screamingdaisy said:
One thing to remember is that Marhsall "Vintage" speakers were out for years before Celestion released the Vintage 30, and that back in the 80s G12H-30s weren't exactly vintage anything. Long story short, I have a hard time believing the goal was to make a speaker that sounded like a speaker they just discontinued.
I really wish I'd kept a copy of something with Celestion's original description in it!
This was just at the time that old speakers were starting to become desirable, when people were beginning to notice that the old cabs with 25s and 30s sounded much better than the new ones.
Some theorize that it's called a Vintage 30 because 30cm = 12". Others because it was made out of leftover G12H-30 parts... namely the heavy magnet and bass cone.
Wrong and wronger
.
As for what they were trying to develop, who can say? Maybe the original Vintage speakers did sound vaguely like an old alnico to a bunch of people who were burned out on scooped G12T-75s? It's obvious they didn't nail it, but that doesn't rule out that their original goal could've been to create an alnico/ceramic cross and the Marshall Vintage was the best they could come up with.
Trust me, I was just really getting into guitar gear exactly at the time all this was going on (early enthusiasm obsessiveness
) and I can guarantee that it was meant to sound like a vintage G12H-30 but with higher power handling. Alnico had nothing to do with it - back then they were only considered speakers for an AC30.
The G12T-75 had only been out for a year or so at this point too - the 'modern' speakers mostly in use in Marshall cabs were the G12-65 and G12-80, and a very short run of the G12M-70 just before they switched to the 75s. These early 75s *also* have vented magnets and sound different from the current ones, by the way...
For what it's worth, I took the original V30 out of my Studio 15 and put in a genuine vintage G12H-30, because I didn't really like the V30. How things have changed! (Or rather, the speakers have genuinely improved with age as well just like the old ones did.)