Epiphone Valve Junior

Nice little amp. Can't get any simpler than that. Not even a Tone control.

It's amazing how great these simple little amps sound. I have an old 1958 Premier Twin 8. It's about 5 watts and weighs maybe 8-10 pounds. It has a guitar, microphone, and even an accordian input jack! :D It also has Tone and Tremelo controls. Cranked all the way up it's about as loud as a TV turned up loud. But the Tone! Absolutely beautiful.

I brought it to a couple of open mics and set it on a chair. People must have thought it was a joke. I put a mic on it and ran it into the PA. I put a good Overdrive pedal on it and people were blown away. At one point I held a single note for about one full minute. Endless sustain!

That's one cool amp! Would probabaly scare me when I would use it in front of others, don't think that amp has much options to hide ones errors. :D How much did it run you?

Right now the price seems to be about the same everywhere it's sold: $119 + shipping's what it ran from Musician's Friend.

I did note on the shipping box that it had check boxes for the operating voltage. 100, 120, 130, and 230 if I recall correctly. They sell these in different areas of the world. My Electar has a 115/230V selector, but the Epi doesn't. The tag on the back of my Valve Junior says 100-120V.

I posted a sound clip down in the "Hear Here" forum.

Well, having retrieved my Agile AS-820 semihollowbody from my boy and having gotten him a P-90 equipped Agile of his own, I no longer felt obligated to keep those puny little .010-.049" strings on it. Put on a set of Darco Electric Jazz Strings, "Light Gauge," .012-.052" nickel wound. Man alive, does it sound good through that little Valve Junior amp! With the neck P-90 it's loud and just hinting at a bit of distortion at 1/3 volume (a very nice sound!), and when it's cranked all the way up it's not much louder but dirty as Paul Lynde's mind.

It's also a lot easier and more pleasant to slide on with the fat, tight strings. I'll try to record something tomorrow; I've got to get to bed now.
:P

Something I do when asked to use an amp that Hums and the folks are animate that they want a particular amp used for a recording is I've found to cut Hum without going in and doing work to the inside of the amp would be to put an attenuator on it and cut 2 to 4db off it. Which isn't much but enough to clip the hum plus allows me to drive the amp a little harder. Like the old Gibson and fender amps. A few of them are known to have distinctive hum. Gives them character..Oh maybe I'm the character..lol

Joe

Since it's 60 cycle hum, it's likely coming from the heater circuit. I haven't yet gotten around to it, but plan to make sure the heater leads are twisted together throughout and lying close to the chassis, and positively bias the heater circuit. The easiest way to do that with a cathode biased amp is to tie each side of the heater circuit through a resistor of about 100-220 ohms to the cathode of the power tube, using the raised potential of the cathode as the heater circuit's central ground point. That can be done right at the EL84 socket, simply bridging the cathode terminal to each heater terminal with a resistor.

What it does is to stop the heater from emitting a stream of electrons, modulated at 60 Hz, to the plate. The cathode of the 12AX7 is very near ground potential, maybe ~1.5V positive, and as the heater swings back and forth through its 6.3V cycle, if its DC potential is near ground its potential alternates between ~3.15V positive and equally negative. So electrons emitted by the bare heater at the ends of the cathode can go right around the control grid and reach the plate when the heater's more negative than the cathode, and the stream gets cut off when the heater's more positive than the cathode. The result is hum.

When the two wires of the heater circuit aren't kept closely together, each radiates an alternating 60 Hz field that can easily be picked up by the first amp stage as hum. When the wires are very closely parallelled or twisted, each one's opposing electromagnetic field cancels the other out.

I'll work on that this weekend and let y'all know how it works. The hum's really not too bothersome to me anyway, in a live situation or playing around the house and office. It's not noticeable to me at all while playing, and the tones this thing puts out are killer!

Some tubes are more prone to heater humming than others, and changing the 12AX7 to a different one might help a lot. (A friend of mine said that his new Fender Pro Junior hummed terribly with the same Sovtek 12AX7WA in it, and it quieted down when he put JJ tubes in it.) But other than the hum, I have no complaint.

When American 12AX7s first came out in the late '40s, they hummed terribly. The heater was redesigned to reduce this, and we got the 12AX7A. The 7025 was a low noise 12AX7A. The 12AX7WA was a military spec 12AX7A. Sovtek calls their Russian tube a 12AX7WA/7025, but it's really not. It's a workable replacement for one. If the amp's designed to minimize hum, tube choice becomes noncritical, and that's the way I like it.

I took the little amp in to show off at my local music store (which sells the competition.) The guys there were impressed with the sound of the amp and didn't care about the hum. The youngest fellow, a hard rocker, plugged in his Gibson, turned it up and let it rip. He thought it could be improved with a different speaker but liked it. He wondered if it could drive a 4x12 cab, so I said "Give it a try." Plugged it into a Fender 4x12, and it really put out some volume! Sounded great! None of them thought the hum was an issue. When I mentioned I was going to see if I could cut that, they laughed and said "It's going to hum. It's got tubes in it."