Originally Posted by dannyg1
There are now a good number of us (maybe 6-7) who own this amp, which is good because it‘s finally time to get a full picture of what this amp is out on the AGF.
When I bought the amp a couple of months back, I had expected a level of excellence that was a step above most anything available, based on what little info I could find here on the forum. At that point there was only one vocal person on the AGF who surely owned the thing and his review was basically a pointer to Teja Gerkin’s AG magazine review and video. The AG Magazine review, though fairly well done turned out to be a bit less than complete, if you were looking to get a full picture of what you were shopping for. Pretty much everything available here on the AGF, to base an informed decision from, was impressions people had of the Jam 150.
Long story short is that I did buy it and it’s a more than a bit different than what I expected.
My impression of the Jam 100 I own is mixed, mostly because I had such high expectations. All of the things that others have featured in their reviews do stand true: It is stunning to look at and use. It is an amazingly large sounding amp for such a small box and it does deliver a truly natural, organic sound that is micro-detailed and beautiful in a blooming sense.
So what’s not to like?
Well, I think that Schertler might have idiot-proofed this amp and left its users in very limited control of what the amp can do. It occurred to me the last time I was using the amp in a direct comparison with my Loudbox Mini. Fact is that no-matter what settings you choose to apply to the Schertler, it’ll still sound good, though very little changed and while that might be great for Schertler….
What’s bad about that is that every control this amp has is more of a ‘flavor’ than it is a control. The Q on the 3 bands of EQ are canyon wide and, my guess is in order to avoid any phase shift at all, tend to be almost useless for feedback control or true sound shaping. Schertler says that these controls are +/- 15 db and I can’t hear that. I’d say that they’re +/- 6db at best.
Compared directly to the Loudbox Mini, the EQ controls of the Jam 100 sound like they’re absolutely, unfailingly polite, like salt and pepper vs. hot sauce. The reverb is also exactly like this. On the street reverb gets eaten by the free air and though the Schertler’s reverb sounds gorgeous, there’s no setting where there’s enough of it for the street.
Overall, the general effect I’ve noticed is that the amp always sounds good-great and that’s a huge plus but the micro details it presents and the lack of any real sound shaping ability forces the player to be close to perfect in every sense (I fingerpick and if you pluck a string even ever so slightly too hard it’s easy to hear as a mistake) and though that’s good in many ways, this is not an amp that’s simple to coax a sound you might want to direct out of it. It plays you just as much as you play it.
With that said, I’m keeping mine for stage playing (Inside a room, the controls don’t need as much oomph to make a good difference) and may actually buy two more to run as a tiny PA. Its flat frequency response/neutrality makes for an excellent PA speaker and though it’s not powerful enough to be DJ friendly, a set of two as mains and one as a monitor would make for a stellar sounding PA for a player, especially given the sound shaping control a good mixer adds to the equation.
To be clear, this really could be the perfect amp. Everything that it does it does really well with the exception of the ability of the user to direct the sound’s character and my guess is that Schertler might very well have set up the amp the way they did to be sure that it never sounds bad.. Which should be good, right?
Not for a professional tool in my opinion. It really needs a more powerful front end to be all that it promises it can be.
|