Laney Valve Amps are Good II

[macsabbath]

I liked the GH50L Head so much I just bought another one and a Laney 4x12 cabinet. The Laney Cabinet is excellent, well made, looks good and sounds quite different from the Marshall Cabinets I use right now. It has a more vintage type sound I think and will come in handy as part of the Mac Sabbath setup. The GH50L per the previous topic on the subject is really good, they grow on you really quick and at the price you can buy these for they have to be the best kept secret in great sounding low cost valve amps ! Staggering.

Does anyone out there have a Laney LC15 or LC15R combo. This little amp is an all valve 15W combo, but you can also hook it up to a 4x12. I bet this would give you loads of heavily saturated valve tone without ear splitting volume and might be a really good way to get a great sound for using at club/pub gigs. They retail for £159 without Reverb or £200 with, which is pretty good.

As before these comments are about Laney ALL VALVE amps ONLY and NOT about the Linebacker or other transistor amps in the range !

[njw]

how much did the GH50L Head set you back? I'm currently looking into buying a head and i can never turn a blind eye to laney, my bass half stack is doing a bloody good job!

[macsabbath]

Originally Posted by Knee-Cow

how much did the GH50L Head set you back? I'm currently looking into buying a head and i can never turn a blind eye to laney, my bass half stack is doing a bloody good job!

KneeCow: you can buy these amps brand new for £340-360. So far I've bought two of them 2nd hand for £210 and £200 respectively. They are both in as new condition, one came with the proper Laney packing box. Other Laneys that are in the same family and will be well worth a look are:-
Heads
GH100L - £409
GH100TI - £436 ( Tony Iommi Signature Head )
VH100R - £596
Combos
LC15 - £160
LC15R - £200 ( I'm going to order one of these soon ! )
LC30 - £350
VC302x10 - £359
VC202x12 - £448

Laney have produced some transistor based stuff "LineBAcker" which seems to be well dodgy from what everyone else says. Also I've noticed "World Series" on ebay which I think is also transistor, so maybe not too good, equally they might be brilliant! They also do some Valve Fusion Amps which are similar to the Marshall Valvestate rubbish, and probably equally as bad, but again that's supposition only.

The all valve amps seem like a really good buy, because they do sound good. Bear in mind I'm comparing these to ENGL amps( think Messa) which are 3-4 times the retail price. The ENGLs sound better but not -3-4 times better!. Obviously it depends what you are after but they offer a good cross specturm sound by just adjusting the dials! I spoke to an amp tech last week who said the Laney Valve amps were really excellent and the only slight issue with them was that the distortion needed tweaking, because it cut in earlier than he liked. I told him to turn the drive down ! Basically your're getting a really good quality amps for very sensible money.

For what it's worth the Laney 4x12 Cabinet is very well made, sounds great and is easily better than the 1960 Marshalls I 've got. Again it's not ENGL standard but it's very close.

Hope this lot helps, but get out and try a GH50 I reckon you'll be so pleasantly surprised, you'll want to get your wallet out and take it home !

Originally Posted by macsabbath

KneeCow: you can buy these amps brand new for £340-360. So far I've bought two of them 2nd hand for £210 and £200 respectively. They are both in as new condition, one came with the proper Laney packing box. Other Laneys that are in the same family and will be well worth a look are:-
Heads
GH100L - £409
GH100TI - £436 ( Tony Iommi Signature Head )
VH100R - £596
Combos
LC15 - £160
LC15R - £200 ( I'm going to order one of these soon ! )
LC30 - £350
VC302x10 - £359
VC202x12 - £448

Laney have produced some transistor based stuff "LineBAcker" which seems to be well dodgy from what everyone else says. Also I've noticed "World Series" on ebay which I think is also transistor, so maybe not too good, equally they might be brilliant! They also do some Valve Fusion Amps which are similar to the Marshall Valvestate rubbish, and probably equally as bad, but again that's supposition only.

The all valve amps seem like a really good buy, because they do sound good. Bear in mind I'm comparing these to ENGL amps( think Messa) which are 3-4 times the retail price. The ENGLs sound better but not -3-4 times better!. Obviously it depends what you are after but they offer a good cross specturm sound by just adjusting the dials! I spoke to an amp tech last week who said the Laney Valve amps were really excellent and the only slight issue with them was that the distortion needed tweaking, because it cut in earlier than he liked. I told him to turn the drive down ! Basically your're getting a really good quality amps for very sensible money.

For what it's worth the Laney 4x12 Cabinet is very well made, sounds great and is easily better than the 1960 Marshalls I 've got. Again it's not ENGL standard but it's very close.

Hope this lot helps, but get out and try a GH50 I reckon you'll be so pleasantly surprised, you'll want to get your wallet out and take it home !