Ampeg Review: J-12t

History:

Purchase: I bought this amp off music 123 about a year ago now (http://www.music123.com/Ampeg-J12T-i59888.music), and play it consistantly every night, so i have a good impression of the pros and cons of this amp. Very basic layout with 2x EL84s in the power amp in 'class a', and two 12ax7's for preamp and phase splitter duties. Controls for volume, tone, tremolo intensity and speed, and reverb. I bought it to step up to my first tube amp after owning a Marshall MG15DFX for 2 years...

What I Like About This Ampeg J-12t: Starting with a clean setting with the volume at 2, and tone at five and single coil pickups, you get a really shimmering tone that feels lively under your fingers. Adding a touch of tremolo present a great tone for airy fingerpicking work, and the whole feel extends itself to a great Jazz, Blues or Country style. Humbucker clean tones are not quite as impressive, but they still work well for smoother tones. Winding the volume up to 5 or 6 starts to drive the valves just a touch, and because of the interaction of the tone and volume control, i feel the need to bring back a bit of treble, rolling the tone up to seven. This is a nice blues setting for some SRV style licks, but the bottom end starts to lose defination and becomes wooly when playing two notes less harmonically related than a fifth. Im sure a speaker upgrade would be a cure here. Even so, the overdrive present is quite pleasing and smooth, and humbuckers are welcomed here with open arms, smoothing out the tone further and ridding you of the overly present noise factor with single coils. Pushing the amp harder still, and it begins to break up into nice distortion for lead work, but with the volume from 8 to 10, the bottom end justs farts out. Even with a single coil at the bridge and tone on 10, the lows are ill defined. So far ive been playing dry, but both the tremolo and reverb sound good. The reverb could be a bit more lush, but its still good for the price. The tremolo is great, going from slight shimmer to over the top warble. One invaluable item i have perchersed recently it a crispy cream treble booster (www.treblebooster.com), which brings the amp to life, curing the ill low end, and giving a really pleasing overdrive. One of my favourite tricks is to keep the treble boost set low, and max the volume for more power valve overdrive, giving sweeter distortion. A match made in heaven...

What I Do NOT Like About The Ampeg J-12t: *Poor low end defination *Average (but not bad) Reverb *Cheap Speaker Apart from that, nothing to complain about...

Ampeg J-12t Quality Rating: It seems solidly built, and should last along time, Although my specimen has a strange (faulty?) volume knob which gets much louder quickly between 1.5 and 2...

Review Summary: Overall, a great clean sounding amp, and nice breakup for lead playing. Without the treble booster (which i recommend very much) the lows really are quite mushy, but with the Treble Boost, this amp really sings...

Rating of this Ampeg product: 4

This Ampeg J-12t Guitar Amplifiers Review Submitted By: Alex Fiddes

Review Date: 2004-09-27