Which cabinet is best paired with Zentera head???

Hello all. Just grabbed a very cool Zentera head. I had the combo amp back in the early 2000's bit now with the head - I'd like to get the cabinet that will allow me to maximize its performance. 200 watts and 16 ohms. I admittedly do not know much about how to pair cabinet watt and ohm capabilities to the head. Any advice will be greatly appreciated especially from those whom have used H&K heads specifically the Zentera. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration!

Hi VB.  Your Zentera is not like the majority of other H&K amps to date.  It does not handle speaker impedances the same as a true valve output amp will.  It isn't a problem in practice, in fact it makes things a little easier with less to worry about.

What are you planning to do with the amp?  Is it for home use?  Small pub/club gigs?  Large venues?  Stadiums?  2x100W is f***in' LOUD!  It's Pete Townsend of The Who in their early stages loud when they used the famous Marshall 200W Major "The Pig".  He's deaf now!!!  I would suggest that there aren't many homes in the UK at least which could require 200W to sound full and alive.  Even the 2x60W output is more than is needed for all but the largest space.  I have a variety of 100W Marshalls which I can't even use at home or in small gigs as they sit so far below their "coming alive" point on the MV.  I currently use a Marshall SC20H for gigging in small-medium pubs and clubs and I have to have that set on 5W with Master below half.  That is with another guitarist using a Marshall Silver Jubilee set at 25W.  I have no problem with being heard, (only some times that you CAN hear me   ).  So to matching...

I'll be honest up front, I have never seen a Zentera, but the specs are available and are simple engineering.  The Zentera manual shows it can offer 2x100W into 6ohms (that's 24.5V output), and 2x60W into 16ohms (that's 31V).  Those two specs do not match up to each other accurately, in an ideal amplifier the voltage should stay the same, but that is normal for high current outputs like our guitar amps.  Doing an estimate this would mean about 2x85W into 8ohms (guessing at 26.5V).  Not too shabby for the standard 8ohm types.  The lower the impedance of the speaker, the more current is pulled out of the amp's output stages for the same signal voltage level.  This gives us higher powers for the same output signal voltage.  (Power = Voltage X Current.)  In a true valve output stage you must match the speaker's impedance to the amp's output impedance reasonably accurately and speakers of too high or too low impedance should not be used.  In a solid state transistor amp lower speaker impedances will stretch it more, they mean more current and transistors have a maximum current they can cope with, while a higher impedance is not a problem.  Higher impedance just results in lower overall power out and an easier life for the output stage.

You would need to make sure that you keep the speaker power handling at least the same as the amp will give out into that impedance.  Hence I asked what you mean to do with the amp.  If you are playing stadiums then you really need to get close to your 6ohm minimum for max power.  For home or small gigs you only need to take the 16ohm approach and even then it will most likely be too loud at 2x60W.  A last word of warning, be honest and realistic, it is very easy to convince yourself you need much more power than you really ever will!!!

Wow thanks for that Fantastic reply. I play at home, at rehearsal with full band and smaller venues 1500 or less. I loved the features and ease of use when I had the combo back in the day. So it was easy for me to go back to familiar. I considered others but my lack of knowledge and experience with Marshall heads or others pushed me towards the Zentera. I just sent want to hurt it or the speakers that I get in any way. I'm sure I'll never really need 200 watts. I've been looking at some 2x12 hughes and kettner cabs as well as their 4x12's and also Marshall 4x12 and Mesa 4x12. I've read that the 4 12 is just fuller and more bottom end where the 2x12 is more mid and Brite which I don't really want. I am willing to get the right cabinet just need to know which would work best with this head and its outputs. You mention 6 OHM but the head is 16 ohm or 8 I believe. I have a diagram from a H&K manual that shows some of the options. Like I said I'm just trying to avoid doing any damage to a vintage head and whatever cab I end up getting whether new or vintage. I'd like to pair the head with a cab that is right both power wise and sound wise. Any additional advice will be greatly appreciated as well. Hoping to make a move this week.

I would say that you should also consider this. Not too many people do! Part of the sound we crave is actually the speakers being driven correctly and completely. That doesn't mean being overloaded electrically. All speakers have a "maximum cone excursion" defined in their specs which means the amount the cone can move forwards and backwards before the outer suspension surround restricts any further movement. This is not usually a "set in stone" thing where you reach that excursion cleanly and the cone stops dead. It just gradually stretches out and restricts the cone as its excursion increases. Guitar speakers are not like hifi speakers which need to remove all sources of distortion. The hifi speaker tries to give as long a "throw" to the cone as it can before restriction because that means the maximum linear undistorted power range, lower distortion up to higher powers. Just look at their bigger, softer, more flexible surrounds. Guitar speakers begin to restrict the movement much earlier and over a larger proportion of their travel. And that means that our guitar speakers sound great because it causes gradual compression of the signal which is not like any distortion the amp creates, it's unique to the speaker itself and it is really organic.

