Want to change the tone of your setup? Old speakers are safe to buy because there are so few maintenance issues associated with them, which I'll attempt to explain.

I believe that it's rather hard, if not near impossible, to harm a guitar amp speaker. They can take full-blast volume (from a tube amp that is—solid state amps are another story) at their rated wattage for decades without harm. The cones don't get old and flabby.

The only way that I know of to hurt them is to play a solid state amp on 10 so that it clips (distorts). When solid state amps distort, the signal is “clipped,” meaning the tops of the output electrical waves are chopped off (you’d need to see it on an oscilloscope and then you’d understand better), and the signal becomes more like AC voltage than DC. This AC damages speaker coils. The other way to damage speakers in an open-back cabinet is by playing bass guitar through them too loud, which will damage your cones. Other than these two ways, speakers are your last equipment maintenance worry. Most buzzes are cabinet problems that can be fixed with a squirt of window caulking where the buzz is. Occasionally the cardboard gasket gets crushed from the basket being improperly torqued, but the gasket is an easy fix.

What can (rarely) happen to old speakers is, the center cone in the middle of the speaker can work its way loose, and dust can get inside that will jam up the travel of the cone/coil over the magnet. When this happens, if the speaker cone is supposed to be in a certain location in its travel while playing a certain frequency and it’s not in the right place, it will sound unmusically distorted. If it happened to me, I’d blow the coil out with a can of dust remover, and glue the paper cone back down with either nail polish or that black rubber cement used for repairing wetsuits. By the way, nail polish is great for fixing rips and tears in speaker cones. I believe it's made of the same stuff that dope for cloth-covered airplanes is made out of (nitrocellulose for all I know), and it shrinks as it dries, pulling the glue joint together. There’s usually no need to replace a speaker if it merely has a little fixed rip or hole in the cone. Personally, I probably wouldn’t buy a speaker with a hole in it (but then again I *might* if it was a speaker I really wanted), but if I put a hole in one of my speakers by poking it with a cord jack or something, I wouldn’t run right out and buy a new speaker. Taking a speaker out (I did this all the time as a kid, for no good reason) and putting it back in, and poking a hole in it with a mounting bolt, is no reason to replace the speaker. Just glue up the hole with nail polish.

To my knowledge, a dent in the center cone does not affect the sound of the speaker, either. I've never had to take a dent out, but I'd try holding a vacuum cleaner hose over the dent and then have someone turn the vacuum on and then off. This may suck the dent out. Maybe not, but I'd try it.

If you’re looking to change the sound of your setup, then getting some old speakers may be an option you should look into.



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