My Vintage 30 pile - Where is the line between enthusiasm and insanity?

the other John Browne said:
1. I am an obsessive lunatic

2. All the myths and baseless claims about the V30 always bothered me. If the same machines, materials and processes are used, it should not matter if the speaker is made in China or in England but I also had nothing to back up my claim so I decided I wanted to prove it through means of testing because I used to be a test engineer.
Pretty soon into my research I found out I was getting more than I had bargained for as there seem to be a lot of possible parameters that influence the nuances... but I already committed myself to the test because

3. I am an obsessive lunatic
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thank you for doing this! (i'm also a lunatic, but slightly lazier.... :P)
 
RaceU4her said:
I have two v30 equipped 4x12s, I have one in a recording 4x12 with other speakers and a couple others laying around, I have no clue when or where any of them were made, I never really wondered cause they all sound like v30s to me. Like how does an obsession like this start? V30s are cool and all but not that cool lol
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They're the most popular guitar speaker ever made. So they have that going for them. Basically the sound of nearly every metal record from the early 90's to now.
 
anomaly said:
They're the most popular guitar speaker ever made. So they have that going for them. Basically the sound of nearly every metal record from the early 90's to now.
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countless records they have been on in the last 30+ years now. I gotta ask though, do you know the who, what, where and when of any of those v30s on any of those records?? I don’t, and I bet it’s a minuscule amount of players and producers that even know or care. I don’t ever remember reading a magazine with some asshole saying “oh yeah, those v30s made by Billy Bob in Korea the third week of august are the key to my tone” but I could have missed it. It’s a good topic for YouTube creators to generate views and have us argue over
 
A lot of times players do know what time period their V30s are from, simply because we know the approx dates of our cabs which are still housing the stock versions. I have 12 V30s and know all their years give or take one. Currently 8 are in use and 4 are in box, 2 UK 2003 and 2 from china 07.
 
RaceU4her said:
countless records they have been on in the last 30+ years now. I gotta ask though, do you know the who, what, where and when of any of those v30s on any of those records?? I don’t, and I bet it’s a minuscule amount of players and producers that even know or care. I don’t ever remember reading a magazine with some asshole saying “oh yeah, those v30s made by Billy Bob in Korea the third week of august are the key to my tone” but I could have missed it. It’s a good topic for YouTube creators to generate views and have us argue over
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I think the most important thing is to get TGP involved. Strictly for entertainment value.
 
I think they are pretty consistent with the difference being how broken in one is.

imo, they're great for that one specific sound. A Silver Jubilee and V30s is like peanut butter and jelly. Forget about pristine, bell-like cleans though
 
Donnie B said:
You got access to a sine wave generator?
Be cool to see a 20Hz - 20KHz sweep of each speaker taken and then a composite graph.

Something like this.

AudioTechnica_ATHM50_Graph_FRCompare.jpg
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Duuude, my worlds just collided:
I can use the Reaper plugin Reaverb to generate and record sine wave sweeps. THEN I can use a program I still have on my work laptop from my test engineer days called imc Famos to import all the .wav files, run FFTs on them and display whichever and how many ones I want in the same graph!
 
Yes it can. You can superpose dozens of measurements if needed, highlight any of them and change color individually. You can also save them one by one in separate files. I used it to tune my big pair of Altec VOTT 4-voice system. Very handy.
 
Jack Luminous said:
Yes it can. You can superpose dozens of measurements if needed, highlight any of them and change color individually. You can also save them one by one in separate files. I used it to tune my big pair of Altec VOTT 4-voice system. Very handy.
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Oh nice! I didn't know that! I am probably going to do both. More data is more betterer
 
I've had a EVH 2x12 loaded with Chinese V30s that sounded night and day difference better than a Mesa 2x12 V30. I recently had an Orange 4x12 loaded with Chinese V30s that held up perfectly with a Mesa OS V30 cab. My buddy has a Mesa Traditional with Mesa V30s and it sounds like a honky bright mess. I'm curious what your test will show. Over the years having a single cab with V30s sound great by itself, but being able to compare multiple cabs in the room really puts some cabs to shame. I wonder how much is the speaker vs. the cab construction.

You should try to grab an Isolation Cab or make one, then you can output tons of IRs to compare.. or sell :D . I've thought about building/ripping this design after seeing Matt Heafy use them to record. https://www.theboxofdoom.com/box-of-doom-allxs-system-guitar.html?id=70729868
 
vultures said:
I've had a EVH 2x12 loaded with Chinese V30s that sounded night and day difference better than a Mesa 2x12 V30. I recently had an Orange 4x12 loaded with Chinese V30s that held up perfectly with a Mesa OS V30 cab. My buddy has a Mesa Traditional with Mesa V30s and it sounds like a honky bright mess. I'm curious what your test will show. Over the years having a single cab with V30s sound great by itself, but being able to compare multiple cabs in the room really puts some cabs to shame. I wonder how much is the speaker vs. the cab construction.

You should try to grab an Isolation Cab or make one, then you can output tons of IRs to compare.. or sell :D . I've thought about building/ripping this design after seeing Matt Heafy use them to record. https://www.theboxofdoom.com/box-of-doom-allxs-system-guitar.html?id=70729868
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Yep! I purchased a Grossmann SG iso cab specifically for this purpose two years ago.
Getting stuff ready in the evenings. I'm moving slower than I had hoped. Just the logistics of moving 51 speakers around is something else
 
the other John Browne said:
1. I am an obsessive lunatic

2. All the myths and baseless claims about the V30 always bothered me. If the same machines, materials and processes are used, it should not matter if the speaker is made in China or in England but I also had nothing to back up my claim so I decided I wanted to prove it through means of testing because I used to be a test engineer.
Pretty soon into my research I found out I was getting more than I had bargained for as there seem to be a lot of possible parameters that influence the nuances... but I already committed myself to the test because

3. I am an obsessive lunatic
Click to expand...

For an obsessive lunatic you are also a bad ass. I thought about going down the rabbit hole you are on, got lazy, and bought a greenback instead.
 
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