Jensen Loudspeakers is a company that manufactures speakers in many different models and sizes. Originally located in Chicago, Illinois, the company built a reputation during the 50s and 60s providing speakers used mainly in guitar and bass amplifiers. Although the American company is long out of business, "reissue" guitar speakers are currently made in Italy by SICA Altoparlanti and distributed in the United States by CE Distribution. Jensen and Rola were, for a time both under common ownership (subsidiaries of the Muter Co.), and shared various design similarities. Their 8" and 15" baskets appeared to utilize the same tooling. Rola locations took over Jensen product manufacturing when the Chicago plant closed.
The current Fender Twin Reverb amp uses two 12" Jensen C-12K speakers.
The former Jensen Radio Manufacturing Company was founded in 1927 by Peter Laurits Jensen, the co-inventor of the first loudspeaker, in Chicago, Illinois. The company gained popularity in its early years, rising to its peak in the mid 1940s when Jensen speakers were selected to be used in the first production of a guitar amplifier by Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. Subsequently, Jensen speakers in the 40s, 50s, and 60s became commonly featured in major amplifier production, including amplifiers produced by Fender, Ampeg, and Gibson. The company also produced Hi-Fi loudspeakers for home use and was a manufacturer of OEM drivers for other brands.
Jensen Loudspeakers ceased production of their products in the early 1970s. The speakers remained heavily sought-after as replacements for amplifiers originally manufactured with Jensen speakers. Following that demand, SICA Altoparlanti began reproducing "reissues" of the Jensen speakers in 1996. These speakers are designed to be as close as possible to their original design. [1]
In 2008, SICA Altoparlanti began producing new speaker designs under the Jensen name. These speakers and the Jensen reissues are distributed in the United States by CE Distribution. [2]
Jensen speakers used a model number that contained 4 to 6 characters.
The first character denotes the magnet type used.
These are listed in the order in which they were made, with the P line starting in the 1940s and the C line starting around 1960.
The next one or two characters denotes speaker size (8 = 8", 10 = 10" diameter and so on).
The last character denotes the magnet/voice coil size, and directly influences the power rating. The same magnet weights (and corresponding codes) were used on multiple speaker sizes, and the power rating increases with the increasing diameter. Ceramic magnets are roughly 45% heavier than their Alnico equivalents that share the same code.
Examples:
These aspects together make up the speaker's model number. For example: a Jensen C8R speaker is eight inches in size, and has a 10 Oz ceramic magnet. All Jensen speakers also include a date and manufacturer's code. Jensen's source code is 220. Accompanying the company specific (EIA) code (220) is the last digit of the year and the 2 digits of the week manufactured, creating a 6 digit code usually imprinted on the speaker edge or the magnet housing. Thus a code of 220534 would denote a Jensen speaker manufactured in either 1945, 1955, or 1965 on the 34th week of that year. Most speaker (and other electronic component) manufacturers began adding the last 2 digits of the year in the 1970s, so the 6 digit code became a 7-digit code. In the '40's, Jensen would sometimes omit the leading zero of a single digit week, which would reduce the total number of characters to 5. [3]
A loudspeaker is a combination of one or more speaker drivers, an enclosure, and electrical connections. The speaker driver is an electroacoustic transducer that converts an electrical audio signal into a corresponding sound.
Vox is a British musical equipment manufacturer founded in 1957 by Thomas Walter Jennings in Dartford, Kent, England. The company is most famous for making the Vox AC30 guitar amplifier, used by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Queen, Dire Straits, U2, and Radiohead; the Vox Continental electric organ, the Vox wah-wah pedal used by Jimi Hendrix, and a series of innovative electric guitars and bass guitars. Since 1992, Vox has been owned by the Japanese electronics firm Korg.
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A pickup is a transducer that captures or senses mechanical vibrations produced by musical instruments, particularly stringed instruments such as the electric guitar, and converts these to an electrical signal that is amplified using an instrument amplifier to produce musical sounds through a loudspeaker in a speaker enclosure. The signal from a pickup can also be recorded directly.
Celestion is a British designer and exporter of professional loudspeakers.
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A P.A.F., or simply PAF, is an early model of the humbucker guitar pickup invented by Seth Lover in 1955, so named for the "Patent Applied For" decal placed on the baseplate of each pickup. Gibson used the PAF on guitars from late 1956 until late 1962, long after the patent was granted. They were replaced by the Patent Number pickup, essentially a refined version of the PAF. These were in turn replaced by "T-Top" humbuckers in 1967, and production ended in 1975. Though it was not the first humbucking pickup ever, it was the first to gain widespread use, as the PAF's hum-free signal, tonal clarity, and touch sensitivity when paired with overdriven amplifiers made the pickups popular with rock and blues guitarists. The PAF is an essential tonal characteristic of the now-famous 1957–1960 Gibson Les Paul Standard guitars, and pickups of this type have gained a large following.
