Lee Jackson amps?

[killertone]

When Lee moved to Austin in the late 90s, he was selling a bunch of gear at a local music store on consignment. I bought two of the LJ V30 cabs and gigged with them heavily for about a year before I won two Marshall V30 cabs in a contest. I then sold the LJ cabs. They were good cabs though. Very solidly built. Don't know about the Eminence loaded cabs.

Also at the store where I bought the cabs were two heads. Not sure of the models but they were tweed covered or blonde IIRC. I plugged in one of them to the cabs that I was buying to try it out and it blew up right there in the store. One of my friends that worked said the other one had a problem as well.

I have a good friend that had an amp modded by Lee here locally back then and it sounded killer. Looked like a rat's nest inside but it sounded great.

Lee still lives here but I haven't seen him around in forever.

 

[mchn13]

i got a vl1002 when they first came out. a friend of mine had gotten one and was telling me, "dude its so heavy and brutal"! (i was like 20), traded in my marshall on it, and regretted it for the next several years or so. two trannies and idk how many tubes blown later, i finally got rid of that decrepit piece of shit!
back then we didnt have all the resources of the interwebs, and no one wanted to work on it locally. fuck i hated that goddamn amp! and no balls, i had to run it at around 3:00 on the master to keep up with my drummer, which just caused it to fail faster. i had several decent techs from florida to san fran fix that thing, and no one could make it last. hope the dude lives in obscurity for that abortion of an amp.

 

[Chris6870]

i got a vl1002 when they first came out. a friend of mine had gotten one and was telling me, "dude its so heavy and brutal"! (i was like 20), traded in my marshall on it, and regretted it for the next several years or so. two trannies and idk how many tubes blown later, i finally got rid of that decrepit piece of shit!
back then we didnt have all the resources of the interwebs, and no one wanted to work on it locally. fuck i hated that goddamn amp! and no balls, i had to run it at around 3:00 on the master to keep up with my drummer, which just caused it to fail faster. i had several decent techs from florida to san fran fix that thing, and no one could make it last. hope the dude lives in obscurity for that abortion of an amp.

If you read about Lee a little he says that Ampeg changed his original design with cost cutting measures that doomed the amp from the start and there wasn't a thing he could do about it. He was very helpful with making the fixes public later on down the road. He had a website with the mods and fixes. I ended up with a Crate Blue Voodoo with my store credit when mine blew up,so It was not a good time for me amp wise either.

 

[mchn13]

i got a vl1002 when they first came out. a friend of mine had gotten one and was telling me, "dude its so heavy and brutal"! (i was like 20), traded in my marshall on it, and regretted it for the next several years or so. two trannies and idk how many tubes blown later, i finally got rid of that decrepit piece of shit!
back then we didnt have all the resources of the interwebs, and no one wanted to work on it locally. fuck i hated that goddamn amp! and no balls, i had to run it at around 3:00 on the master to keep up with my drummer, which just caused it to fail faster. i had several decent techs from florida to san fran fix that thing, and no one could make it last. hope the dude lives in obscurity for that abortion of an amp.

If you read about Lee a little he says that Ampeg changed his original design with cost cutting measures that doomed the amp from the start and there wasn't a thing he could do about it. He was very helpful with making the fixes public later on down the road. He had a website with the mods and fixes. I ended up with a Crate Blue Voodoo with my store credit when mine blew up,so It was not a good time for me amp wise either.

gotcha, but at the time, being in a touring band from a little beach town in fla, and not having internet to find out this info.....

 

[jerrydyer]

did you see an ad? right as they started production, lee halted the release, didnt like the outcome, I dont blame him. I just serviced one, bias and some other slight probs. Horizon, the assembly or production line built them but something was lost in translation. I might get one on a trade deal in exchange for some advertisement type help what kind of tone do you like? this was supposed to be the traditional hot rodded marshall type jackson thing from late 80's but it sounds a little sterile to me. and a host of others.

 

[jerrydyer]

i got a vl1002 when they first came out. a friend of mine had gotten one and was telling me, "dude its so heavy and brutal"! (i was like 20), traded in my marshall on it, and regretted it for the next several years or so. two trannies and idk how many tubes blown later, i finally got rid of that decrepit piece of shit!
back then we didnt have all the resources of the interwebs, and no one wanted to work on it locally. fuck i hated that goddamn amp! and no balls, i had to run it at around 3:00 on the master to keep up with my drummer, which just caused it to fail faster. i had several decent techs from florida to san fran fix that thing, and no one could make it last. hope the dude lives in obscurity for that abortion of an amp.

If you read about Lee a little he says that Ampeg changed his original design with cost cutting measures that doomed the amp from the start and there wasn't a thing he could do about it. He was very helpful with making the fixes public later on down the road. He had a website with the mods and fixes. I ended up with a Crate Blue Voodoo with my store credit when mine blew up,so It was not a good time for me amp wise either.

gotcha, but at the time, being in a touring band from a little beach town in fla, and not having internet to find out this info.....

where are you in florida/ My cousin has a channel switch combo of mine you might be able to use. he hasnt played it in a decade. (not literally but you get the idea)

 

[jerrydyer]

i know this is old topic but i have one at my house right now. it had a melted plug where the heaters come in off the trannie and then to the board.
uuuhh this thing sucks. i think the tone and gain are lame. whats the deal .. my friend told me they are discontinued? maybe lee said get these off the market cause they are lame and not a good representation of my work???/? I dont know but its not a good sounding amp.