If you build too much available power handling into your speakers you may never reach the amount of excursion needed for them to "come alive". The amp may but the speakers may not and that is something wonderful missing. The lower the drive to each speaker the lower its excursion will be. So to increase the excursion you can use less speakers. It is sometimes helpful to use only a single speaker so as to drive it to a longer throw and into its distorting region at lower output powers. With two speakers running you end up turning the amp down more because, with twice the cone area, they actually give out more "sound power" (that's a descriptive term not a technical one) making them sonically louder for the same electrical power in. The down side is that they are also driven to a much lower cone excursion as the electrical power is split between them so they will not each go into their sweet spot as early as one will.

Your speaker choice is one of the most important you will make soundwise. It far outweighs any difference valves will make. You absolutely must hear any potential speaker with your own setup. One which sounds great with the store's chosen audition amp will almost certainly not sound the same with your Zentera. And choosing the driver purely from someone else's recommendation is the road to expensive dissatisfaction later down the line. It depends on what genre you are playing and what sort of sound you are hearing in your head. These are not things easily described between people in a meaningful and accurate way.

You have a number of possibilities: a pair of 1x12"; a pair of 2x12"; a single 2x12" split for each output; a pair of 4x12"; a single 4x12" split into pairs for each output. How does all of that sit with your budget and your requirements?

Ok well I saw these 1x12' for $500. They're 60 watts each and says 16 OHMS. Has an in and out (parallel) on back of cabs. Would I plug into one and then run a cable to the other? Would this set up be safe for the head and speakers? I saw a Hughes and Kettner 4x12 that I like as well for 795. It is new old stock. That's about the most I'd be looking to spend either on one or two cabs. Doubt I could get two 2x12s for less than 800 but maybe of you think better? I'm leaning towards 2 1x12's to be honest if they are compatible?

Tried to post links but not allowed for 1st 7 days lol

The 1x12"s would be compatible but remember, the fact that they are 16ohms means that you are limited to the power you can get the system to produce.  You don't need to worry about the speakers having an "Out" socket on them for this case, that is only useful when you need to combine more speakers to drive from one power amp.  With the Zentera head you have a pair of power amps with no internal speakers to complicate things, so with these 16ohm speakers you will get a maximum of 60W from each speaker, period!  The only way to increase that would be to add in another speaker, either 8 or 16ohms, in parallel with these ones you are thinking of buying.  If 2x60W is enough for your use, (and I can't imagine it would not be), then they may be the way to go.  If you do not listen to them with the Zentera before buying you are taking a big risk.  Speaker choice is the most important decision you now have to make in terms of your tone.  You need to hear your own system working to know how it will sound.  No amount of hearing a speaker with another amp will guarantee what it will sound like with your own different one.

I can't help thinking that $500 is a lot to pay for a pair of 1x12"s but I'm generally out of touch with market prices as I am sitting on more gear than I will ever need in my lifetime and I don't suffer from FOMO.  Despite "common knowledge" there is nothing exotic about speaker cabinets, especially the smaller ones like 1x12"s.  The driver itself sets a price starting point with the cabinet being basically just a solid wooden box made to a specific volume.  That volume is not crucial in any way (as confirmed by Celestion's advice on their website).  There is no clever or innovative design in guitar speakers, they are just boxes to carry a driver, ideally fairly solid ones but that is easy for any decent woodworker to achieve.  There is no real authoritative bottom end to a guitar signal which only goes as low as 82Hz.  And for a tight and balanced bottom range the overall system response fall off is designed to start higher up than that.  What we consider to be the bass in a guitar signal is really not terribly demanding to reproduce.  Most of the complex design and development of hifi speakers is work done on the bottom end and that is simply way lower than a guitar cabinet needs to worry about.

