The Reviewer » Musical Instruments

Laney LC15 Review

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:31:49 +0000

The Laney LC15 is a highly regarded tube practice amplifier, garnering an 8.9 out of 10 average rating for Sound Quality at Harmony Central. It is rated at 15 watts with an EL84 tube, out to a 10″ Laney-designed driver. It may only have 1 channel, but what it lacks in features, it makes up for pure unadulterated tube tone. Let’s see what users have to say.

“Sound is king and this amplifier can sing. With stock preamp tubes you get a clean sound with the gain knob set to lower than 9 o’clock. Past that it starts to break up but no matter what you dial in you will find a useful sound. Seventies hard rock sounds hit you in the face past 12 o’clock. I mainly use this amp for recording clean to bluesy sounds though and I found it better to put in two 12AU7 preamp tubes because of their lower gain. A good clean tube sound is hard to achieve but I actually think I found a personal favorite in this pup. It has got more personality than other low watt amps I owned over the years. Try and record with it and you will find it always finds its spot in the mix. It is like glue on the tape.” — Larry Johnson

“This amp is pretty good for its value, very reliable, easy to tweak, but it lacks a bit of the drive power. It’s good for blues and some classic rock, but those who want headbanging gain would have to pass on this amp and look for the other. It doesn’t work too well with distortion pedals either, but overall smoothness is pretty good for an amp this small.” — Nance Horrowitz

“Very usable and beautiful English clean/crunch sounds—not too hot for squeely distortion on its own, but a pedal pushes things up nicely. It is a little noisy but not bad considering it is all valves. The volume knob is not particularly subtle at high gain, but again if you are using a pedal to provide most of the overdrive it is more responsive.” — Richard Alexander

“Overall, for the price, this is the best deal on a tube amp out there. Replace the speaker and tubes, and yer set. This amp excels at clean to slightly dirty sounds and is great for recording. It’s definitely a UK sounding amp, and if you dig that tone you’ll like the Laney.” — Glen Bestmore

Peavey 6505 Reviews

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:20:27 +0000

The Peavey 6505 head has five 12AX7 preamp tubes and four 6L6GC power amp tubes. It has controls for presence and resonance and a three-band equalizer. The 6505 series was created to celebrate Peavey’s 40 years in the amplification business. It has 120 watts of raw power, fed into either 16, 8 or 4 ohms. It has high and low gain inputs and two foot-switchable preamp channels.

The 6505 is basically an updated 5150 (Van Halen), but let’s see from current users what Peavey added to make this anniversary model even more special.

“I play metal and this thing was made for it. I’ve been playing for about 5 years. At the time I had been also looking at Mesa Triple Rectifier, Mark IV, and a Marshall DSL100 and JCM800. If money wasn’t an issue I would still buy this. It’s just that good. If you can find one to try out go for it; I would be willing to bet you’ll find something to love about it. I couldn’t be happier with my purchase. The only reason I don’t give it a 10 is because it does have small things that could be improved on, but what amp doesn’t? So in my opinion the best an amp is ever going to deserve is a 9.” Crimson_Eve

“I play lots of music and this amp does a pretty good job at obtaining the sound that I need. My favorite feature besides the sick amounts of gain is probably the effects loop. I can put my POD XT Live through it without it sounding like shit. I wish it came with a footswitch, but I bought it off the floor so oh well. If it got stolen, I’d cry for a very long time because I couldn’t get another one for a long time. Good, hard-rockin’ amp dude.” robsta_65

“I mentioned that I play from jazz to extreme metal, this amp has proven to be a perfect match for what I have thrown at it. I have had the amp 3 weeks and I played every guitar I own through it and all sounded kick ass. All my amps are Peaveys, I own a Classic 30, Transtube Supreme, TNT 115 and now the 6505+ Head. I run the 6505+ through a 5150 4×12 Slant and an Ampeg 4×12 Straight cab. I must be honest I did not try anything else, my experience with Peavey products now goes back 15 years and I have never had a problem. By the way all my Peavey amps are made in USA.” Triumph2002

Digitech Bad Monkey Review

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:24:42 +0000

The DigiTech Bad Monkey is a tube overdrive pedal that was made to compete with pedal legends such as the Ibanez TS 9/TS 808 Tube Screamers. The difference? A couple-a-$100. The Bad Monkey is listed at only $69.95 which means you can get it in some places for as low as $50. Guitarists have been raving about this pedal for quite some time now, so in this review, we highlighted the best of what they said.

Andy Bostick - Chicago, IL

Don’t let the price fool you—this is an outstanding effect! It really does give a warm overdrive sound that is significantly more transparent than the reigning Tube Screamer. This won’t give you high gain distortion, but it sounds great for blues and rock.

