We are selling our stock of THD Vintage 10" Guitar Speakers, handmade in the USA, 8 ohms, 20 Watts Peak Maximum Power Handling and have 1" voice coils. (Rating of speaker power handling in vacuum tube guitar amps is an inexact science. For reference, I know many people who have used one of theses daily for 20 years in Fender Princeton and Princeton Reverb amps, which are rated at 15 Watts RMS, and they have no trouble with that power level at all. No one I know has ever blown one in a Princeton.)
Individually hand-treated speaker, custom aged by THD using our proprietary method. These are from our last production run of this speaker, made in late 1990, as you can see from the date code. The manufacturer's code, 247, is our own, and designates that they were made by THD Electronics, Ltd. in Seattle.
These speakers were designed and built to sound and react like the original Alnico Jensen speakers used in the Fender Tweed Bassman of 1958, but without using Alnico magnets. We made this decision because, at the time, most of the nickel and cobalt used in AlNiCo magnets was coming from government mining in South Africa, back when apartheid was in full force. We chose not to do anything to support this oppressive, racist government.
These speakers have a sweet, musical top end, a full, rich bass range, and a smooth, neutral midrange. They were designed to be their best in open-back cabinets and small combos.
Ideal for 1 x 10", 2 x 10" and 4 x 10" combos, the THD Vintage 10" speakers are the favorite of guitar and harmonica artists in 4-10 combos. They are also the IDEAL upgrade for the stock speaker in 1 x 10" Fender Princeton and Princeton Reverb amplifiers, adding substantial bass response and beautiful treble tones, while noticeably increasing overall efficiency and volume of the amp.
The THD Vintage 10" uses stacked 10 oz Ceramic magnets to create the long pole piece and magnetic density necessary for a vintage, Alnico sound. We discovered that it was more the shape and dimensions of the pole and the field than the composition of the magnet material itself that gave the old Alnico guitar speakers their characteristic sound.
Doing a bit of research in 1986, we discovered that the speakers that were used in the original Fender combo amps were designed by Jensen as ceiling PA speakers, to be mounted on simple ceiling panels with no box or cabinet at all. To give some semblance of bass response, the speakers were designed with a very high Q factor. We then decided to look for a company that still makes speakers for this application and settled on the Quam Nichols company in Chicago to do the rough manufacturing work for us on these speakers as they had the machines to stamp the frames and the experience necessary to assemble the stacked magnets and pole piece. Quam's business is based on such speakers designed to be used without a cabinet, so they have the basic characteristics that we were looking for. The frame, magnet, pole piece and cone configuration represent a custom speaker deigned for us with the very small gap between the voice coil and the magnets' pole piece for efficiency and high Q factor. Also, we found that the light stamped frame was essential to the sound we were looking for, as was the seamed paper cone. A seamless cone sounded too modern to us.
With the help of a PhD acoustical engineer, we developed a method of treating the speakers so that they sound like old, played-in speakers. Brand new speakers (weather new or new-old-stock) typically sound hard and a bit brittle compared to speakers that have been played for a year or two. The process that we developed has the added benefit of increasing the useful life of the speaker cone itself.
So, with the basic work done by Quam and the final assembly, tuning and aging done by us at THD in Seattle, these are entirely US-made speakers, a rarity these days.
Going through our warehouse, trying to make more efficient use of our space, we found nearly two thousand of them, and decided to offer them for sale. They are all in perfect, new condition, and are 100% tested before shipping.
These originally had a list price of $95.00 and a wholesale price of $47.50. We now need the room that they are taking up and don't want to move them to an off-site storage facility, so we are offering them for sale below our cost.
We've had a number of requests for sound clips of these speakers. I recalled the the amazing slide player Dave Hole used a THD 4-10 amp on his first few CDs, and the one he used on the first CD had 4 of these speakers in it. So to hear Dave Hole playing 4 of these speakers wired in parallel to a total load of 2 ohms in an open-back THD 4-10 amplifier, click
HERE for "Dark Was The Night",
HERE for "Albatross" and
HERE for "Short Fuse Blues".
This listing is for single speakers. If you only want a set of 4 of these at an even better price, check our other listings for quads of this exact speaker model.
We welcome local pickup in the unusual circumstance that the winner lives close enough to do so.
Larger quantities are likely best sent by truck on pallets. This can be easily arranged.
