Diezel VH4

My DIEZEL is a VH-4 made in 2006. 4 Channels with seperate eq per channel.
1: Clean sound, I dont use clean sounds very often so I dont really know what a clean sound should be like. In fact, I like the sound and with an EMG- Humbucker u can get sum nice crunch sounds here.
2: Amazing, it sounds about 10 times better than my Marshall TSL sound. By putting in sum bass, you can almost cry cause it's so warm and... it sounds like it ****** should sound!
3: This is the best distorted rhythm channel ever. I play sum Punkrock and its just awesome. 2 years ago I went to the next music store to try one and even without using the EQ, it sounds great. I dont need an amp which can get a good tone after 10 hours of trying out, just to realize that it still sucks one day later. I dont wonder why guys like Hetfield or Ian D'Za play this amp without getting paid for using it.
4: High gain channel, perfect for Solo parts and looots of gain.

MIDI: First I thougt: Damn, why dont they make a footswitch like Marshall or Mesa. Finally, I must say, the midi controller offers lots of possiblities you wouldnt have when using a footswitch. I can easily make 8 different sounds just by using the effect loop for every channel, the Amp has more possibilities than I could ever use. And I just need a Midipedal and if it breaks, I simply buy a new one. Its definately very versatile.

I use a Fender USA Deluxe strat with a seymour duncan Hot Rail, a Gibson Les Paul with P100, a Heritage Gary Moore signature with 81 EMGs and a Gibson SG Guitar. It doesnt matter which guitar I use, the Amp always sounds awesome. But never without being "coloured" by the type of guitar I use, it simply does what it has to do and nothing else.
Another advantage towards the other amps I tried is, that you never get sum muddy tone, even if you "overgain" your sound. The chord stays clear and they simply have "big balls". For me it fells like combining the best sounding Marshall with the power of a Mesa Recti. Simply the perfect mixture, a warm and defined sound with lots of power. What else do you want?

Currently there are some problems concerning the tube quality in general. My VH-4 did his job quite well for the last year, but after having changed the tubes he burned. No problem anyways cause Peter Stapfer simply gave me a new VH-4 for the time mine got repaired. But in fact the problem is not the amp but the ****** tubes, they simply cant stand what they should. You cant compare a VH-4 with a Marshall, it's a genius work and build with lots of passion and not screwed together by sum mexican workers. It's build on the limit, every part of it has to give its best to make this sound possible. And the sound is worth it, no doubt. So as you can see, if one part of the system fails, it simply breaks down. Is this Diezels fault? No, they cant build the tubes, they have to buy them. And its a fact that the tubes lost quality, so its simply unfair to blame DIEZEL for this problem most of the high gain amps currently have. And I'm sure this will change soon.
To sum it all up, its a masterpiece of work and if you want to have an amp that never breaks down, just dream on or dont buy a tube amp, every amp I owned (Marshall, ENGL, Mesa) broke down at least once.

If you got any problems with ur Diezel Amp, they repair it for free. They even send another amp if you need one, geat service and all those guys who say they wouldnt take care of their customers simply lie or are not able to write a friendly email. They love their amps and they will always try their best to help you as fast as possible. Just remember, DIEZEL is not a big company. Its Peter Diezel and Peter Stapfer, 2 guys for all the amps around the world and they are here in Germany. They will not visit you in Canada or the USA and they might be very busy sometimes. If you write an email and dont get an answer, write another one or call them. Believe me, they will do their best to help you as they did when my VH-4 burned down. This is the best and friendliest support I ve had in my entire life so dont believe anyone who tells you it sucks, it simply doesnt.

DIEZEL is an impressive company with a great ideology and lots of passion and love for these Amps. The VH-4 is the best amp I have ever played and I tried almost every amp existing. For me it's worth every penny, although I had to save money for about 1 year to afford one. If you are looking for a great and special amp you should try the VH-4, maybe you get the same awesome felling that I got when I first played it. It simply sounds like it has to sound and you dont need to make any tradeoffs.
I thank Peter Diezel and Peter Stapfer a lot for creating this Amp and finish the endless quest of finding the perect sound for me.

