Brentcgp wrote:
@Alan, dont you think these attenuator (tube tamers, dr z air brake etc) are going to take something away from the sound?
The speaker is a huge part of the tone, but surprisingly little of that tone is the speaker itself distorting from being overdriven. Most speakers are way overrated for the amp that's plugged into them: take a 4x12" cab with V30s in - that's a total RMS power handling of 240W per cab and chances are it'll never be hooked up to anything bigger than a 100W amp (if that!). Now look at the more modern speaker cabs and you'll see they have ratings of up to 400W.
Funnily enough, the exceptions are the Vox amps with Celestion Blues which, when fully cranked, put out slightly more than the speaker's handling - which is the other reason (aside from sheer volume) why people rarely run them flat out. At full crank, the speaker gets very flabby on the low end and has an annoying tendency to burn out.
I think attenuators can only take away the sparkle that comes form a lekker speaker thats cranked.
In most cases when the attenuator is soaking up a large amount of the amp's output, it's the difference the lower volume makes to
your ears (those
Fletcher and Munson blokes again), rather than the difference to the speaker. Most attenuators work best when soaking up to 9 - 12 db of the output (about half the power), which is enough to get the amp into a different gain range without significant tonal losses. Of course, If you want to scale your 100W Marshall with two 4x12 cabs down to bedroom level there will be a significant impact on tone - but then, what do you expect?
