Guitar Speakers

The loudspeaker is a major contributing factor when it comes to guitar tone, so it's no surprise that there's a healthy upgrade market, with companies trying to sell you new speaker models for your amp. The problem is that tone is a subjective thing, and like everything else in the guitar signal chain, the tones we know and love were born of technical imperfections. Early guitar amps were fitted with cone loudspeakers but not tweeters, so the frequency response dropped off quite steeply above 3‑4kHz. This filtered out some of the less pleasant harmonics generated by the tube distortion that resulted from trying to get too much volume out of too small an amplifier.

Without the technical limitations of guitar speakers, tube distortion would sound gritty and unpleasant, and this is why, despite the advances in speaker design, today's guitar amplifiers still employ limited‑range cone drivers and don't use tweeters. The main difference today is that the manufacturers know more about why old speakers sounded the way they did, and they're able to design new models that offer specific voicings.