Solid State Guitar Amp Forum | DIY Guitar Amplifiers

Hi everobody:

Im just curious about something:

Why regular SS Guitar amp (at least that i see here, in Argentine) dont use tweeters?

Any idea?

Distorted guitar tones will sound obnoxious unless frequencies above ca. 5 kHz are attenuated heavily. Reproducing them with an efficient tweeter would be pretty much the opposite of that.

You can see tweeters in acoustic -and bass amps though, because those applications don't rely so heavily on generating distorted tones and can therefore benefit from a bit wider bandwidth.

To expand a little bit, "acoustic amplifiers" are really small PA systems.  They are mostly there to amplify a full range signal faithfully.  A guitar amp in contrast is part of the instrument and is intended to color the sound.

A good experiment is to plug your electric guitar into a hone stereo system, or even into a mixer channel input on your band's PA system.  Listen to how it sounds through those full range speakers with tweeters.  it generally sounds thin and tinny.

In short, we don;t put tweeters on guitar amps because nothig we want to hear would come out of them.