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The Vox AC30 is a guitar amplifier manufactured by Vox. It was introduced in 1958 to meet the growing demand for louder amplifiers. Characterised by its "jangly" high-end sound it has become widely recognized by British musicians and others, such as George Harrison and John Lennon of the Beatles, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, Brian May of Queen, Dave Davies of the Kinks and Hank Marvin.
A guitar speaker is a loudspeaker – specifically the driver (transducer) part – designed for use in a combination guitar amplifier of an electric guitar, or for use in a guitar speaker cabinet. Typically these drivers produce only the frequency range relevant to electric guitars, which is similar to a regular woofer type driver, which is approximately 75 Hz — 5 kHz, or for electric bass speakers, down to 41 Hz for regular four-string basses or down to about 30 Hz for five-string instruments.
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The Fender Bassman is a series of bass amplifiers introduced by Fender during 1952. Initially intended to amplify bass guitars, musicians used the 5B6 Bassman to amplify other instruments, including electric guitars, harmonicas, and pedal steel guitars. Besides being a popular and important amplifier in its own right, the Bassman also became the foundation on which Marshall and other companies built their high-gain tube amplifiers.
The Fender Super Reverb is a guitar amplifier made by Fender. It was originally introduced in 1963 and was discontinued in 1982. The Super Reverb was a Fender Super amplifier with built-in reverb and "vibrato". The original Super Reverb amplifiers were all-tube designs and featured spring reverb. There were two different designs, distinguishable by the color of the "face" or front control panel. Super Reverbs from 1963 through 1967 had "blackface" panels. From 1968 until its discontinuation in 1982, the Super Reverb had "silverface" cosmetics and circuitry. Early models in 1968, while cosmetically "silverface", did contain "blackface" circuitry. Fender introduced a reissue '65 Super Reverb in 2001 featuring a printed circuit board design rather than the hand-wired circuitry of the original '65 Super Reverb.
The Fender Noiseless series is a line of electric guitar pickups made by the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation designed to cancel 60 cycle (Hz) hum noise while retaining the characteristic sound of single coil pickups. Introduced in 1998, these pickups consist of a pair of single coils stacked one on top of the other, compacted so as to match the shape and width space as a traditional Fender single coil guitar pickup, while being only slightly taller. The upper coil is actually the sound source, while the lower coil is responsible for the mains hum attenuation. Alnico V magnetic bars span from one coil to the other, crossing a soft ferrous steel spacer plate that isolates them, without touching it. The spacer plate has mainly two functions: to isolate the lower coil from the vibrations of the string, making sure that the sound is picked up only from the upper one, and to increase the magnetic flux that passed through both coils, increasing the output of the pickup. This is to be contrasted with the original noise canceling pickup, the humbucker, which is a double-wide, horizontally adjacent pair of single coil pickups with opposing phase.
An electrodynamic speaker driver, often called simply a speaker driver when the type is implicit, is an individual transducer that converts an electrical audio signal to sound waves. While the term is sometimes used interchangeably with the term speaker (loudspeaker), it is usually applied to specialized transducers that reproduce only a portion of the audible frequency range. For high fidelity reproduction of sound, multiple loudspeakers are often mounted in the same enclosure, each reproducing a different part of the audible frequency range. In this case the individual speakers are referred to as drivers and the entire unit is called a loudspeaker. Drivers made for reproducing high audio frequencies are called tweeters, those for middle frequencies are called mid-range drivers and those for low frequencies are called woofers, while those for very low bass range are subwoofers. Less common types of drivers are supertweeters and rotary woofers.
The Fender Telecaster, colloquially known as the Tele, is an electric guitar produced by Fender. Together with its sister model the Esquire, it was the world's first mass-produced, commercially successful solid-body electric guitar. Its simple yet effective design and revolutionary sound broke ground and set trends in electric guitar manufacturing and popular music. Many prominent rock musicians have been associated with the Telecaster for use in studio recording and live performances, most notably Bruce Springsteen, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Keith Richards and George Harrison.
DUPLEX was the trade name given by Altec Lansing to its line of coaxial loudspeakers, beginning with the first model 601 in 1943. However, the name was most commonly associated with the subsequent model 604 which was a seminal loudspeaker that became a milestone in loudspeaker development. Well over a dozen different models carried the Duplex name over a near 50-year period. The vast majority consisted of a high frequency (HF) compression driver mounted to the back of a large diameter paper cone low frequency (LF) driver. However, there were also a few models with small diameter LF cones and direct radiator tweeters.