GH12H30 Speaker Breakup

[sixpakldp]

Getting ready to record my guitar tracks tomorrow night. This time around our bass player has been doing all of the recording, however the only bad thing is the only available space for me to record is my singers house. He keeps saying that volume won't be a problem, however I do not think he is aware of how I would normally record my metro 100 watt-no attenuator maybe a little lar mar ppmiv and lots of volume to get the speakers moving.

So knowing that, I know I can get the output section going enough with my attenuator so the next question is how to drive the speakers at more reasonable levels (not bedroom levels, but not crank your plexi in a studio level).

A while back I purchased two Hellatone G12h30's to compliment two G12C30's I bought used out of a top hat amp. Although the Hellatones were broken-in, they were nowhere near as broken in as the other speakers and you could hear the difference, they were much more thin sounding. So to help them along, I loaded the Hellatones into my 2X12 Avatar, made sure not to turn my MV past halfway and kept my hotplate on -8. I played two 4 hour practices like that, loaded them back into my 4X12 and I now had a quad of speakers that sounded evenly broken in.

So I'm thinking about loading my G12C30's into the 2x12 tonight and use the same settings, no more than halfway on the ppmiv and -8 on the hotplate.

So what do you think, should I give it a go and would it sound better than running a 4X12 at the same settings? And before answering that question, I do know you should always have twice your amps wattage in speakers, however I am using both an attenuator and ppmiv as a safety against melting speakers. I've ran the amp in this configuration before without issue. In 1978 if EVH posted that he was thinking about using a variac to adjust the voltage of the amp he'd probably get hit with a shit storm of comments, but a lot of us here on the site do it to some extent (safely of course!).

[Maverick]

I can tell you from my experience with hellatones that they are not broken in at all, the best way to break a speaker in is to play it loud alot, especially clean!

[908ssp]

For recording with a microphone run one greenback and only turn the attenuator up enough to get the speaker working.