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Help Identifying Fender Bassman Cab
- Thread starter ssaammaayyy
- Start date
You can’t tell from the outside if the speaker is original.
If it sounds good, it has value.
If it sounds good, it has value.
I am no expert, but I believe this cab is from the silver face era (late 60s to about 81). I believe it has a pair of 15s that are mounted diagonally.
It's worth what someone will pay you, which is probably not much regardless of whether it is working or not. Fender was not known for making great bass cabs in that era.
Here is a listing on Reverb $21999. Maybe it will sell, and maybe it won't.
Fender BASSMAN 70 2-15" CABINET | Reverb
It's worth what someone will pay you, which is probably not much regardless of whether it is working or not. Fender was not known for making great bass cabs in that era.
Here is a listing on Reverb $21999. Maybe it will sell, and maybe it won't.
Fender BASSMAN 70 2-15" CABINET | Reverb
They used this sized cab beginning in '72. It's not worth too much -- 200 Frog-skins seems appropriate, for someone who has a hard-on for a vintage Fender look. And it's probably worth neither more nor less with different speakers. Do NOT invest money in speakers hoping to enhance the value. OTOH, there's nothing particularly desirable about the original drivers that would make one want to keep them to 'preserve the magic', or whatever - IMHO, anyway. Broadly speaking, this cab is too small for two 15" drivers, so trying to upgrade it with better drivers can only yield marginal improvement.
If wanting to keep the aesthetics of the cab etc, would getting a decent modern 15" driver and making it a single 15... with correct adjustments to internal volume and porting... work?
should read $219.99 
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I cant give the most professional answer, but I believe it would need to be a deeper, less wide cabinet for the best results
To directly address the question, I don't see any obvious problems with that idea. According to my rough guesstimate, the cab has about 4 ft^3, which would be sufficient. If you're trying to build a reflex cab, a shallow cab like this presents a challenge in that there is a limit to how deep the port ducts can be if you use just straight ducts. Of course, that tuning depends on the actual driver used. And maybe you could put the port(s) in the panel you use to fill the open hole in the baffle and avoid actually butchering up the original baffle board.
It's an interesting thought experiment: would one modern 15" driver in a properly designed cab outperform the original 215 cab? I'd say definitely so with the original drivers, but I can't say that it would do any better than the same cab with two modern drivers and just allowing for their compromised performance. That's something that really would be driver dependent and would need to be modeled. And it kind of depends on how you define what 'works' is. The original cab performed its function, albeit marginally -- it was intended for a 50-t0-70-watt amp, and in that respect, it 'worked'. You could probably just stuff two modern drivers in it and that would also 'work', after a fashion. It's just that the performance of the drivers would be sub-optimal. Whether that would 'work' for a particular situation is an 'it depends' question.
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The bassman 70 was the late 70s ultralinear model, made from about 77-83. The cabs were the same from about 72 on I believe (that’s the timeline on this page at least), but since it says 70
I would assume it’s from the later ultralinear era.
Fender Silverface Bassman