Ideas like "finger jointing" and "void free baltic ply" might send the cork sniffers into paroxysms of ecstasy but they mean very little in the guitar world.  This isn't hifi!  Yes, they can create differences in sound but they do not mean "better" tone, just slightly different.  I started off using my H&K GM36 with a pair of ultra cheap Thomann Harley Benton 1x12"s, (a mini stack looks pretty cool on stage), and they cost no more than the Celestion V30 which was inside each of them, effectively the cabinets came free.  Here is a link as a reference point:  Thomann 1x12".  They improved with the GM36 when I swapped out the V30s for G12M Greenbacks.  They weren't brilliant but they were perfectly acceptable and very convenient to transport.  I moved on to a 2x12" I made myself.  No exotic materials, simple reinforced butt and dowelled joints, based on the Marshall vertical 2x12" approach.  I still use that now onstage and it is in preference to my 1960s Marshall 4x12".  Thomann also sell a Marshall 1x12" here:  Marshall 1x12".  I am not suggesting buying from Thomann only that there are items out there which are cheaper than your $500 if you look and are not afraid to buy something that is not "tone junkie class".

Marshall's first generation of cabinets are loved by the golden eared and sell for many thousands nowadays.  They were simple butt joint boxes, Marshall had no tooling to even produce a finger joint until later.  There is also a move in their latest generations to use cheaper MDF which the gurus deplore as that of course means all tonal quality has been totally removed.  Don't be fooled into thinking that if it has a known badge on the front or is made in a particular way from specific materials then it must be better sounding.  Use your ears before parting with any of your money and make sure to keep your objectivity.  Criticise the sound honestly without being steered into hearing the "slight sense of nasality in the upper mids" or the "minute degree of flubbiness in the upper bass" of a cheaper cabinet.  Suggesting what you "should" hear is a sales technique meant to steer you towards the decision the salesman wants you to make.  Remember my previous advice, "if you have to listen very carefully to hear something, you probably can't!"  Differences in guitar sound are very much obvious!

Thank you very much for your time, guidance and wisdom. You have given me much to consider. I'll let you know what I end up doing. With the Zentera head - csn any OHM cabinet be used? 4, 8 or 16? I don't understand how they relate to one another. I have a better grasp of wattage I think lol. Like I've said previously, I just want to avoid doing any damage to either the vintage head or the speaker cab.

It is difficult to get into this without starting on the maths and most people just zone out at that point.  It's a shame because the maths is simple and it makes the whole thing much more transparent.  Basically, impedance is crucial to the amount of power you make the amplifier supply to your speakers.

A power amplifier of your Zentera type, a voltage amplifier based on transistors, is a dumb unit!  It is designed to put out a large signal in the form of a voltage which follows the input signal as closely as possible.  Though in the case of our own guitar amps we actually want it to add some distortion to our guitar's signal hence the obsession with valve amps or the addition of that distortion if it can be mimicked in the preamp stages.  So the amp is designed to try to keep the voltage level constant as near as possible, (for a constant level of signal), no matter what speaker is hung on the end of it.  And that is where impedance comes in.

The key thing is that the Power = Voltage X Current.

The impedance of the speaker is the factor which controls how much current is drawn from the amplifier.  If you use a lower impedance speaker you are making the amplifier supply more current for the same output voltage.  So with a low impedance speaker your amplifier will be made to give a higher current for the same voltage and, think of the equation above, the power is therefore greater.  If I fit a speaker with half the impedance (16ohms -> 8ohms) I will double the current out of the amp as long as the voltage remains the same.  And therefore the Power will double as well from the equation.  In the real world there are losses which complicate things so it is not quite as simple as halving and doubling but the principle is exactly that.

Output transistors supply this current and they also waste some of the available power as heat which they have to shed.  That's why amplifiers have heatsinks inside or on the back, to draw that heat away from the output transistors and put it out into the air.  If too much heat is generated or if the heatsinks are not large enough to carry it away then the temperature of the transistors gets too high they go 'pop'!

Think of it this way.  If you have a hose connected to your garden water supply it has water supplied to it at a constant pressure of the main, your Voltage is the equivalent of that pressure.  The amount of water flowing through the hose and out of the end is the equivalent of your amp's Current.  You can add different nozzles to the hose with different sized outlets so as to control the current.  The size of the nozzle you fit is the equivalent of the impedance of the speaker.  A smaller nozzle represents a higher impedance with more resistance to the water's flow, more resistance to the current from the amp.  Of course a smaller higher impedance nozzle means less water gets out, as long as the pressure (voltage) remains the same, and that volume of water represents the power.  So it works like this:  Same water pressure, smaller nozzle, less water flow, less water into in the bucket;  Same output voltage, higher impedance, less current, less power to the speaker.

Your Zentera has been designed so it can supply enough current so you will get the maximum power possible to your speakers while making sure the transistors will not overheat, hence the 100W at 6ohms, 60W at 16ohms, and the 6ohms minimum limit.  You must not go below that 6ohms loading under any circumstances as you are then in danger of overheating the amp and burning it out.