I am getting unwanted distortion from my guitar amp?

Question

I have a Crate 65 watt amp. I replaced the stock speaker with a 150 watt RMS speaker. However, when I turn up the amp about 3/4 the way I get unwanted distortion on the clean channel and its even worse on the distortion channel. How can I get distortion when the speaker should have no problem handling the maximum output of the amp? The speaker is at the right impedence.

Answer 1

Brad, it sounds (lol) like what is happening is that the amp itself is distorting, due to clipping.

When you had the stock speaker in it, the output was louder, and you probably never needed to go to ¾ of full volume.  Now that you have a higher wattage speaker, you have to crank it higher to get the same volume.

Many amps are built just this way, where the highest power settings are just for amplifying really, really low-level signals only.