Heil Talkbox question...?

[Young Angus]

My band is doing some shows with a band where their guitarist uses a Heil Talkbox and he was originally going to use my quadbox one night to save room at venues but then he found out that my box is a 16ohm box while apparently the Heil Talkbox says to only run it at no greater than 8ohms.

Now assuming this is correct, my question is "does the speaker cab matter"?

I know you can mismatch an 8ohm amp output to a 16ohm cab no worries, but will it affect the talkbox at all? He uses the talkbox straight into the PA, he does not have a separate speaker for it. So I'm assuming that when he engages the talkbox the signal actually gets cut off from the speaker cabinet anyway and then runs up to the tube and the sound goes from his mouth into the vocal mic so I'm thinking that doesn't have anything to do with the cab anyway. Is this right?

If so, doesn't that mean that you CAN mismatch the cab with the amp as normal, and then when you use the talkbox it will be operating separately from the cab anyway so it will be okay?

Haha did that make sense in the end :friday:

 

[Rich_S]

Re: Heil Talkbox question...?

I believe the Heil switches the speaker line from the amp one of two ways: either to the speaker cabinet, or to the talkbox's own driver. Sounds to me like the Heil has an 8-ohm driver, so in a perfect world, you would match it with an 8-ohm setting on the amp. The cabinet in turn should match the amp, too; so it needs to be 8 ohms.

Is this a tube amp we're talking about? If so, it's better to mismatch with the speaker lower than the amp. So, I would match the amp to the 16-ohm quad cab, and leave a mismatch with the 8-ohm talkbox. A 2:1 mismatch isn't going to cause problems.

With a solid-state amp, this logic gets turned around backwards.