Great concept, just unreliable, MIDI channel switching, 4 great metal channels, has potential to be awesome, when they iron out all the bugs..... I have been playing 19 years, so I feel valid to offer this review

Brutal metal sound, perhaps so heavy it may be unusuable when you go through mic preamps on a desk and through a P.A system. Sounds great at bedroom level, again unreliable

Can we go into - numbers here. This unit suck sucks sucks in this area. My chassis got loose from it's housing, and tube failure was unquestionably high. Fuse blew 3 times, LED light flickered on and off. Ok, so I call their distributor, wow, what jerks, they spoke to me like I was a 3 year old. Trying to justify the amp's failure as user error, just stopped short of saying the amp is next to God, and it cannot go wrong. They suggested I email Peter Diezel himself, well now 5 weeks late..no reply.

Read above, terrible, poor, unqualified, and lack of follow up. Only one place to ship this amp to when it goes wrong, and it WILL go wrong... Thats $200 for return shipping, and it will happen more than once...forget about it!!

Exactly as the title says, What a hunk of junk, I would feel more comfortable with a Brujera amp by Behringer, and thats REALLY saying something, as Brujera are well, yeah, you can figure that one out!!

Ok, there seems to be a lot of slagging this amp going on here, and I thought I'd state my personal opinion

I'm pretty sure mine is a 2004 issue VH4, but I'm not 100% on that being that it's at my jam space, and I'm at home.

I play in a hard rock band, and need to have a great variety of tones, almost all of which i get purely from this amp, and my guitars, with occasional use of a few effects.

4 channels - clean, crunch, distortion, crazy, effects loop with two mixing options, no headphone jack, but if you're buying this as a practice amp for low volumes, it's not what you want.

I don't actually have an issue with the midi footswitching, it is very smooth, and very easy to program, and you can get an old midi controller for under $100 on ebay most of the time.

I use the amp in live shows and jamming with a full band, and depending on the size of the room, sometimes I have to run it at 50W instead of 100, it has plenty of power, you'll never be lacking in terms of power.

I have 4 main guitars that I play live and they are as follows:
Gibson Les Paul Custom - 2007 silverburst - stock
Gibson Les Paul BFG - 2008 silverburst limited edition - stock
1990 Fender Telecaster Plus - stock
Fender Stratocaster Frankenstein with many customizations, but the ones that matter here are Tom Anderson soapbar pickups and a solid maple body.

The amp sounds amazing, but one of the keys is to make sure you aren't letting it take control of you, almost every dial on my head lives at 12:00 for settings, I think many people's problems with sound quality are coming from poor settings, this amp is not meant to be dialed to 10 in many (if any) of it's controls, as it's tuned to sound good naturally.

It has almost no noise coming from the amp, and there is plenty of difference in distortion tones. I find with my mostly dark sounding pickups though, that it is important to use the bright switches on channels 1 and 2...

Channel 1 is generally always clean for me, and some of my guitars have very hot pickups...

Channel 2 breaks up a little where i have it set, if you up the gain, you can get a bit more crunch, depending what you're looking for out of this channel

Channel 3 has some very brutal distortion if dialed up, or a wonderfully even tempered sound (best i can put it) where it's always easy to hear your notes, but the gain adds a great touch.

Channel 4 has gobs of gain, just gobs of it, great solo channel i don't use it for much else...

Important to remember if you're looking into this amp is that it doesn't have the most Saturated tone, when i want something really saturated, i'll add some fuzz into my sound ahead of the amp in the chain.

It's never had a problem for me, built like a tank, and holds up like one too.

Peter Diezel and Uwe Salwender (i think that was his name) were very helpful in assisting me when I needed to re-tube the amp and was trying to make sure it was the best compliment to the sound i like out of it.

