High-Gain Britt-Voiced Speaker Shoot out!

Hey all you faithful tone seekers!  This week I’m back to speaker shoot-outs with accompanying videos.  This week’s shoot-outs pit some of WGS’s best Britt voices speakers against their classic Celestion counterparts.  If you do check out the videos, be sure to listen through good sounding full-range reference monitors (speakers); some of the tonal differences were fairly nuance-level.  We used a matching pair of Marshall JCM 900’s, and this was all about high-gain rock tone.  Okay, so ya ready?  Let’s get to the first round in this particular smack-down, a fresh outta the box WGS Veteran 30 vs. an actual vintage made-in-England Celestion Vintage 30. I hope you have time to see all the videos and read the entire blog!

For those of you without the time to view the video, here is the Readers Digest version of the results:  Both speakers sounded great.  The Celestion gave us just what we expected, classic Marshall/Britt crunch with a very focused mid-heavy sound. The WGS Veteran 30 had a lot of that same character, but wasn’t as narrowly focused in the midrange; it had a notable amount more bottom and top to accompany the midrange crunch, it basically was a more complex sounding speaker.  Efficiency wise, they were pretty much dead-on with one another.  Here is the video:

Next we pitted a Celestion Green-Back against a WGS Reaper.  In this case, there was a clear winner.  The Reaper ate the Green-back for lunch.  We were not expecting this much of a difference!  The Celestion sounded tiny and very narrowly focused in the midrange compared to the very complex and inspiring sound of the Reaper.  The Green Back was lifeless, the Reaper made me not want to stop playing. 

*** One IMPORTANT note:  I incorrectly refer to the Celestion Green-Back as a "Green Beret" a coupple of times, Sorry, I should have taken better care of my brain cells when I was younger ... 

NEXT NOTE (March 25th): A couple of folks, including WGS Pres. David, have mentioned that this comparison would have been more direct using a WGS Green Beret instead of the Reaper, and that's true!  The reason I went with the Reaper is because I realized at the last minute that I didn't have a Green Beret on hand!  In a couple of weeks, I'll be doing a bunch of comparisons between most of the WGS models ... answering the ever popular questions of "What is the difference between a Reaper and a Green Beret" and "how different is a Retro 30 from a Veteran 30?".  Stick with me for that - it should help answer a BUNCH of questions! Anyway, here is that video:

And for our last bout, we had in one corner of the ring a Celestion G12 Heritage edition, and the WGS Reaper 55 in the other corner.  Once again, both speakers sounded great.  Just as with the Vet30/Vint30 comparison, the Celestion had a more focused midrange-heavy sound, while the WGS speaker was more complex with more highs and especially more lows.  This race may have been too close to call; I’ll let ya all decide!  Oh, but I keep forgetting, the WGS models are all priced at about half of the Celestion models; in these times of tight budgets ... that always factors in!  Here’s the vid:

Okay, next week, it’s another speaker shoot-out using "tiny tube-amps"; it’ll be a blast!

-Vaughn-

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