Jensen C8R 8 Ohms

This is "just" an 8 inch, 25W speaker but you wouldn't know that from its sound. Jensen themselves describe it as having tight bass, aggressive mids and bright highs. They are not overstating.

Amazing bass response here, no muddy, boomy sounds but just crystal clear tone. The higher frequencies sparkle. Very defined and lush sound with single coils.

Sound is partly subjective, so to put things in perspective: I play a Fender Strat with Texas Specials through a tiny Kustom V5 Defender. I like my sound clean, or at most a little breakup. The speaker performs wonderfully here, it really opens up the amp, like removing a curtain in front of it.

Any negative points? Relatively speaking, no. For any improvement you'd need either a bigger speaker (12") or perhaps Alnico (though that is debatable).

If you have a practice tube combo, 5-15W, with an 8 inch speaker that can use an upgrade, this is it. Sure, you'll maybe end up paying 1/4th of what your amp cost, but to me, it's worth it. This speaker (together with tubes from TAD) has made the little Kustom really shine and become an excellent recording amp.

The most attractive feature of the Jensen C8R is its super tight midrange. That's literally the first thing that you'll notice. And then there is the musical, silky high end. Which sounds also really pleasant. Never harsh. The low end is tight and almost punchy. Alas there isn't much of a low end here. You can almost tell, ok its there. So what this is, its a very mids focused speaker. And as such you don't get much of a full range sound.

Thus this speaker on its own sounds small, fizzy and honky. If you were to pair this Jensen with one or two low end heavy speakers, i could imagine that would result in a really dynamic setup. So in short nay for 1x8. But could be really awesome for 2x8 or 4x8 mixed speaker setups.

Got this to upgrade my Peavey Blazer 158 (USA made) as I always found the stock speaker to be kind of lacking and being a bit muddy. I play metal, so clean sound is insignificant to me. It's better than the stock speaker on the clean channel and that's where I'll stop.

I get 100% of use out of the drive channel, so I'll base my review around it. Note that I also own bigger amps (tube and transistor ones) and more than decent speakers to accompany them and play them fairly often, being in bands that perform throughout the year or record albums.

Out of the box - looks sturdy and durable, no complaints there.

Installed it in hopes to add to praises most of other reviewers claimed - it "takes the blanket off the amp", adding more headroom and clarity, making everything better.

They are right - got more volume, more highs and cleaner sound. BUT - this means that i have to crank the amp a fair bit more than I used for it to start breaking up rendering the term "practice amp" useless - you can't practice as the sound at reasonable volume levels is horrid, explanation below.

The amp lost all of its usable mids. All i hear is bass and shrieking highs, basically turning my amp into a bad Boss HM-2. Adding mids worsens the situation as I assume that the amp is dialed to a specific frequency that does not sit well with this speaker. Adding an OD pedal to aleviate the amount of gain and add some more eq control doesn't help.

OK, amps don't sound that good at low volumes, let's crank it up, to hell with neighbours. I only managed to add more low end and the horrid highs continued to pierce my ears, now at gigging volume. If you try to play fast, there is no note separation, you only hear mudd enveloped in a swarm of mosquitoes.

I thought that it could be that the speaker is broken, so I measured its impedance - everything's all right. I can only assume that it is not broken in, having been played for an hour or two at lower volumes so I'm not sure whether it's fair to rate it right now or not.

All I know is that as of now - this aftermarket product managed to downgrade my inexpensive peace of gear and the intent was the opposite. Shame.