Hi Todd,
I managed to carve out an hour for myself over the Thanksgiving weekend and spent it with your JOAT 20 RT. What an amazing box.
I played it with a 1968 Les Paul Custom into three different cabinets. The first was the Marshall Model 1990 that has eight 10 watt Celestion 7442 speakers in it. It’s the perfect lead cabinet. I was driving it with a JTM50 clone that I built from a kit bought from George Metropoulos. I stuffed yellow jackets into the output sockets and filled them with NOS Mullard EL84s. That was my best effort to get the chimey sound I remember from my rock’n’roll days in the late ‘60s.
The JOAT 20 eats the clone alive. I had to chain the inputs of the clone to add back bottom while your amp has it all via the low cut and high cut switches. I was amazed at how quickly I was able to set the tone I wanted with each of the three cabinets I tried.
I’ve been chasing clean tone for a long time without much success until now. The best examples of that might be the guitar fade at the end of “A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles or the triplets at the end of the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town”. Bell-like tones that seem to be impossible to nail down. The JOAT 20 is stuffed full of them.

The second cabinet was a 1969 Fender Dual Showman with two JBL D130Fs. I expected it to sound much fuller than the Marshall from all of the extra cone and those big JBL voice coils, but WOW. The combo of the JOAT 20 and that cabinet produces a full, balanced spectrum of tone with no holes. Again, setting up the amp took less than 30 seconds.

The third cabinet was the Vox Super Beatle (I have the adapter cable) with four 12 inch Celestion Silver Bells and two Goodmans horns. Again, a totally transparent sound with fine balance across the spectrum but very different from the Fender cab. Set up probably took all of 15 seconds.

The reverb is the best I’ve ever heard and the tremolo has perfect range in both speed and depth.

Please understand that I’ve monkeyed with a lot of amps trying to get to where your amp is right out of the box and never got there on my own. The closest I have is a 1958 Fender tweed Bassman but that is a one-trick pony without any of the versatility of your amplifier.

I have a lot of little 1950s & ‘60s 5 watt amps that deliver grit when I want it and I didn’t have time to push the JOAT into a small speaker to see what comes out of it (yet). I’d like to come back later and buy one of your cabinets but am not sure which one in which configuration (closed or open back) will fit me the best. Are you porting the closed back cabs?

You have my apology for this long note but I’m so impressed with this amplifier that I wanted to share my first experience with it. Makes me wonder what to do with all of the others (there are many and they all now look like unattractive old girlfriends). I guess that’s a high-class problem to have.

You have a fan in Pittsburgh. I’ll buy dinner if you ever come this way.

Most respectfully,
Vic