Hi Folks – Just recently bought this speaker and thought I’d post a few thoughts about it. First and foremost however, I would just like to comment on the excellent service I received from Lean-Business whare I purchased this – I dealt directly with Nigel and can only say that the whole experience was nothing short of outstanding in every respect. You can deal with Lean business confident in the knowledge that the standard of service is of the highest order!
Back to the speaker. This was a replacement for a stock Fender Blues Junior (ii). I have recently (over the last year and a half) gone about downsizing my gear from various large, classic amps to small Classic Marshall Class5 (it was a superbass, then a 1974x now it's the class 5, but I love it!), an AC4 and most recently, the Blues Junior. I play mainly classic rock/pop and occasionally dip into a bit of Folk/Rockabilly/jazz and funk, so the different food groups of amps is justifiable and the low volume levels and portability are a boon.
As a caveat, and apologies in advance, words will definitely fail here with respect to trying to adequately and accurately describe what I hear, but I’ll do my best. …When I acquired the Blues Jnr, I felt it was a decent little amp and the variety of tones available was great. However, even tho the speaker it ships with isn’t as bad as some folks make it out to be, it definitely contributed to the slightly boxy/small amp sound and by comparison to the class5 and most crertainly the Slverface Twin I used to own, it did sound ‘small’ and a ‘papery’ as well as having what I can only describe as a glare in the upper mid-frequncies that just couldn't be dialled out. I did the usual trawl of internet blogged opinion (highly subjective) and various YT demos (highly subjective) as well as directly soliciting the opinion of WGS themselves and decided to try out the WGS G12C/S. I wanted to try to preserve what elements of ‘American’ tones exist in the Blues jnr but also felt the some of the top end might benefit with a bit of smoothing. I was going to opt for either the ET65 or the liberator but decided to stick with the traditional type US speaker and opted for this. I ordered the speaker from Lean Business and it was here in less than 2 business days (England - >Ireland). It took about ten minutes to fit the speaker and I broke it in by playing a looped guitar phrase thru it for about 15 hrs, probably still nto completely broken in yet, but it's sufficient enough for my purposes.
Categorically, this speaker is a rock-solid improvement over the stock OEM eminence generic 12”speaker that ships stock with the blues Jnr. The amp no longer sounds as dimensionally small as it did previously (within reasonable constraints - it is still a small box after all and the laws of physics are always going to apply!) The speaker yields definite and noticeable gains with respect to bass, mids and treble but there is more to it than the simple frequency response improvements. If I were to be lazy, I would simply say that the WGS imparts vast improvements in terms of euphony over the stock speaker, but I’ll try and describe it in a little more detail … There is a tangibility and near visceral quality to the sound that was simply missing with the stock speaker. The tone feels like it has a new weight and authority to it that was previously absent. It complements and enhances those American flavoured tones the amp is built to deliver but also helps to smooth out the inherent but vague shrillness that was present prior to the change. Pedals sound significantly better thru this speaker, particularly things like fuzz and some of my older vintage phase and chorus pedals sound naturally smoother without losing any of their definition. Perhaps the best way I can describe it would be to say that prior to the upgrade, I was using a Wampler Black 65 pedal to capture those edgy blackface tones. Now I no longer need to!! Don’t get me wrong - it still isn’t a blackface twin or deluxe reverb, but in the context of a pub gig, I’m not so sure many folks would notice!! defintie improvement and a great match for this amp. Highly recommended!!