If it were stolen or lost, I'd probably cry, cause in the 15 years I've been playing, nothing has ever sounded this good, and it would be hard to afford/find a replacement with the rarity of the vh4 in canada.

it sounds like itself, and not really anything else, it's a unique sound, and if you like it, it's all you'll settle for

4 channels, but the channel 3 and 4 were pretty much the same, the channel 4 had a bot more dust noise and slightly more gain, but no bug difference, channel 1, clean, channel 2 crunch, channel 3 and 4 Distortion and lead. t suits for hard rock and metal, I wish channel 4 would be more different, it's almost the same as channel 3.

one of thebest distortion I have heard, it's just flawless, top of the calss in sound. channel 2 is great, you can have classic crunchs and if you crank up the gai you will have a great distortion so you can have a vintage and a moder heavy crunch. Channel 1 sounds as good as as the best Fender amp, its just great.

the worse amp ever! Do not buy this amp if you will use it on tour, This thing blew a fuse right after i opened the box and played for the forst time, them it blew 2 fuses in 3 days. then in a week it blew 2 more. this thing just keeps blowing fuses, and the worse thing is that it blew the first day using it in a room temperature. Simply this thing was build to last nothing. I rate it a Zero! I pay the biggest money you can pay for an amp and I couldn't even use it in a live gig fearing it would blow another fuse! a cheap peavey amp is 100 times more reliable than this chep build piece of crap

Zero, Zero, Zero! I called Diezel, nobody answered the phone when I called Diezel, send an email, nobody respoded, I damn you Diezel! good I still had warranty and got my money back.

This amp produces probably the best sound ever for Rock and Metal, but what is all this great sound for if you cannot even use it in a full gig without blowing a fuse? it's like trying to drive a Ferrari Enzo in a small french town with stone roads and speed bumpers every 100 meters.

As stated hundreds of times here already

Follow up to review below - see below
However, since Peter re tubed the amp, the sound has become more defined, and the cleans sound a lot better. I still need to find a balance between the clean sounding thin, and breaking up a bit too much, but it's getting there.

This is a follow up to my earlier review. I sent the amp off to Diezel, and got it back within two weeks. The repairs did not cost me a thing, and I believe they replaced the circuit board and all the tubes.
The customer service at Diezel is second to none, and although for the price of the amp, I maintain that it should not have had any issues, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the company to others.
Consider this an apology for my hastiness to point out the few negatives of an otherwise fantastic and entirely reliable company.
Also, the warranty on the amps is lifetime. I admit that I was mistaken in believing that it was a one year warranty.
Although the amp did break down within 6 months of ownership, the problem was very quickly and conveniently solved, even with the shipping costs to Germany.

Couldn't have wished for better service from Peter and the team. Best customer support I have ever received. Thank you Peter!

See below - Sounds fantastic. Lets just hope it doesn't break down again!

I've had this amp for a year now, and thought I would be completely honest about it's positives and negatives.
As stated before - 4 channels with Fx loops for each, also a master serial and parralel Fx loop.
Points taken off due to the lack of a simple channel switching device. The amp doesn't come with a footswitch, and only allows midi footswitching. You know what this means?! You have to buy another company's footswitch and hope it works, so you can do somethihng really simple like... urrr... change the channels on a 4 channel amp! Ridiculous. With the price this thing costs, you would think that a simple jack connector would be appropriate, as well as the midi stuff.
I was looking for a simple 4 button midi footswitch for months, until I found that Randall is the only company who makes them. However, Randall have now changed the spec on them so they use 6 pin DIN cables instead of the 5 pin cables, hence, they now don't work with the VH4. I then had to shell out over ??150 for a footcontroller with way more buttons than I will ever use. Sounds daft?! Believe me, I was P1SSED!
Controls on the amp do what they say they do. Prescence and Depth are very handy features.

