Welcome back and welcome to 2026—what better way to kick it off than with a pair of Friedmans. In this video I do a quick, “get the info and move on with your day” comparison between the Friedman Jake E Lee 20-watt head and the 50-watt big brother. I’m running a Schecter into a blonde cab with a Vintage 30, mic’d with an SM57, and I’m switching between the two amps with my Morningstar MC3 and an amp switcher so you can hear the differences back-to-back. The big takeaway: the voicing is identical. The 20W is basically the quieter version of the 50W, but “quieter” is relative—there’s about a 5 dB difference and that’s huge, so after letting you hear them un-leveled, I match volumes as best as I can. I walk through Channel 1 crunch with the bright cap positions, then Channel 2 with boost off and on, and finally the 20W saturation switch (which, if I’m being honest, feels more like a bright-cap-style shift). My conclusion is simple: both are loud, both sound killer, both can work on stage—pick the one whose feature set fits your real-world gigging needs, especially if you want the 20W’s cab sim/XLR convenience versus the 50W’s extra headroom and grunt.