What about the speakers. You’re using a lot of light-weight speakers…what are your thoughts on those?

 

I’ve tried a lot of speakers. I really like the Eminence speakers…I like dealing with those guys…and the ten and the twelve I use are off the shelf…but the 15 inch Delta Lite I have custom built because the one off the shelf doesn’t have enough power to it. But I love Eminence speakers and, except for a couple of years where I used the Fane 15 inch, which is a great speaker, unfortunately it weighs three times as much as the one I’m using right now. Other than that we’ve always used Eminence….that’s all we’ve ever used.

 

Many of your amps and cabs are partially open in the back. How did you arrive at this?

 

I prefer a kind of semi-closed back, where you get good bass response but you get better sound dispersion throughout the room. My concern with the closed-back cabinets is that they are a little too uni-directional for me…in some circumstances it’s what’s called for when you’re in a really messed up room. But if you have to set it in front of your drummer [you get better sound dispersion to the rear]. The other ones are too loud if you’re in front of them, especially with an archtop, and they’re not loud enough if you’re beside them or behind them. The open back type of cabinet I also think lends to the upper-end clarity value. Closing the back and porting the front…you could keep pushing the bass….see, it’s all about a balance….in physics you can’t get more without losing something….there’s no free lunch in physics. There’s a point to where to get more [bass] it’s going to cost you something somewhere else, and that’s where I stop.

 

What’s the future for Evans amplifiers?

 

The amps we’re making now are better than anything we’ve ever made. And so, the future is extremely bright. We’ve been in business continuously since 1962, and there’s not too many companies that can say that that are selling amps today. There’s no reason why we’re not going to be able to stay in business….our amps are better than they ever were. And so, as we used to say in engineering school:  it’s plug and chug time now! You just build ‘em and send ‘em out and just make sure you keep the quality of them. The reinventing the wheel stuff is over with. Right now, the amps are at their full design optimization, and that’s what I’m selling.