alnico vs ceramic

[gibson8678]

Ok, I don't know much at all about the guts of amps and speakers. I'm building an 18 watt head using a marshall clone chassis and 18 watt stout with reverb board.
My question is speakers. I know there's a lot so i'm just asking about the characteristics. If I understand things right, alnico speakers have a tight bass while ceramics break apart, and are for high wattage. ( in general) care alnico's capable of clean sound in the upper decimal range.
I'm going to use 12" speakers.

[krx]

It's impossible to generalize. There's a lot more to a speaker than what the magnet is made of. Are we talking about an 11 oz. alnico magnet or a 40 oz. one? Ceramics come in 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 oz. And then there's the cone, the voice coil, the surround, the dust cap.

For what it's worth, I really like the Warehouse speakers, they're a great deal, and they're made in the USA. The Reaper is a clone of the G12H30 which is a VERY popular speaker with 18W players. I like the Reaper HP even better because it's a little smoother on the highs. The ET65 is cool if you want a smooth top end and less break up. My favorite is the Blackhawk alnico, which captures some of the old Celestion silver alnico flavor by being a little warmer and smoother than the Celestion Blue (and it also hangs together better on the low end due to the higher power handling). Alnico isn't necessarily better than ceramic though, just more expensive. Alnico's expensive because almost all of our cobalt comes from the country that used to be Zaire, which has, unfortunately, been a wreck for about ten years now.

There's also similarly good choices from Eminence and Mojo plus Celestion itself (if you don't mind paying more for something made in China). Browse through the speaker section of the forum and I'm sure you'll find lots of info.

[nyazzip]

FWIW, i have 5 or 6 vintage(50s-early 60s) Jensen 12 inchers that i have wired up in different boxes and permutations. they are various models, none of the highly sought after types, all fairly low wattage, but: the ceramics are much much brighter(harsh, to my ears). but also, the ceramics are also better bass performers too. in all i guess they are probably just higher fidelity speakers than the alnicos; maybe Jensen used different cone material with the (stronger) ceramic magnets which made them bright

[Badfinger]

I think it's safe to say that alnico speakers are sometimes warmer and smoother and ceramics are sometimes brighter and crisper, at least that's what I've found over the years.
Everything else varies a whole bunch.

Randal