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Hey Mike I know how you feel, those cabs are few and far between in the used market these days! If your ever feeling spendy, the Reeves with VP's should treat you right. I'm very happy with mine. I'm actually trading my 79 SE4123 with Fanes pretty soon and don't have a problem sticking with the Reeves. Although if it was a perfect world... it would be nice to keep the Hiwatt cab around.

OldSchoolDave wrote:Give those Thames a good thrashing and let us know if they settle in.

One pair is in thrash mode today... iTunes (low end eq boosted) on MacBook into Marshall solid state power amp (80 watts into 4 ohms), probably pumping no more than 40 watts into the pair. Man, those cones really jump!

My son recently upgraded his recording studio, including some really nice Focal Solo6 Be monitors and Waves Gold plug-ins. Surprisingly, the Fane and Thames sound much closer in tone on his new monitors (extremely flat response). He ran the demo clips through the PAZ frequency analyzer - only very subtle differences between the two, mostly in the roll-off above 6kHz.

FANE:

WEBER THAMES:


I think the red line is the SM57, blue is the Sennheiser.

Interesting stuff. Looks like the Thames has a slightly higher spike around 600Hz and not quite as bit a dip at 1kHz.

Is there any way your son could rerun the comparison, only showing the 0 to -40 range? If the graph could double the level of detail in that range, it might reveal more deviations.

Dave

I'll ask - looks like there are zoom/navigate controls. I'm sure he'd like another excuse to play with the new toys.

I picked X as the fanes. Although the Y speakers have the overall tone down, their breakup is much different. The fanes to me have a crunch in the very high end that I don't hear with other speakers. They are a bigger part of the Hiwatt sound than I thought before I found a cab.

speaker Y has a more scooped sound to me...brighter, too

speaker X is muddier


IMO you need to be pushing the speakers with a lot more volume to get them to reveal their differences more

interesting comparison!!