TALKING LOUD
If you’ve ever been on a cramped stage with your amp blasting your ankles from the floor, you’ll appr eciate this advice from Zilla Cabs’ Paul Gough
You might have noticed how some cabs have a completely straight front, have a slight slant on the baffles, and others (normally vertical 2x12 or 4x12s) have a straight bottom and angled top speaker. I often find during the ordering process, customers have already considered the different options and picked the obvious topics, such as speaker choice, size and type of back. So, choosing between the three baffles might seem to be based more on looks rather than anything else. However, it’s very much an overlooked aspect of a cab’s design and has important practical implications on your tone. As such, we’re going to look at how each type affects the sound of your cab, the positives and negatives, and in what scenario each will work for you.
Straight-Up Sound
It’s probably best to acknowledge that the internal volume of a cab affects how it sounds. Astraight-front cab has the greatest internal volume (all things being equal), and putting any slight slant on the baffle eats into the internal volume. Agood designer will take this into account when designing the cab, so we’ll keep our focus on how the placement of the baffle inside the cab can affect its performance.
Focusing on a closed-back cab, the key thing is the position of the baffle and therefore the speaker in relation to the backboard. Imagine a straight-front cab: it will have its speaker baffle and speakers parallel to the back panel. When a signal is applied to the speaker, its cone will first move forward and then retract back to its original position (an oversimplification, but you get the point). Not only does this slightly change the pressure inside the cab, it also creates pressure waves inside the cab, most of which will travel in the opposite direction towards the backboard.
Some of these waves will reflect and hit the speaker, or at the very least make a complex pressure differential inside the cab – but one that is mostly front to back. There can also be a certain reinforcement of the sound.
ADifferent Slant
Now imagine inside a cab with a slight slant on the baffle. The pressure waves hits the backboard at a slight angle, therefore the reflections are also at an angle. Once these reflections make it back to the speaker, they hit mostly at a different angl
