Epiphone Valve Junior – First Thoughts

July 9, 2009 · Posted in Gear, Reviews 

If you came across an ad for a new $200 valve amp, what would be your first thought? Broken, cheap, sound like marbles in tin can? You might be surprised if the ad was for the Epiphone Valve Junior.


Epiphone’s Valve Junior line (link) consists of two options, the Valve Junior Combo and the Valve Junior Head/Extension Cab. With the combo priced ~$200 and the head/cab priced together at ~$250, both present an attractive price point if the sound/quality is there. Internals for the combo and head share a similar design. Here’s the specs:

Combo

  • 5 Watts, Class A
  • Single-Ended
  • 12AX7, EL84
  • Single-Ended
  • 8” Special Design Speaker
  • Weight: 25 Lb
 Head

  • 5 Watts Head
  • Single-Ended Class A Tube Amp With Solid State Rectifier
  • 12AX7, EL84
  • Single-Ended
  • 4, 8 & 16 Ohm Speaker Out
  • Weight: 16 Lb

The Extension Cab comes with a 12 inch “16-ohm Eminence Lady Luck speaker rated for 70 Watts RMS.” Weighing in at 26 Lb the cab is light enough to move around fairly easily.

So when the boxes arrived today containing the head/cab pair I was quite excited to get into them and see if a $250 tube amp was worth it….

Upon opening the box I was pleased with the initial appearance. The head/cab are well matched with black/maroon coloring. The cab is somewhat wider with a nice cream fabric cover. Together they present a mild, classic look. Both are solid pieces – good feel and heavy enough but not unwieldy.

The head is simplistic to the extreme – input jack, volume, and power. Output jacks in the rear for 4/8/16 ohm and a power jack complete the extent of interface. Setup could not be any easier.

Not one to let things sit long, I plugged the power to the wall, the head to the cab, and my guitar to the input. Time to see what it can do. Unfortunately for me my boys were taking a late summer afternoon nap so the audio evaluation will have to wait…

Sidenote:

When looking around for a value-priced valve amp to review, there was something I decided was an absolute requirement. One wouldn’t expect a value-priced amp to have all the qualities of a top-end boutique amp, so I searched for something which could serve as a foundation – something that would allow modifications for improvement. The simplicity of the Valve Junior fits the requirement perfectly. There are already many mod kits specifically for it. Here are a few:

BitMo Brat - “adds a Tone Control with pull-switch that adds gain and a British Top Boost overdrive voicing.”
BitMo Tweaky/Spanky – “add quite a bit of gain to the amp while at the same time making the clean, lower gain much broader and more useful.”
BitMo TRIO – “combines BitMo’s 2 most popular kits.”
Mercury Magnetics Valve Jr. Kit – “new power and output transformers, the addition of a choke”
Sewatt.com – home for MANY Valve Jr. mods.

Coming Soon – audio review!

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2 Responses to “Epiphone Valve Junior – First Thoughts”

  1. jkmowery on July 11th, 2009 4:24 pm

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  2. jkmowery on July 12th, 2009 10:26 pm

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