Vox Blue 1962

To make a speaker robust enough to use with a Vox AC30 amp, Celestion Chief Engineer Les Ward modified a variant of the G12 radio speaker to give it greater strength and power-handling: adding a thin layer of doping to the cone, changing the voice coil wire from aluminium to copper and making the termination wires tougher.

Rated at a more resilient 15W, Celestion began manufacturing the new speaker, T530, in eye-catching ‘azure blue’, in January 1961. With its alnico magnet it was first built for loading into the Vox AC15 and AC30 Twin amps and thus the legendary ‘Vox Blue’ was born.

On its introduction, the Blue’s unique tonality immediately found favour with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and other trailblazers during the ‘beat boom’ of the early 1960s, remaining popular and successful all the way to the present day. From these origins, the G12 became the World’s first purpose-built guitar speaker and went on to become the template for the many other guitar speakers that followed.

This superb collection of speaker responses has been recorded using some exquisite examples of the Vox Blue, dating from 1962 and taken from Celestion’s extensive archive. Nothing else could get you this close to the original ‘Celestion sound.’