J Design Cabinets The Old Dog Cabinet

The Old Dog 1210 is a highly crafted cabinet with a 12" and 10" speaker.
It has a recessed insert, which is a nice feature.

If you believe a cab is a cab and its the speakers are the only factor in
determining the tone, then more power to ya. My Old Dog arrived empty because I got it off ebay, and that is how it was offered. I installed a Weber
Blue Dog (Alnico), and a Blue Pup (ceramic). AWESOME SPEAKERS in a
truly TONE-RULING cabinet. Mines in pine and is beautifully resonant. I believe that the cab adds considerably to my sound.

This piece is so well made that I foresee no problems.

Jeff at JDesigns returned my emails quickly and kindly. Very professional.

I have been playing harp for (ever). I've never had nicer tone. The Weber
speakers in this Old Dog cab is the best combination I ever heard, so lively.
SIMPLY SYMBIOTIC!

I was looking for a good cabinet to put some Celestion speakers in. Since most second hand cabinets are equiped with speakers already, I chose to go for a custom cabinet.

I first looked at the Jenkins cabinets, but they are out of my budget. Based upon the pictures on Jeff's site, and his very reasonable prices I contacted Jeff.
He is a class guy, very fast in his communication and open to International transactions. Not to mention the great handcrafted cabinets that show on his webpage.

But anyway. This The Old Dog is a custom one. It has a fascia and an open back. The fascia holds the JDesign label and it looks perfect, nice logo.
I wanted two 12" holes done, Fender-like brown tolex and the wheat grill (man, that stuff is cool). I wasn't sure if the colors would match, but it turned out very classic!
So, it came with two 12" holes, and a piece of spare tolex, just in case. He installed a very nice speaker jack, and a heavy duty handle.

I paid USD 425,= total for the cabinet, but keep in mind that the cabinet had to be shipped (empty cabinet 35 lb) overseas to Holland, and that is a significant part of that amount.


Thus, the features are very limited, but hey, it's a speaker cabinet! So, since it looks great, I am giving Jeff a 10 anyway.

Like I said, I had some spare speakers. Celestion G12M blackbacks to be precise. I installed them (the speaker mounting holes were perfectly in the right place) and I was rather dissapointed. Not because of the cabinet, but the speakers themself are low resonance (according to Dr. Decibel of Celestion). For your info, I was using a ZVex Nano amp.

Tried two G12-65's. That was a lot better I gotta say!

The Old Dog standard has dovetail joints. That makes the cabinet as strong as it ever could be. 9 Ply Western white Pine and the regular cabinet is painted transparant in 6 coats. But I wanted tolex 8^)

When I received the box, it looked like it really got some damage. The folks from USPS, or DHL, didn't handle it with care. But the foam inside absorbed all the damage, not even a little dent in the tolex. So, reliability is ok I'd say!

I've emailed about twenty times, and all the times he was very friendly and helpfull. There's a two year warranty, but I doubt anyone would really need it.

The total proces took three weeks. And that is very fast if you want to have something custom build.

This amp is in great company with my other equipment. My main amp is a '81 Deluxe reverb, but I recently bought a ZVex Nano amp too. There's an Echolette BS40 and a Scottish Carlton amp too.
There's more than 50 guitar pedals from Boss, Robert Keeley, Ibanez, Toadworks and Bruce Bennett to name a few. I only got one guitar, a Fender strat. Not all original but it plays well.

No expert needed to see that this cabinet is high quality. Thank you for reading and thank you Jeff Earl.