Lab Series L-5 ?

[Murphy Slaw]

Got 2 slingers in this town that still use them.

I'm a Boogie guy, Blue Angel myself. Maybe a Fender Prosonic for outdoors.

I'm not really impressed, but they sure have, to this day, a helluva following.

Tell me why?

 

[ylo]

They nail the Fender Twin sound, and you don't have tubes to replace. Though rated at 100 watts, they actually produce about 135 clean watts (GP Magazine bench test), much louder than most solid state amps. By messing with the compressor and the turning the gain up and master down, you can also get a passable "on the verge of breakup" sound for blues.

However, if you want heavy Triple Rec. type sounds, you're gonna have a battle on your hands with an L-5 regardless of what pedals you use -- the amp is much too bright in my opinion, esp. if yours has JBL speakers.

 

[HipKitty]

The L-5 series came about during a engineering period when most solid state amp designs fell well short of what players wanted. If you were to hear some of the other ss amps of that era, you would see why the L-5's were successful...specially when side by side in a music store with the ss Fenders of that era!

What the engineers working on the L-5 series understood was what most tube amp players wanted (and loved) about their tubes amps... the natural compression and tone of tubes...hence the compressor. They also worked hard to get the tone frequencies of the tubes and the tube amps. Other companies like Fender were trying to build clinically clean sounding amps at that time. A pure failure and lack of being aware of what the players wanted or needed.

Durability has kept the L-5's alive and kicking. The sound is kinda old school, but can easily be achieved by many of today's modeling-type amps/processors.

 

[treedroppings]

when I was starting out it was fun to play on an L5

nowadays I gotta get a silverface twin (maybe for xmas) and I have a peavey triple xxx for dirty sounds I also wanna get a boutique that does distortion and fender sounds too maybe a Koch or Brunetti or a King

one of these days ...

 

[SixVeeSix]

B.B. King has played a Lab Series amp for many years. He sounded great the last time I saw him 5 years ago. What else need be said?

 

[jbird]

Ty Tabor also used them in the day! King's X rules!