L. Wesolowski – Santa Cruz, CA

Wow. What a pedal! It completely outshines the TS-808 Reissue and costs over $100 less. I did a side by side comparison with these two and the Monkey just screamed. The tonal varieties with the 4 knobs, in combination with your guitar’s volume, gives you anything from crackling tube amp to revved up Big Muff type sound. Makes any solid state amp sing like an old Fender tube that’s cranked to 11!

cellphone 899 – Harmony Central

I use this with with a Laney LC 30. Pure f@%king heaven. That’s all I got to say. Its my number one OD. Better than the TS 10 and more rugged. Great drive and sustain with almost 100 percent transparency. I love this thing. Too f@%king good for 30 bucks.

Alex Wong – Harmony Central

This pedal would have been good at twice its price. At the price it is for sale at, if blues rock is your thing, you really have no excuse to give one a try. I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

Herb Genelly – Petaluma, CA

A lot of semi-pro or pro musicians cringe at the thought of putting a Digitech “anything” in their signal chain. But recently, I went to a local venue, and heard this guy playing super transparent lead guitar lines, while maintaining the sound of his single coil instrument, It sounded like tubes being over driven, all from a 15-watt amp. I sneaked a peak at his modest pedal board…and there was a Bad Monkey!

Digitech Bad Monkey 1

Digitech Bad Monkey 2

Behringer DEQ2496 Review

admin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:32:46 +0000

Behringer Ultracurve PRO DEQ2496; Ultra High-Precision Mastering Processor

Behringer, as we all know, is a out in the market to battle with mega-buck music products by providing a cheap, feature-rich alternative. While professional equalizers are tricky, Behringer’s quest to “break the scene” started with the Behringer 8024. It was received warmly even by the most discerning audiophiles.

To be able to use its built-in RTA, you need at least a decent omni-directional microphone to perform simple measurement and alignment tasks in your room. The DEQ2496 does not come with a mic, and for your best interest, let’s leave that in the mercy of professional music guys.

The DEQ2496 has a graphic eq, a parametric eq, dynamic eq, a virtual paragraphic eq and an expander. The virtual paragraphic eq allows parametric control of the graphic eq. Then there’s the FFT analyzer…

The FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analyzer allows for computing of frequencies with an automatic EQ to match your loudspeaker and room, flattening your overall frequency response to as much as 20,000 Hz.

The DEQ2496 has balanced, gold-plated inputs and outputs—XLR, AES/EBU, S/PDIF and optical. This means you have to adapt the XLR connection to RCA if you want to pair it with your home system. You can get RCA-to-XLR adapters for this. You can connect the unit as a tape loop of typical receivers, which treats the DEQ2496 an an outboard processor. Hit its bypass function and it’s out of the loop.

Laymen

The DEQ2496 is a lot to digest because of all its features and functions. Its 50 plus-pages on its manual doesn’t do much either. You need to have a deep understading of your equipment and your room, as well as the ins and outs of audio frequencies to be able to put this beast to good use. Once you do, youll be able to completely analyze the limitations of your system and room.

A good EQ should be able to address real weaknesses of your system, the DEQ2496 filled the lower end of the frequency spectrum best. The mids were leveled with some limitations as were the bumps in the highs.

Optimizing a room should always come first. If there are cases where (for example a movie room) vision is compromised, bring in an EQ as powerful as this and for sure you’ll find a decent workaround.

For all this, we consider the Behringer DEQ2496 as a very powerful tone controller. It can provide you with a lot of tweaking options to shape your system’s overall response, or shape individual recordings flat. Either way, this unit will give a listener the control—all the controls.

Behringer DEQ2496

Peavey Vypyr 15 Review

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:14:35 +0000

The Peavey Vypyr® 15 is a 15-watt modeling guitar amplifier. It has an 8-inch speaker with 12 amplifier channel models of popular amplifiers so clean and distorted combined, you get 24 unique voices of different amplifiers. In addition, you also get 12 different effects, with the ability to use four simultaneously. Now that’s a lot for a practice amp.

Because the Vypyr® 15 is the smallest and has the lowest power output of the Vypyr® series, it definitely was intended for one’s room. It is listed at $169.99 but most retailers carry it for less than $100. So, what other amplifier for less than $100 gives you this much features? We reckon, none.

Alright, there is the Line 6 Spider III, and a Fender and a Marshall counterpart without amp modelling, but the Vypyr® is leagues apart. The Fender Frontman 15G sounds good if you’re into no-frills amplification and/or have your own effects collection.

The distorted channels are what we looked at first. You can forget about most solid state amplifiers’ distorted channels, let alone digital distortion but Peavey did one better by adding true analog distortion to the Vypr series. It actually sounded good for most amp models, with more than enough gain at hand to tackle the most outrageous sustains. As this amp is a Peavey, the Peavey models obviously sounded better.

The effects are pretty decent, although as in most multi-effects processors, most of them are not everyday-usable. The TubScrm effect does not sound anything like a Tube Screamer and it is our least favorite of the effects.

You need not play the Vypr very loud because the speakers will definitely rattle—on loud clean strumming, and loud palm-muting—because an 8″ simply can not cope with such. Most reviews we’ve read so far ranted on this fact. It is a practice amplifier, it was intended for your ears only, if you want to go loud, find an amplifier with a bigger speaker and a higher rating.

