fender steel king breaks up...help!

[Jeff Bottomley]

i'm sure this topic has been covered before,but i have not been able to figure out why this is happening. When playing through my fsk with the gain and master anywhere above 10 o'clock the bass notes break up terribly ( amp farts!). anyone out there experience this and if so whats the remedy . at lower volumes it is my favorite amp of all.

[George Macdonald]

One thing you might check is to make sure that the velcro strap inside the back that is there to secure the power cord when in transit, is not touching the speaker. That did happen to me, and I thought the speaker was gone. When I made sure the strap was out of the way, the problem was solved. George

[Michael Johnstone]

Put a Black Widow speaker in there and turn down the bass to no more than a little past straight up - that's about you really need anyhow. The amp has a built in compressor which is not adjustable(it should be)and it just doesn't seem to kick in soon enough or hard enough.Therefore even with the BW speaker,if I was gonna play it real loud and really punch the bottom strings real hard I'd use an outboard stompbox compressor. Just with the speaker change tho I play it at juke joint levels and really have to try to make it crap out. It's a great amp otherwise.

[Kevin Hatton]

Paul Franklin was the first to point this out when the amp first came out. I have heard it here in Buffalo also. I am really surprised that Fender let this happen. They have to know.

[Paul Warnik]

I have had it happen to me also-the FSK "crapping out" with the original speaker-I too decided to replace the stock speaker with a Peavey Black Widow-It solved the problem but I did notice that the amp has taken a more deeper bass sound overall since the speaker conversion-The '65 Twin Custom 15" uses the same stock speaker as the FSK without the problem apparently due to it's much lower power (85 watts) compared to the FSK (200 watts)

[Jeff Bottomley]

sorry boys been out of the loop for awhile.....so basically we've concluded that i will need to go to a black widow speaker to prevent this (crapping out) from happening anyone got one lying around for sale (reasonably)so i could try it out?

[Dennis Wallis]

I've never had a problem with my FSK with the original speaker,even after spliting the head and bottom into two parts. I've used the amp head with BW speaker cabinet and it still sounds good but not quite as clean as with the Eminence speaker. There must be an underlying problem somewhere. The one I have will handle all the lows you want.Just lucky I guess.

[Billy Carr]

I had same problem with 2 FSK's. Solution is replace the speaker with a 1501 Black Widow. End of trouble! Makes amp lighter also. 1501 speaker is a far better sounding speaker than the Eminence, in my opinion. I also enclose most of the back of my FSK. Tone to the bone on the high and low ends. Amp is yet to distort and I've really pushed it before. Use a DD3 delay, Hilton electronic pedal and a D-10 Fessy with the mods on both necks. 10-1 on E9th & E66 on C6th.

[Jim Walker]

Same story here with my FSK. 2 months after I bought it new I replaced the stock "junk" Eminence speaker with a BW 1501-4 and it improved the tonal quality and added about 20% more headroom. Fender DOES Know about the problem as I wrote in several letters, emails and 20 phone calls.

JW

[Kevin Hatton]

This is really disgraceful on Fender's part for selling a poor performing product. Like I said, they had to know when they put this out. Paul Franklin knew immediately.

[Paul Warnik]

I think if you play only E9TH and do not have any low bass notes like on C6TH you could probably play through the stock speaker and never have it happen-I noticed the problem while playing the low notes on C6TH-The first time I heard a FSK it was Jay Dee Maness playing though it-and it sounded fantastic-of course alot of it was the player-He was playing only E9TH stuff at the time and there was no audible break up of the speaker