I love my Fender Bassbreaker 15. It sounds like an old Marshall. It sounds good clean and it sounds great in crunch mode. It sounds like rock. When you overdrive it enough, it does a decent metal sound. But it delivers the best sound of all my amps. There’s just one problem – I’ve never liked the speaker. It comes with the Celestion G12, a $99 decent speaker. But the amp had too much midrange and not enough low end. And when I connected it to my external Ibanez cabinet with a Celestion Seventy 80, those problems went away. Hmm. What if I swapped the two speakers?
So I did. And now the amp sounds… a teeny tiny bit better, but not by much. And a strange thing happened to the G12. In the Ibanez enclosure, it sounded much better. It had a great low end and the midrange was no longer nasty. Hmm…
OK, so lesson learned. The cabinet contributes to the sound of the speaker way, way more than I thought. I’m now playing the Bassbreaker through my Orange cab with a single 12 Celestion Vintage 30, which is my fave rock speaker. I could order one of those and stick it in the Bassbreaker cabinet, but as I’ve learned, it won’t matter that much. The moral of the story is: Connect your Fender Bassbreaker to a really good external cab, and enjoy the awesomeness. Or just buy the head version of the Bassbreaker.
UPDATE – 11-12-18 – Tonight I decided to open up my Orange cab and my Bassbreaker 15 and perform surgery. I pulled the Celestion Vintage 30 out of my Orange cab and put it into the Bassbreaker 15, and… well… it didn’t exactly fit. The speaker was too deep and the tubes were practically touching the magnet. I managed to get about 1/8 of clearance between the tubes and the speaker – not enough room for my comfort. But ultimately, as I found with the other speaker swap, it didn’t make a huge massive difference. The cabinet has a massive impact on the sound. Duh.
Disclaimer – PLEASE make up your own mind! Don’t just listen to some guy on the Internet. Let your ears be your guide. You might love the sound of the Bassbreaker 15 as is. Recommendation – put it on the floor. That’ll give you a much better low end.
