What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

Watched Jim Lill's new video about where tone in a guitar amp's speaker cabinet comes from. And unlike his experiments in where an electric guitar's tone comes from (by this point, it's more or less just down to the pickups [model, position, height, and slant angle] and volume pot value), it looks like there's more variables with the speaker cabs:



And narrowing the list of 12 factors down to the factors that actually correspond to real-world use: 

• The back of the cabinet matters. Closed back, open back, and if there's still a back plate but a big open gap, that changes the lows (below about 200 Hz) in very confusing ways.
  
• Dividers between speakers within a cab can shift the low frequencies emphasised, though not by too much. 
  
• Planks over the speakers Vox-style cut down on highs above 3 kHz.
  
• Speaker models naturally change the tone, even if it's in a multiple speaker cab. If one speaker is changed, the tone gets changed, even if that one particular speaker of a different model isn't being miced.
  
• Of course, tone changes if the number of speakers you have changes. More speakers, more lows.
  
• Cab size affects the tone, with larger boxes emphasising lower frequencies.
  

It's a shame that enterprising cab builders aren't given any set of equations to explain how much back to leave on a speaker for optimal tone. At least there's something for cab size, at least if you have Thiele-Small specs for the speaker. I may or may not end up doing something with this information later. Especially given that it's been several months and the Richardsnary still hasn't made much headway.