Standel Imperial 48 412 Cabinet

The Standel Imperial 48 is a powered 4x12 infinite baffle speaker cabinet not unlike any 4x12 stack. It is extremely heavy, made from particle board and thick plywood, covered with black tolex. The sides of the cabinet are slightly larger than the top and bottom, which help protect the speakers and amp from damage when laid down. The rim of the side panels is protected with a heavy plastic cap that stands up to abuse and dragging across floors, etc.

It has 4 removable casters on the bottom, with a power amp in the upper portion of the back of the unit. There are built-in heavy duty recessed carry handles on either side of the cabinet.

I have two of these - one built approx. 1969 and the other in 1970. They take a line in and have loop-thru jacks to daisy chain multiple cabinets together.

The power amp has a single control - an on-off switch. There are two two-prong AC outlets for accessories, and a push-to-reset circuit breaker.

The unit has 4 JBL speakers (unknown model) in a 16-ohm configuration, and is extremely clean and loud, with lots of tone. As I understand it, the amp is a 50 watt unit, but you wouldn't know it if you stood in front of it at high volume levels. This unit can easily cause hearing damage. I rarely play above 3 on my preamp head.

I use these couple to the MC2G preamp head, which I've also reviewed here. As I said in that review, Standel solid-state amps are very clean. There is some hum, but overall it is negligible when playing.

Since the preamp and amps are so clean, it does have a distinct sound and you have to use outboard effects to get distortion and overdrive sounds. However, it is a great sounding amp system.

I have not had any problems with the amp or speakers over the 20 or so years I've owned it. It has been 100% reliable.

One of my units, being slightly older than the other, had problems from day one. The amp was blown when I bought it (used) and I was not able to find anyone who could fix it. The amp designs were constantly changing as Bob Crooks (Standel founder) sought out the perfect design. So between my two amps, there is some design difference, and we couldn't just copy the good amp design to fix the bad one.

Over the years I had removed the blown amp and used the cabinet with other amps, and unfortunately I've lost the amp unit for my second cabinet, so I'm looking for a replacement.

Now that Danny McKinney has resurrected Standel, he has posted the schematics to all Standel gear as PDF files on his web site. I wish I had the old amp - I could fix it easily if parts could be found for it. I'll keep looking!

Danny McKinney is a great guy, and very interested in hearing about the other Standel products. He is genuinely passionate about the Standel amps. I have had nothing but good experiences with him and the company, mostly via email.

He's also put all the schematics to the various products up on the web in PDF files, which helps a lot if you find an old amp somewhere and need it fixed up.

I'm very happy with my old amps and wish I could find more of them, combo models, parts, etc. In this day when all amps are sounding the same and/or moving to digital modeling, it's nice to have a real unique, vintage amp system with such a great sound that can still blow away the new stuff out there.

BTW, how about letting us post pictures of these units???