I entered the music store expecting to buy some picks and was told it was "Epiphone Day". Everything that was Epiphone was reduced $50. I called their bluff and asked if I'd get $50 off the $99 Epiphone Valve Junior head. Bingo!
This is Epiphone's 7-watt head (no speakers). On the front there's an input jack and a volume knob. On the back are outputs for a 4, 8, or 16-ohm speaker. There's one Sovtek 12AX-7 pre-amp tube, and a single Sovtek EL-84 power-amp tube. Must be a solid-state rectifier.
I plugged the lil' tyke into the cabinet of a Top Hat Club Royale that has it's stock pair of Celestions for an 8-ohm load. Into the front I plugged a four string vintage Schwab tuned CGDA. It's sounds just wonderful! Articulation and sensitivity are excellent. Very quiet, very little hum. There's no tone knob but the balance was perfect. I turned down the treble on the Schwab about 1/3 the way. Bass response was very full, but not overpowering. At half volume and the Schwab just a hair below full volume the sounds were plenty loud and practically clean. With more volume the overdriven sounds come on gradually and really start to scream at 3/4 volume. Excellent tone from this little monster!
I took off the back and replaced the tubes. In went a JAN Phillips 12AT-7 and an EI EL-84. The tone improvement was immediately noticable. The overdrive was smoother, less "grainy", and there was a little more headroom. Just for fun I replaced the EL-84 with the Sovtek and found the improvement was 95% due to the better pre-amp tube.
I next compared the $99 Epiphone to a $250 B1uesboy point-to-point hand-wired "boutique" amp. This one has a single pre-amp, tube rectifier, and a single Electro-Harmonix 6V6. The B1uesboy has a boomy bass, maybe a little bit more articulation. I am a fan of EL-84 amps and this re-affirmed my tastes.
I compared then to the Top Hat Club Royale, which is a 18-watt EL-84 powered beast, also a "boutique" hand-wired amp. Sure, there was more loud headroom available to it, and the Top Hat got a better variety of sounds from the Schwab's twin-humbuckers with coil-tap switches. But I kinda liked the lower power of the Epiphone better, though the TopHat has the ultimate touch-sensitivity and articulation.
All-in-all I'd give the Epiphone top scores even if it were $200 or more. At a list price of $99, it's no more expensive than a quality pedal. Sure, you'll need a speaker cabinet but you can easily buy a very good cabinet with the speaker(s) of your choice and create an excellent sounding stack for very minimal money. Or plug into a the speaker(s) from your combo amp.
I'm suspecting that with no tone controls, reverb, master volume, channel switching, etc., and just one tube for the pre-amp and power amp sections, the signal path is so short and uncomplicated that the difference between a point-to-point hand-wired boutique amp and a chinese circuit board amp become very negligable. I'm very pleased.
Oh, I did remember to buy a couple picks.
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