2
USING YOUR NEW SPEAKER CAB
BREAKING IN
Your 1x8 Cabinet features a Jensen C8R speaker. We have found that these Jensen speakers are typically
a bit stiff straight from the box. They tend to soften up the more you play through them, and they reach
a nice bright, clear tone once they are mostly broken in. If you are using this cabinet with the Percolator
amplifier the speaker will take a very long time to break in because it is such a small wattage amplifier
compared to the capacity of the speaker. It is possible to speed this process along by using a larger
amplifier – provided it is less than 25 watts, and capable of accepting an 8 ohm load. Plug the amplifier
into the cabinet and keep the volume rather low for a while (about 10 minutes) with guitar chords or
background noise. Then turn the amp up to about 15-20 watts and play full, fat, bass heavy chords on
your guitar, or anything to get the cone really moving and stretching. Focus on the mids and the lows.
Percussive playing is also very helpful. After about 15 minutes with this type of signal through your
speaker, it will be about 90% broken in. It will slowly continue breaking in over the next few years of
playing through it.
DRIVING CAPACITY
We developed this product as a companion to the Percolator, a nifty 2-watt, single-tube guitar amplifier
kit, but the speaker is rated at 25 watts with 8 ohms impedance. You can safely drive it with any amp
rated up to 25 watts.
CHANGING THE TONE OF YOUR CABINET
If you are the type of person who likes modifying gear, then you may be interested in experimenting with
changing some things about your cabinet. One of the easiest tone mods you could perform on your cab
is to change the speaker. We have chosen this Jensen speaker because of its response and tone qualities
when driven by our Percolator 2-watt amplifier head. However, tone is mostly a matter of preference and
taste, so there could be an endless number of different 8” speakers that could be used depending on what
you like. We encourage you to try them out (see the next section on replacing the speaker). Find one that
works well for the type of music you want to play.
Another mod is to experiment with different port sizes. This cab is mostly open-back, which gives some
nice dimensional presence to the sound when playing in a smaller room or if the back of the cab is near
a wall. The sound seems to swirl around as our ears are affected by the phase differences, but you could
add some more ports to make it closed-back. This takes away from the natural, swirling sound, but gives
a much more punchy, stronger mid-range tonality. This is one of the reasons the classic Marshall (closed
back) sound can cut through a mix so well. You can always mix and match port sizes too. You could even
bore holes in some of them to “port” the box. If you are really motivated, you could define the frequency
response you’d like from the cab by playing around with a program like “BassBox Pro,” using the Thiele-
Small parameters of the driver (available on the Jensen website) and the internal volume of the cabinet
(which is about 380 cubic inches) to determine the port type and size you’d need. Between changing the
speaker and playing with the ports, the possibilities are endless! Be creative, experiment and explore!
