Speaker Simulator Comparison Test

What are Speaker Simulators good for?

They have many names: cabinetulator, speaker simulator, speaker emulator, frequency compensator, cabinet emulator, cabinet simulator – to name a few...

You are new to speaker simulators in general? They are designed to work together with guitar amplifiers. Let me give you some idea, what one can do with these nice little helpers:

Use a speaker simulators during live performances and you don't need to take the risk of defective or incorrectly placed microphones to pick up your speaker cabinet anymore. Most times you will also not know in advance, which specific microphone model will be used. Bring your own speaker simulator to gigs and you can be sure to get the sound you want to the mixer console.

The same applies to (home) recording situations. A good speaker simulator allows you to record exactly the sound you know and want. If time and money in a professional studio is no problem for you, classic recording via a real speaker cabinet will probably still be your way to go. But for all others speaker simulators can be a good choice.

If your sound is generated by a preamp (or if the power amp section of your amp head or combo amp is solid state based), you can even feed a speaker simulator without the need to connect a real speaker to your amp. This type of setup allows for silent recording. That is a nice feature, if your favorite time for making musik is late in the evening or at night. Otherwise you need to connect a load resistor, which simulates a speaker and protects your tube power amp.

Oh I see, you're asking why you cannot simply use the line out of your preamp, amp head or combo amp for direct recording or for gigs? Just try it and you will hear why. There are too many nasty high frequncies being audible via a fullrange loudspeaker. A speaker simulator filters the incoming signal that it sounds more like sent through a guitar speaker and picked up by a microphone. You will get a chance to hear the difference in a minute...

Warning: in case you connect a speaker simulator to the speaker output of a tube power amp, you need to connect a speaker or a load resistor to the output of the speaker simulator! Otherwise your power amp will most probably break...


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©2006 by Frank Nitsch