Not All Speaker Designs Are Good - The Styrofoam Speaker!

Not All Speaker Designs Are Good - The Styrofoam Speaker!

Innovation.  Good?  Bad?  Shucks, it can be either one, but mix a little "innovation" with a really stupid speaker design and what do ya get?  The Styrofoam speaker!  I am a vintage Fender amp guy through and through, but I gotta tell ya, the CBS nut-jobs made some downright appalling speaker decisions in the late 60’s/early 70’s.  The absolute worst of the worst: The Fender Bantam Bass Amp.  All I can say is that the designers of the Bantam bass amp musta been wasted outta their minds when they choose the Yamaha Styrofoam driver for the Bantam bass amp ... hey it WAS designed during the "summer of Love".

I love the wicki blurb on this amp: "The Fender Bantam Bass was a bass amplifiermade by Fender. It was introduced in 1969. This silverfacedamp used an asymmetrical trapezoidal Yamaha speaker using a white styrofoamcone, and so the speakers blew very easily. As a result, the amp was not a commercial success".  Wow, like, man ... puff, puff, who woulda thought that folks wanted speakers that actually worked.  Bummer, man.  Oh, Leo, what they did to your company!

Okay, so what’s the only thing worse than an all-tube Fender Bantam Bass amp with a trapezoidal Styrofoam speaker?  A solid-state Yamaha amp with FOUR (!) of those God-awful things!  I’m gonna end with this, non-photoshoped pic of an actual Yamaha amp, the dreaded TA-120 ... like an accident on the freeway, as terrible as it may be, you just can’t help gawking at it!

Bye for now, my "outside" site recommendation this week is ggjaguar’s Bantam Bass page!  Checkout  http://www.ggjaguar.com/bantbass.htm- I love his description of the speaker "Yamaha trapezoidal weirdo model"!

Oh, and rest assured, WGS has no styrofoam models in the works.

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