cabs

If you’re like me, chances are you’ve had the opportunity to play through a 100-watt tube amp and a 4x12 cabinet. Perhaps you’ve had the opportunity to play through three 100-watt amps driving three 4x12s at the same time. It’s awesome! Once you start playing through multiple cabs, odds are good someone will ask you if you need “all that equipment,” smiling smugly like it was the first time you’d ever heard that before.

My answer is always a very confident “yes,” usually followed by some quip about how I actually need more. At one point, I owned six 4x12 cabinets. (I’m currently down to just two.) As Steven Fryette pointed out in his recent Speaker Geeks article, the size and shape of the cabinet has a great effect on a speaker’s performance. That said, I became so infatuated with how nicely the standard-sized 30"x30" boxes stack together to build a wall, I grabbed anything I could get my hands on. I came to that outrageous number of 4x12 cabs because I bought them used or empty, and then filled them with my own speakers and wiring.