[FFTT]

This afternoon I sat down ready to try another clip showing the cleans-crunch
tones and just moments after I started warming up, the amp just quit. No Sound.
I was only at half volume, so I thought it was in the amp.

I took the amp over to my friend Eric at Viking Amps who was kind enough
to do a quick check to see what had gone wrong.

The good news is that the amp is FINE
The sad news is that the original driver tested for an open voice coil.

So as I feared, playing a 45 year old driver at full volume is not a good idea.

For the time being, Eric set me up with an Eminence Canibis Rex.
The amp still sounds great but the mixed blessing is now the amp
is twice as loud !!!

The C-Rex has an SPL efficiency of 102, where the original AlNiCo driver might have been around 97 or less.

I'm going to have the original driver re-coned and store it away.

The original lower efficiency driver made the amp perfect for great tones at lower volumes for recording and for long term listening comfort.

The more efficient C-Rex makes this amp much better suited for live band performance, adding not only volume but increased clean headroom and
greater response from the control knobs.

Ampeg's specs of 18 watts are quite conservative.

Eric tested the output @ 21 watts clean RMS and 28 watts peak wide open.

We tried a bunch of guitars through it and it totally rocks, but
I'm afraid I'm gonna need to hunt down a less efficient AlNiCo
that can handle at least 30 watts.