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Unidentified Celestion 15" speakers


Bobo_08
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It is a guitar driver, that frame dates back to the mid 70's. The 80's version had a chunkier chassis I think. They still make a G-15 100  

 

I'd be very careful about putting 100W through it or using it for bass. It may have a paper former for the coil and won't be using the sort of high temperature adhesives we use now. You might be able to sell it on to someone doing a restoration project if you do some research and find which cabs used that driver back in the 70's.

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I've got a pair G15/150 8ohms in the workshop. 

They were in a huge subwoofer cabinet I bought years ago before I knew any better. The seller demo'd them to me in his garage using a sound wave generator of some sort, the sound went so low it was almost inaudible but cancelled out our speech and made the metal door vibrate like crazy.

I used to run a bi-amped rig with a Peavey valve preamp crossover splitting the high and low, through a 200w stereo power amp with the low(left) side going to the 2x15 cab and the highs(right) to a 4x12 cab with H+H pa speakers. The H+Hs weren't great so I tried a pair of 10" 60w McKenzie speakers I had, they sounded great. 

Somehow that rig kicked out insane sound levels and sounded great. The Celestions coped fine being used as subwoofers and I could drown out most PAs I came across if wanted. 

I'm sure something must've been on the brink of dying but it was abused for ten years with no ill effects, only being retired due to the rediculous size. I prefer going straight to the desk now with a floor monitor. 

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They may know what they were for but the likelihood that they have specs are slim to none, and I believe that Slim just left town. They once approached me about recommending their drivers in my designs. I said sure, give me the T/S specs. They didn't have them. This was around 2004-2005, so there's no way that they'd have them for drivers twenty to thirty years older than that. I wasn't able to get full data sheets from them until 2008.

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9 hours ago, BassmanPaul said:

How about emailing Celestion  and asking them what the drivers are for? They should know after all! :D

Already been down that route, only info they could give was a manufacturing date of 1976.

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I'm not sure what Bill's problem was with Celestion but they've provided TS parameters for their bass and PA drivers for as long as I can remember. They don't usually publish a full set of parameters for their guitar drivers, however, as there's not much point. But they are available.

 

Marshall used this speaker in a 2x15" reflex bass cab, the 1551, but I don't expect it went very loud.

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On 08/05/2023 at 22:45, Bill Fitzmaurice said:

They may know what they were for but the likelihood that they have specs are slim to none, and I believe that Slim just left town. They once approached me about recommending their drivers in my designs. I said sure, give me the T/S specs. They didn't have them. This was around 2004-2005, so there's no way that they'd have them for drivers twenty to thirty years older than that. I wasn't able to get full data sheets from them until 2008.

Does that mean that cabinet building based on Celestion speaker units really was more or less nothing but qualified guesswork prior to 2008?

 

Or have I misunderstood something (which is very likely, as I have very little theoretical knowledge of how to properly build a cabinet, or what a speaker's specs actually means, beyond frequency response, sensitivity and wattage, for that matter)?

 

 

Edited by Baloney Balderdash
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6 hours ago, Baloney Balderdash said:

Does that mean that cabinet building based on Celestion speaker units really was more or less nothing but qualified guesswork prior to 2008?

 

Or have I misunderstood something (which is very likely, as I have very little theoretical knowledge of how to properly build a cabinet, or what a speaker's specs actually means, beyond frequency response, sensitivity and wattage, for that matter)?

 

 

Now Celestion has confirmed the speaker was mid 70's (1976) it seems probable that they didn't publish TS parameters at the time. I think they stopped production of that model around then and I assume the speaker was designed earlier than that. Thiele and Small didn't publish their research until 1970 and it took a while to become widely known, it took maybe 10 years for the music industry to catch up. In 1970 most powerful amps were big, expensive and unreliable valve amps and speakers were mainly general purpose. 

 

Thiele and Small developed a model that could be used to mathematically describe the movement of the speaker taking into account a number of the electrical and mechanical properties of the speaker itself and also the cabinet and repeat the calculations at any frequency. In 1970 I was programming computers with punched cards and pocket calculators and home computers were yet to hit. Speaker design was indeed a craft skill at the time. I built and tested a lot of boxes with hours of very subjective listening tests. Science is better :)

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  • 10 months later...
17 hours ago, Chad Hartfiel said:

I am looking for 1 of those speakers let me know if interested in selling. email [email protected]  Thanks

Welcome to BassChat, it might be worth private messaging the OP via BassChat and asking them. Just hover over their ID and the messaging will pop up

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