Tweeters for a Suitcase

[Student Rhodes]

Have any of you any experience with either playing, or installing tweeters on a Suitcase cab?
I sure would like to have more brightness on one of my Suitcases.  It just feels DULL and flat.
I've seen pics of the mod, but I've never heard the results.
Opinions welcome!
Ray

[Tim Hodges]

Rob wrote up a good article about performing the mod. I'd start from here:

DIY Bright mod

[pnoboy]

I suspect that you don't need tweeters, but rather, new speakers.  I had a suitcase some years back that sounded completely dull.  It turned out that Fender, at least during the era in which my suitcase was made, used speakers they used in their Bassman amps--they were essentially woofers.  I replaced them with guitar speakers, and the piano sounded much better.  I ended up using just 2 speakers, installed on the side facing the audience, and left the remaining 2 places open.  That made the sound even better.  If you have any friends was guitar speaker cabs you could experiment with just to see what the sound is like, that would be worth doing.

[Ben Bove]

Now that's an old thread!  I definitely think the standard 4x12" speakers never quite yield what you hear out of the headphones or line-out directly to a recording interface... so I would agree, added brightness would be great in factory suitcase cabinets.

I haven't researched what would fit the bill, but I've always thought that adding both midrange speakers and tweeters would solve the problem.  Midrange would help amplify the 500-2k range... and if there were tweeters that handle more of the 2k-5k range rather than the obscene 10k-upper limit of human hearing ... it could be a more faithful reproduction of the sound coming directly off the preamp.

[pnoboy]

Guitar speakers are pretty much large midranges.  I can listen to my stage piano through headphones, or through my speaker cab that has a single Ragin Cajun guitar speaker in it.  They sound very much alike, though the headphones have a bit more treble--I actually don't like the added treble because it further reveals the noise that results from the hammers hitting the tines.  I think that the right guitar speakers in the right cabinet are all you need for a Rhodes 73.  I also think that 4 12" speakers as used in the suitcase piano are far from ideal.  At one point in time I had a Gibson Thor bass amp.  It had 2 Jenson 10" speakers arranged vertically in a sealed cab.  The amp put out 50 watts via a pair of EL34 tubes.  Boy did it sound better than the suitcase piano I sold when I bought the stage piano.

[Max Brink]

I'm glad this is on someone else's mind, too. I think that if I was going to design a Rhodes suitcase cabinet from scratch with no expenses considered it would definitely have a crossover network tailored to the instrument... The speakers themselves make a huge difference and I wonder what kind of difference could be made by calculating a crossover/tweeter network for the Rhodes... Would probably develop some new recording and live mic'd performance issues for sure... But in it's own room could sound amazing!

[pnoboy]

Max,

There's no need to wait--connect the musical-instrument amp of your choice to a hifi speaker.  Of course, you won't get lots of volume out, but you'll be able to hear what a full-range speaker system sounds like with a Rhodes.  Alternatively, you could just connect your amp to a good-quality set of earphones.  I've done both experiments and wasn't particularly impressed.  Then, if you can set your amp for a flat frequency response, put a good multiband graphic equalizer in the signal chain and play with that until you get what you think is the best sound.  I've done that, too.  After all was said and done, I found that the right guitar speaker in the right cabinet was a very good choice for the Rhodes.  Different speaker cabinets make a huge difference.  An open-back cabinet with the speaker almost essentially at floor level definitely produces a frequency-response contour.  The same arrangement, but with the cabinet up off the floor a few feet sounds quite different.  A sealed cabinet produces yet a different frequency contour. 

After all was said and done, the best arrangement I found was a high-quality 10" guitar speaker, in a sealed cabinet, with the speaker mounted off the floor.  If I needed more volume, I'd use 2 10" speakers mounted vertically.  For home use, a single 10" speaker can blow me out of the room.  Of course, your taste could push you in a different direction.

[Max Brink]

I agree with you big time. Cabinet design can make a huge difference. I wish there was "no need to wait," but at the moment it's pretty far down the list of experimental jobs... It's on the list somewhere but it'd be a while before I was able to get to it... Seems like it could be really amazing if pulled off right but also could be a dangerously time consuming rabbit hole to start going down...