The heater mod is well documented. Should be an easy fix for ya. If I recall undersized molex connectors were used that melted. Ditch the connector and solder directly if I remember correctly.

I bought one of those pictured above brand new. It blew up within a few weeks and the store said it was not repairable and gave me my money back.

hi broken, thats exactly what i did. cant figure out why they used.

 

[jerrydyer]

i know this is old topic but i have one at my house right now. it had a melted plug where the heaters come in off the trannie and then to the board.
uuuhh this thing sucks. i think the tone and gain are lame. whats the deal .. my friend told me they are discontinued? maybe lee said get these off the market cause they are lame and not a good representation of my work???/? I dont know but its not a good sounding amp.

Lee hasn't made amps in over 15 years. Which model do you have there?
Jerry

XLA 100 two channels, identical though ??? go figure.. its from 90's some went out and the rest sat in st louis storage.

 

[jerrydyer]

by the way after some cleaning, tube swapping, bias etc its sounds a little better but still extremely mediocre.

 

[killertone]

I spoke to Lee quite a bit about SLM changing his design and using Crate (SLM owns Crate) parts to make his designs. He said his designs were much more heavy duty and the lower quality Crate parts that SLM used flat out could not take it. He said that was the last time he would ever sell his designs to a large amp company and he meant it. He hasn't had an association like that since.

 

[mchn13]

i got a vl1002 when they first came out. a friend of mine had gotten one and was telling me, "dude its so heavy and brutal"! (i was like 20), traded in my marshall on it, and regretted it for the next several years or so. two trannies and idk how many tubes blown later, i finally got rid of that decrepit piece of shit!
back then we didnt have all the resources of the interwebs, and no one wanted to work on it locally. fuck i hated that goddamn amp! and no balls, i had to run it at around 3:00 on the master to keep up with my drummer, which just caused it to fail faster. i had several decent techs from florida to san fran fix that thing, and no one could make it last. hope the dude lives in obscurity for that abortion of an amp.

If you read about Lee a little he says that Ampeg changed his original design with cost cutting measures that doomed the amp from the start and there wasn't a thing he could do about it. He was very helpful with making the fixes public later on down the road. He had a website with the mods and fixes. I ended up with a Crate Blue Voodoo with my store credit when mine blew up,so It was not a good time for me amp wise either.

gotcha, but at the time, being in a touring band from a little beach town in fla, and not having internet to find out this info.....

where are you in florida/ My cousin has a channel switch combo of mine you might be able to use. he hasnt played it in a decade. (not literally but you get the idea)

Oh i got rid of that thing around 2001 or 2002 afte it had sat in my closet while my old randall rg100 got all the work. I live in south carolina now.

 

[JerryP]

i know this is old topic but i have one at my house right now. it had a melted plug where the heaters come in off the trannie and then to the board.
uuuhh this thing sucks. i think the tone and gain are lame. whats the deal .. my friend told me they are discontinued? maybe lee said get these off the market cause they are lame and not a good representation of my work???/? I dont know but its not a good sounding amp.

Lee hasn't made amps in over 15 years. Which model do you have there?
Jerry

XLA 100 two channels, identical though ??? go figure.. its from 90's some went out and the rest sat in st louis storage.

I had an XLA1000 at the shop a while back and it's definitely not a metal amp. If I remember right it has one less stage than his Metaltronix/Ampeg circuit. Kind of a hopped up Plexi thing. Most of his circuits were pretty similar. The best sounding amp I ever heard from his was a modded Marshall that used to belong to Paul Gilbert I had here at the shop.
Jerry

 

[eljodon]

I never liked them when he was modding amps in the 80's. It sounded dark and muddy!

 

[joepete77]

I had a jmp lee modded and it was pretty badass. If his later production amps sounded like my Marshall mod I would buy two of them. It could scream at whisper volumes if needed and could get very high gain if needed but I wouldn't call it a metal amp by modern standard anyway which is probably why I liked it. It still had a Marshall voicing, I don't like that overly thick bass heavy tone in my amps.

 

[Tonelover]

The melted connector is a recurring problem he had, he even put out a YouTube video about it. I had an XLS-1000 for a while, that thing had more fricking gain than anything I've ever seen. I thought it was pretty damn cool because I didn't know better but it was indeed a muddy mess.

 

[guitarmike]

The melted connector is a recurring problem he had, he even put out a YouTube video about it. I had an XLS-1000 for a while, that thing had more fricking gain than anything I've ever seen. I thought it was pretty damn cool because I didn't know better but it was indeed a muddy mess.

I had in total 8 different Lee Jackson/Metaltronix amps. 1 of them sounded good enough to gig with, the rest fell into the muddy mess range. I had a Marshall modded by him and it sounded horrible. The only LJ modded Marshall I heard that sounded good was one owned by ampaddict a few years ago. I really wanted to like them but they just did not sound good.

 

[jerrydyer]

got all those probelms solved now it has some sort of crackling sound when cranked like cold solder joints. cant find any though. Im re routing wires now to try to fix. any new info on these? other re occuring probs???

 

[mchn13]

aaarrrggh i want to say so much bad shit, i hate these amps so bad lol. good luck broseph.

 

[Racerxrated]

The Crate Stealth is one of the best bang for your buck amps out there..under 300 and NOTHING touches it for that..

 

[JerryP]

The Crate Stealth is one of the best bang for your buck amps out there..under 300 and NOTHING touches it for that..

Gain channel is pretty much all solid state.
Jerry