In this video I do a head-to-head shootout between the Friedman JEL 20 (Jake E. Lee 20w) and my Victory Kraken (Mark I). It’s not a perfectly “fair” fight on paper—50 watts vs 20 watts and the Kraken has three switchable channels—but they’re the same price new, and they’re both the kind of compact, gig-friendly heads that a lot of us are actually hauling to shows. I ran both amps into my Splawn 4x12 with a Vintage 30, mic’d with an SM57 and a 421, and I used my Tokai loaded with Sheptone Brian Kahek PAFs. I also had an SD-1 in front of each amp so we could hear the boosted thing too. I start on crunchy rock tones, then hit boosted crunch, then run through the cleans (and yeah—I'm not a squeaky-clean guy; I like some meat and edge-of-breakup for stage use). One important note: the Kraken in the room is still below where I normally run it, and it really fills out when you bring the master up—especially the mids—so I demo where my “sweet spot” usually is so you can hear what I’m talking about. From there I jump into the high gain stuff, boosted and unboosted, and I mess with the Kraken’s presence shift switch to show how the top end changes. My takeaway: the Friedman nails that traditional modded JCM800/Plexi lane, while the Kraken covers that plus pushes into more modern/EVH-ish gain, with a bigger clean channel and a super practical load-in footprint.