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Gear Lust – Jet City Amplification

I’ve been eying the Jet City Amplification line for a couple months now. They are very affordable, great sounding, and attractive amps made by Soldano. I heard the little JCA20H panned opposite a Peavey 5150 and it was stunning. Look up how much they cost, I’ll wait.

They’re just too damn loud for this little home studio, especially with my baby coming in 4 weeks! So I forgot about them for a little while until this week when I noticed this cabinet in their lineup. This changes everything, and I’m GASing to get some Jet City gear more than ever.

I’m talking about the JetStream ISO12 Isolation Cabinet. You can turn the amp to eleven and not worry about waking the baby. Inside this sturdy box is a 12″ Eminence woofer and a gooseneck for connecting your mic of choice.

I fight to get decent guitar tones with software. When I get the rare chance to turn up and mic up someone’s big amp it just like hitting the EASY button. I don’t have to do any work to make it sound real to start with, and I find I don’t have to put much effort in to get things working right in a mix. With direct guitars through software, even with impulses, I’m sometimes doing excessive and sometimes counter-intuitive processing just to get things acceptable. Real amp into a real cab into a real mic into a real preamp at acceptable volume levels may just be the trick to stopping this hair loss that seems to happen when I want to record guitars.

Strangely the Jetstream ISO12 has an  A/D converter and USB port for direct to computer recording. I can see understand the concept of wanting that in such a device, but that is some I personally do not want and kind of turns me off the idea of getting one. I have limited options and a very limited budget, these are about $400 and you can’t build something that works as well as this or looks as professional for any less. Seems like a good deal.
If you have experience with Jet City Amps or cabinets. Please let me know.


3 Comments

  1. Rupert Brown
    Rupert Brown September 13, 2010

    This looks really cool, I’m not familiar with guitar cabs so maybe this is an old concept? But seems quite useful.

    You say using plugs is a challenge to get right. I remember you liking the IK amp package awhile back. Have you gone off it or is this more a general analogue vs digital observation?

    • Jon
      Jon September 13, 2010

      This isn’t the first of it’s kind but it looks the nicest and costs the least.
      There’s some great software but I find I need to spend far too much time making it sound convincing.

  2. TimJ
    TimJ October 5, 2010

    i see what you did there

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