vintageHIWATTconvention.com

First things first, a BIG THANK YOU to Jarrett (JC103) for recording, processing and publishing these clips!

For those not in attendance, we started at cabinet 1 and worked our way to cabinet 6, then reversed the process (to compensate for the attenuation our ears experienced at the high SPL). Mark Huss was at the guitar, I was switching speaker cables. Give these a listen and let us know which are your favorites:

VHC 2008 Speaker Shootout mp3's:


forward pass:

http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab1.0.mp3 - CAB#1
http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab2.0.mp3 - CAB#2
http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab3.0.mp3 - CAB#3
http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab4.0.mp3 - CAB#4
http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab5.0.mp3 - CAB#5
http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab6.0.mp3 - CAB#6

reverse pass:

http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab6.1.mp3 - CAB#6
http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab5.1.mp3 - CAB#5
http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab4.1.mp3 - CAB#4
http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab3.1.mp3 - CAB#3
http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab2.1.mp3 - CAB#2
http://www.vintagehiwattconvention.com/audio/cab1.1.mp3 - CAB#1



Dave

My son listened to them on his fancy studio monitors. He liked #6 and #1.
I forget, where was the mic placed in relation to the wall of cabs?

edit: I see OldSchool snuck a poll in here while I wasn't looking. I burned a copy to listen to in the car, so I'll wait until I can crank it up to vote.

mikhailwatt wrote: I forget, where was the mic placed in relation to the wall of cabs?

Jarrett ???

From left to right: cab1, cab2, cab3, cab4, cab5, cab6

Recording chain was:

MIC: Sennheiser e906
PREAMP: FMR RNP
CONVERTER: M-AUDIO Audiophile 192

Mic position as shown in the pic was probably about 8ft away from the cabs.

The e906 is pretty unidirectional (good isolation for live close micing) so I think the outer cabs lost a little low end in the translation. But the general character of each is pretty much as I remember them.

I have one favorite, with 2nd and 3rd place just slightly "less favorite." It took a lot of switching between tracks to decide, and I think they could all sound excellent (except maybe one) with the controls optimized for the cab.

Is there going to be a "reveal" once everyone has had a chance to vote?

mikhailwatt wrote: Is there going to be a "reveal" once everyone has had a chance to vote?

Yep. But, for the time being, we'll refer to them generically to avoid any predispositions.

Dave

The e906 is pretty unidirectional (good isolation for live close micing) so I think the outer cabs lost a little low end in the translation. But the general character of each is pretty much as I remember them.

The recording wasn't perfect...

- as there was no acoustic treatment in the room
- which meant we were at the mercy of the rooms acoustic effect on where the cabs were physically located
- the e906 shines its best when used for close micing
- I accidentally recorded the clips in 16bit instead of 24bit

However, the clips do pretty much sound like what we all heard in the room.

I'd say it was a pretty good experiment on many levels!

JC103 wrote: I'd say it was a pretty good experiment on many levels!

Agreed! What a great resource to have filed away .

Dave

I vote for 1 and 5.

#3 sounds pretty good (healthy) to me.

HIWATTuser1 wrote:#3 sounds pretty good (healthy) to me.

But, it has no votes yet...?

Dave

The tension is killing me! Please pick a winner soon!

Mike

I liked : 2.0 & 6.0

and also: 6.1 & 2.1


these samples cut better & sounded more defined

it was more the eq than anything else though...I'm sure if you tweaked the others they would sound better....they were too muddy IMO

They were all good high quality speakers. The amp was a 1974 DR504 with vintage Mullards throughout and every knob pointed at 12:00. A little tweaking of the eq would have made all of them sound great!

ps.
in person Cab#3 and cab#4 are almost identical in tonality. weird huh?

I'll bet it's more or less about microphone axis/position. The cabinets were all in pretty good shape as I recall.