Peavey might have set a trend here by them dropping the prices for something so filled with features this low. We would love to see other manufacturers follow suit, but for now nothing for less than a $100 can compare. If you want all of these settings to play with at home, buy it. If have no need for this much effects and models, but it anyway, for sure you’ll find time to play around with it.

Peavey Vypr 15

Behringer PMP518M Review

admin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:49:52 +0000

The Behringer PMP518M is a compact, rack-mountable, 5-channel, 180-watt powered mixer that has a 24-bit FX processor. Its design makes it easy to transport and store because it is nearly half of a conventional mixer.

It’s quite affordable too, as with all Behringer products. It is listed for $289.99 but usually sells for less than $200.00. So depending on what deal you’ll get it for, the next best mixer that has all of the PMP518M’s features would already cost you double. And it’s durable because we’ve read other reviews and most of them have been using it for at least a year without any problems.

The sound of the PMP518M is what we will describe, for the sake of this review, as “decent.” It is hard to compare a product that has no direct competition in terms of price/features. What we were told was, it could benefit a lot (sound wise) from pairing with a high-end mixer to clean up the sound, but, for a small to medium venue, it can cope with any mid-sized pa.

The unit will definitely not hold its own with maxed-out rock bands, but it suits vocals, duets and trios well with acoustic or electric instruments. We even tried to plug a bass directly, and needless to say, it sounded decent. It should work for emergency (bass) situations. Use it when appropriate, but use a larger one when needed.

The mixer is very easy to learn and operate, as all of its controls are up-front. We did however feel that it could have done better if the main controls were split into mid/low or mid/monitor, but we could not really complain for what it is listed at.

It also has its own fan to cool the output fan so it is not a quiet mixer and might only be suitable for live use.

Behringer PMP518M

Danelectro Corned Beef Review

admin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:13:49 +0000

Danelectro DJ-4 Corned Beef Reverb Mini Effects Pedal

The tiny DJ-4 pedal from Danelectro weighs a mere 11.2 ounces and retails for only $49.99. The sound of the Corned Beef is what others might consider reminiscent to a slapback delay pedal. Particularly a slapback delay in front of a short reverb.

We enjoyed toying around with the DJ-4 but we suspect that the Marshall JCM 800 we plugged it into helped us accept the sound a little more. A mediocre amplifier might bring out the worst in this pedal. The sound we got from the JCM head was, for lack of a better word, engaging.

The pedal only has two knobs—mix and hi-cut. If you’ve owned a Danelectro mini pedal before, you’ll realize that their controls do not conform with what other similar effects have. The “mix” knob controls the wet to dry mix and the “hi-cut” behaves like a treble control, only it rolls of the highs when turned clockwise (opposite of standard high controls).

The effect is turned on by the classic Danelectro round switch. From past experiences, you either love it or hate it. It is soft and does not generate a “click” sound but it switches on time and is known to be durable.

The pedal also comes with the usual Danelectro brand 9-volt battery, a really small box, and a protective plastic sleeve for the knobs.

Really, for $49.99 retail, which means you can get this for as low as $30 below, you should not complain. It might not be part of your travel effects case but it would be good to know you have more sound choices to experiment with if you need something new.

Danelectro Corned Beef Reverb

Radial Tonebone Classic Review

admin — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:49:18 +0000

Here are some good reviews of Radial Engineering’s Tonebone Classic Tube Distortion.

Terry – harmony-centreal.com

I bought this for heavier classic rock sounds like Allmans and Santana. I wanted that singing violin single note tone for certain songs. This box gave it to me. It makes the Fender and Music Man amps I like so much for their clean sounds really sound thick. I hate to say the ToneBone Classic is a “Marshall in a box,” it isn’t, but it sounds great at Marshall-type sounds. Fattens up the single coil guitars I usually use too.

Lots of great sounds in this box, nothing too clean, even with minimal drive it does color the sound considerably.

The tone and drive controls are VERY sensitive, even small adjustments make big changes.I like how it interacts with my Analogman modded TS9. I keep the TS9 pretty much as slight overdrive then use the Tonebone for distortion. If I want the Spinal Tap “extra push over the cliff” I use both together.

ohiowa – harmony-central.com

It simply sounds great. Everything from slightly broken up to full on saturation. I play a ’64 Fender Jazzmaster into not so common high headroom tube amps with 6550′s (’74 AIMS dual twelve, ’68 Sunn 200s). I love this pedal, i can get completely throaty usable tones without having to open my amp up the whole way. Great chord sounds with the low gain setting and the gain knob at 2:00. This thing makes me love playing guitar. I’ve run a Rick 4003 bass through it and got some very cool sounding fuzz bass tones for recording.

Price Check

$189.95 – Amazon.com
$199.95 – zZounds.com

Radial Tonebone Classic