1/4" panel mount socket for a guitar cabinet?

ecc83

"This is why it was pretty much abandoned by the PA industry as far as passive boxes go in all but the cheapest and lowest wattage applications"

Yes but Danny, modern PA runs hundreds to thousands of watts with obviously large currents. The biggest PRACTICAL valve guitar amp is probably 200W (and I struggled with a Series One 200!) I am a bit tired so maths might be suss but that gives me a current of 7A IF you were stupid enough to use a 4 Ohm speaker! I have run a S1 200 many times at more than full whack into 8 Ohms (half a kW load) and I never had a jack or plug get even warm...and that is with a few minutes of sine power or pink noise.

On music signals the humble jack is perfectly adequate.

Now, when we get to 300W+ bass or synth amps then yes, I will agree that the jack is marginal and the speakon better. Especially as with the rise of class D impedance is likely 4 or 8 Ohms.

I have never seen a melted jack plug on a valve amp. Has anyone here?

Dave.

Danny1969

There's a few things wrong with a jack plug used in speaker applications from a design point of view. 

It's too easy to break contact from the tip connector, especially if the socket has been installed upside down. I have encountered this many, many times in the 80's fixing passive boxes with jack sockets and jack plug speaker leads. Most passive boxes went to XLR rather than speakons in the late eighties, the speakon connectors came later. 

Shock hazard. With higher impedance speakers and higher wattages the distribution of power means the voltage on the jack plug is potentially a mild shock hazard. I'm surprised they fit 16 ohm taps on 100 watt amps for this reason. 

You shouldn't have a speaker socket that uses the same connector as the foot switch. Although most valve amps will survive unscathered when tip and sleeve are shorted via a footswitch some solid state amps will literally drag so much current through the output stage it will destroy it. 

Even as a signal cable it's not a great connector. When I was fixing large frame mixers in early noughties around half the faults were due to jack plug insert points and poor contact on input channels. 

It's just cheap to make