Epiphone Valve Junior Questions

[Noparanoiarh]

Hi there. I just recently received a Epiphone Valve Junior Amplifier head as a birthday gift. I am currently waiting on the matching cab(which will arrive on Oct 20th) and the speaker cable. What I wanted to know is that is it possible to hook it up to a solid state amp to verify the Amp head works? I have a Fender J.A.M. amp with a Pre-amp in. I have tried to search around for answer but have come up short.

 

 

 

Thanks!!

[Noparanoiarh]

haha, Dur. I am a complete newbie when it comes to tube amps, didn't expect my wife to get it! I was thinking no matter where I plugged it in at with the fender Jam amp that it would ruin it no matter what.

 

Edit * Removing idiotic question.

[Jan Vigne]

Hi there. I just recently received a Epiphone Valve Junior Amplifier head as a birthday gift. I am currently waiting on the matching cab(which will arrive on Oct 20th) and the speaker cable. What I wanted to know is that is it possible to hook it up to a solid state amp to verify the Amp head works? I have a Fender J.A.M. amp with a Pre-amp in. I have tried to search around for answer but have come up short.

 

 

 

Thanks!!

 

 

Yep, running one power amplifier into another power amp or a power amp's output into a pre amp's input is pretty likely going to be the death of both components. As the VJ has only speaker level outputs you can run it into any available speaker or, more specifically, any raw driver. If you have an old speaker in or out of a cabinet which came with a hifi or some old car stereo speakers in the garage, you can check the operation of the head. If the speaker is in a cabinet of any kind, be careful as you're likely to blow out the tweeter in a typical home speaker. Tweeters are expecting no more than a few watts and even what the VJ can dish out could easily damage the driver - most especially if you begin applying some distortion to the sound. If you have just a raw driver out of a box, you should have very few problems as long as you are careful with levels and distortion.

 

Go down to Radio Shack and buy a package of solderless (screw type), male, mono, 1/4" phone plugs (I think this is it; http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2103992) and a few feet of zip cord or anything cheap labelled "speaker cable". They might even have a packaged version of the male plugs with a cable attached and bare wire ends. This would work out well. If not, it will require only a screwdriver to put the solderless plug together. Make certain you have clean tight connections (wrap the wire end around the screw in the direction the screw will tighten) making sure you do not cross between conductors with even a single strand of loose wire - and then strip the two legs of the other cable end. Twist each wire end down tightly to avoid any stray conductors which could cause a short. Make clean connections to the speaker cabinet or raw driver and you're in business. There's no concern about polarity of the connections for this experiment, either leg of the cable goes to the "+" terminal of the speaker and the other leg goes to the other terminal. Plug the phone jack into the back of the VJ - any tap (open jack) will do for this - make certain the master volume is at "0" and turn on the head. Give it a try and you should hear sound coming from the speaker. If not, shut everything down and re-check your connections at all points. You can use the driver in your existing amplifier but be very careful. Carefully disconnect the leads to the driver coming from the existing Fender amplifier and make the same connections I described above to the terminals. Don't turn on the old amp just in case the leads might touch without you noticing.

 

 

Do be aware you cannot run a valve (vacuum tubes here in the States) power amplifier without a load attached - either a speaker or a load resistor must be loaded onto the outputs of the power amplifier. Tubed power amps have a tendency to go into self-induced oscillation when no load is present and the feedback from this will destroy the amplifier in very short time. So, hopefully you haven't turned on the head to see the tubes glow and you're OK with this.