response curve on the website. It starts off with a higher resonance frequency than the G10 Greenback and the Celestion ten-thirty, so, it might just have some “sparkle” and reduce low frequency excess. I would love to find the Tube Ten frequency response curve, however, to compare. I am going into this without info.

All this experimentation postpones the 12” cabinet build indefinately. The current setup is good. No reason to change. I found my speaker for this amplifier, for now. The 12 inch build might just be replaced by a phase two ten inch cabinet build, with the overall size just an inch or so less that this cabinet. Seeing as the existing ten inch baffle is no more, I unfortunately cannot yet A-B compare the two speakers (well, losts of speakers) to satisfy the quest for knowledge. If I do make a smaller ten inch cabinet, at least any baffle I make up for this cabinet in the interim, can be cut down to fit.

Now, some more tweaking on the stock INF Jem-Jr pickups, they are almost there… I really enjoy playing it.