Mesa DC-3 with cheap cabinet (question)

[Foorever]

I recently got a Mesa DC-3 head. I'm pretty happy with the way it sounds, plently of gain, a good bit of head room.

However I got an Ampeg 4x12 cabinet (not celestions) and it sound to me that the distortion is kinda muddy, like its not responding to the bass and mids real well.

I'm no expert on speaker cabs. I'm finally learning a little about tube heads and such, I didn't know how these two would fair together.

The head supposedly had fairly new tubes when I got it, it's not lacking any volume thats for sure. It just seems like the only way I can get a good tone out of the distortion is by using my treble pickup and deleting most of the mids and bass.

Does this sound like a cab issue?

Also, Its a 16ohm cab and I'm plugged into the 8ohm jack. Someone here said that Mesa calls that a safe mismatch.

Thank you

 

[devilrob1979]

More impedence is generally safe where less is generally not. You're not going to get the best sound from that big of a mismatch but if it's what you have it's what you have. What kind of speakers are in it? You could always wire it so that there were to sets of speakers wired in parallel. You'd also have to rewire the input jack but I'm guessing that it probably has an in and a through. You could wire one side to each jack. That would give you 2 8 ohm loads or 4 ohms total. You could also wire all four speakers in it in series which would give you a 4 0hm load. Just some thoughts.