Jet City 20 watt head

[lowercasee]

So I picked up this little gem a few nights ago from CL. It's a Jet City 20 watt head, the dual channel one. It was originally a combo, but the previous owner converted it to head only. I have traded with him before and he does nice, clean work so I knew it was a safe deal. It's less than a year old and he was the original owner too, still had the receipt from Musicians Friend. Anyway, it sounds great and has a lot gain. The crunch channel can do cleans all the way up to early metal (Priest / Maiden) etc. type gain. Lead kind of picks up from there and just keeps going. Up past half, it really starts to compress and get thick. The controls are all very responsive too. It is based on the Soldano SLO circuit. I've never played a SLO so I can't say how much it sounds like one, but it sounds fairly close based on the youtube vids I have seen.


Overall, it is a sweet sounding little amp for the money. It will never replace my Mark III but is a nice option when I want a different type of tone.

 

[lowercasee]

So I was messing around with this the other day and decided to take a look at the guts. While I was in there, I figured I might as well check the bias. It's supposed to be fixed, but there is a trim pot for adjustments. Anyway, it was reading 11.2. Per Doug at Jet City, he said it should be set at 15-16, which is still on the cold side. I put it at 19 (plate voltage was reading 380) and buttoned it back up. Wow, it sounds even better now! Much warmer tone and even bigger sounding. I am planning to do the depth mod and also maybe the SLO mod. The depth mod just adds a pot for depth/resonance. The SLO mod changes out some of the resistors back to what an actual SLO uses. For the $150 I spent this thing really is an amazing little amp!

 

[Don]

While I was in there, I figured I might as well check the bias. It's supposed to be fixed, but there is a trim pot for adjustments.

Fixed bias doesn't mean that it's not adjustable. Fixed bias can be adjustable or not.

How'd the build quality inside the amp look.

 

[lowercasee]

I'm no expert but build quality is very nice as far as I could tell. The solder connections all looked good and the wiring was very neatly routed and clean. I was really impressed that the owner of the company returned my email within just a few hours too, that's how I got his recommended bias setting. For what you pay for these amps, they are really hard to beat.