pihuey's Reviews
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45
Fantastic amp once you become familiar with it
Fantastic amp but it is a different design from your average Marshall regarding the signal path and the order it hits various knobs and controls. The effects loop is after the preamp gain stages but before the tone stack/tone adjustments, and the master volume for the amp is between the tone stack and phase splitter. The location of the effects loop is odd, but adding things like reverb, delay, etc. those effects work fine since the loop is after the gain stages, however, inserting and eq pedal in the loop would actually put it prior to the amp's eq knobs. Slaving the Jubilee into another amp via Jubilee's loop send jack doesn't work well either due to loop's location. Now slaving another amp into the Jubilee's return works really well as you then get the Jubilee's three very active eq knobs AND the Jubilee's master volume control. The clean channel/low gain channel the signal only runs into one of the preamp tubes so gain is pretty low but stick an SD-1 in front with drive knob off and level knob boosted you get 80's rock into lower hair metal level. The dirty channel is fantastic. The signal hits both preamp tubes and the addition of the lead master knob gives some added power amp drive. It can definitely chug. The rhythm clip is ok for some stuff and left engaged it does have a bit of an effect on the lead channel's sound. I am not a fan of the half power switch...it uses pentode/triode switching like the original and sounds kinda like a@@ in my opinion and that also seems to be a lot of people's opinion. This amp also requires a higher master volume knob setting than other Marshall amps but it does get super loud, the knob pots seem to have a longer more gradual taper/range of travel, and the eq knobs, unlike other Marshalls, they actually DO SOMETHING their entire radius turning them.
45
fantastic hot rodded JCM800
Fantastic plug and play souped up JCM 800 tones right out of the gate. The head shell is large and roomy and it has a huge chassis with a simple, limited number of PCB boards that are laid out miles away from each other with tons of room. Easy to access, easy to lift, limited number of interconnecting wires, cables, etc. easy to mod. Biasing is most accurately done using bias probe socket testers and as multimeter. There is one internal trimpot and a test point, however, the testpoint only gives you the negative voltage being applied, so bias probe sockets that read plate voltage/current are best. Takes pedals well, and blindfolded you would swear it was a Marshall