Cheers guys,
so some of you may already know that I got myself a new amp not too long ago and now after having had some time to toy around with it I give you a revisited review of it.
Now first of all I have to say again that this was a steal regarding the price of 300 bucks I paid for an all valve amp. Sure there are better heads out there but if you're in a situation similar to mine, namely being a poor student, this is a great bang for the buck.
I feel that the "made in china" label has lost some of it's bad reputation, Mike Soldanos role in the design of the Jet City Amplifiers may have contributed a great deal to this.
Anyway, after initially being dissatisfied with certain characteristics of the amp I borrowed my mates ENGL 4*12 cab with broken in Celestion Vintage 30s to see how much difference it would make compared to my Laney 4*12 with Celestion Seventy 80s. In short: the change in sound is huge. Not only do the V30s take away a lot of the harshness in the high end (yeah I know that shouldn't be the case usually) but they made my Valveking 100 sound better as well after the tube change it went through.
Just to clarify: I'm sure the Seventy 80s can be great speakers when played with darker amps and their clean sound isn't bad either. They just have a weird frequency response and when you have a bright rig like I do it can get over the top pretty easily as they seem to be enhancing the high end. When I have the money and the time I'll swap em out for either Vintage 30s or Eminence V128s so I'll have a combination that fits my Valveking.
Anyway, back to the Jet City:
I'll try to keep this short, going from clean to distorted.
Being a cheaper version of the Hot Rod 50+ it surely doesn't sound as well as it's USA made counterpart, but it's based on the same idea. As most people know Soldano isn't famous for his amps clean sound, but it's more than usable, especially when you consider the fact that it's meant to be rather a crunch channel anyway. Keeping the preamp low and the master volume high you get a nice spanky clean sound that reacts great to your picking, I usually play the middle position on my Dinky through it, the combination of the Painkiller in the Bridge and the Coldsweat in the Neck. With my Strat I can get great funky and bluesy sounds when I combine the Middle and Neck Slowhands and being the straight Clean/Distortion two channel amp guy I find it good to add clean passages in metal songs. Throw in a Delay and a bit of Reverb and you can do that spherical sounds pretty well. As said it's not a Fenderish pristine clean but I'm sure people won't buy a Jet City for stuff like that anyway. Good enough for me!
Turning the gain on the crunch channel up gets you into blues/rock/hard rock territory very fast. Depending on the amount of preamp saturation and the boost from a TS type pedal you can vary between Hendrix, Gary Moore, AC/DC and Guns n' Roses just to name a few. As mentioned earlier the head is very touch sensitive and uncompressed giving you all the possibilities of altering it's sound with your hands. In combination with BKPs you get very clear note separation and harmonic richness. Although I use my Micro Terror mainly for blues and rock it doesn't hurt to know that the JC50H can do this stuff as well. If it had only a tad more gain on the crunch channel you could even use it for Thrash Rhythm in combination with a boost. But you have the lead channel anyway, so no need for that :P
The lead channel. Now this is where things get interesting.
I have to repeat myself here and point out that this amp is uncompressed, very touch sensitive and UNFORGIVING. If you're used to 5150s, this will shock you and hit you in the face once you realize that your technique is too sloppy to keep up with the JCs accuracy. Now I'm usually a very tight rhythm player, but everytime I would just lightly touch an adjacent string that isn't meant to be touched I would hear it. This is especially the case when you turn the volume up.
However I see this as a good thing because once you adjusted your playing to it you get rewarded with a detailed and precise sound that hits you in the face and stays clear and defined at all times. I even turned the preamp gain down from 7 to 5 and still had more than enough distortion.
A Tubescreamer or Boost in front is a must as the low end is huge but too flubby on it's own, but other than that everything is fine. Notes fade into harmonic feedback easily and the sound cuts very well.
The only negative thing that is still present, but tamed a great deal by the ENGL cab, is the fizziness. The problem gets worse on lower volumes, the louder you turn your master up the less you hear of it.
However I'm planning to do a complete tube swap and re-bias it as Jet Citys come usually biased very cold from the factory. I'll be throwing in JJs in the preamp and power amp that I'll be getting from Eurotubes and then experiment with different valves in V1 and V2. The Jet City 24s cab is on it's way as well and I'll order some new speakers like mentioned before.
So in conclusion: right now everything is fine stock and not disturbing or lacking to the point where I can't live with it. Sure I'll do plenty of finetuning, but for the money you pay you get a very decent piece of equipment. Maybe this review helps someone somewhere. Pics are attached.
Cheers!