Good clean sounds. A little dark sounding but very Hi-Fi. Some good tones to be had here, but nothing noteworthy really. 7/10 for clean sounds.
Crunch - Sounds a little flat, but breaks up very nicely. This covers a lot of ground, and although still a little dark sounding, covers early Marshall territory quite nicely. Another 7/10 here
Channel 3 - Great Palm mute sounds here! You can dig into the srtings and the amp sounds like it is crushing under your hand, before blooming into wonderful, pure sounding distortion. Fantastic harmonic overtones and a great clarity and punch to this channel. Not too tight though. 'Machine gun' palm muting isn't quite 'there'... If anything I would want a little more attack on this channel, but each to their own. It does sounds fantastic, and brings a smile to my face when played alone, or in a band situation. Cuts perfectly through the mix. An 8.5/10 here
Channel 4 - More of the same here. Too much gain, less mids, doesn't cut as well as channel 3. I don't use this one too much, as the ammount of gain just gets lost in the mix, and it starts to sound a bit "too much" - even for "TEH BR00TALZ METULZ" Riffs. A bit "Meh" with this channel. 7/10
Very satisfied with the sound. NOT ??2000 satisfied though. I would pay ??1400-1500 for this amp if I was asked to make an offer, but what can I say?! I was irresponsible with my cash!

NO I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT RELY ON IT.
Long story short - I had the amp for about 6 months, when it started having all sorts of weird volume issues. I changed all the tubes to no avail. I took it to a tech, who said there was likely a broken track on the circuit board, and it couldn't be fixed without days worth of work unsoldering everything to get to the underside of it.
For ??2000 this should absolutely not be happening. I paid for a reliable amp, apparently built with "Military Spec Components", and I got a f***ing lemon.
Not happy with this. After 2 months of re soldering all visible connections, changing tubes and getting incredibly frustrated with the amp running at about the level of a quiet radio when completely dimed, I decided that I would have to cave in and pay the huge shipping fees to send it back to Germany.
The amp is with Diezel at the moment, who don't pay any shipping fees, and who intend to charge me for any new tubes they decide to put in the amp.
Go figure...

All the staff are very friendly, and very helpful.
As the previous reviewer stated before, they certainly talk a good game, but let's see how they play it.
5/10 due to prompt replies to questions, but yet more charges for fixing an amp that is broken due to poor manufacturing.
1 Year warranty is a joke for something this expensive.

If it were stolen I would jump for joy, claim the insurance,buy a Marshall JVM or similar workhorse and spend the change on a holiday. The only reason I don't sell this amp is because the sound really is great.
The resale value on these amps is so low (Around ??1300) that if I wanted to get rid of it I would run over it with my car and claim it on insurance.
If it breaks down again, I will probably smash it to pieces and claim insurance. What other choice would I have, except to spend another ??300-400 shipping it and buying new tubes?!
Having ranted on about this, though, it is a great sounding amp. Just not worth the price, the hype or the hassle.
Feel free to email me about any of this, or if you want clips of it working, or clips of it broken.
Gaaaa I can't believe the d**n thing is broken! Look at the Rig-talk forums and see how many other people are having problems with this amp! I am not amused.

This is a follow-up to below: Peter & Uwe came through with a new VH-4 as a replacement for my `02 head;this so I could finish these session dates and still get this head repaired. Now, that's customer service! So, here's an amended review.

As regards features, the one thing that might put the amp over the top, assuming it could be done without messing with the audio path too much, would be the addition of a lush reverb. Of course, reverbs always seem to crap out and go down. So, really, a feature-set at around the 8.5 mark (MIDI with EQ for each channel) is probably as good as any head will get.

Again, and as noted, I rate this at 9. It's balls on,though the clean tones may be a little harder and more harsh than one may want in a perfect world. If you're looking for a `64 VOX-like chime, you're probably not going to get it here. As such, the head, while extremely hip for most styles and tones, isn't going to be a chime or surf machine, per se.

Yeah, the only issue has been this strange problem with how the MIDI board has been receiving voltage. It's a fresh problem and isn't related to durability, per se; as it appears to be a problem that may be rooted in a bad batch of parts Peter received. The build strength and quality of the head itself is high--it weighs a ton relative to many other amps and is solid.

Well, customer support has gone above and beyond the call of duty here; with Peter shipping over a new VH4 as a backup/replacement for my head.

Been playing for quite some time and own quite a few different axes and amps. The VH4 serves me well for a number of reasons. I would venture to say that for 70-80% of the players out there, the VH4 would be anideal amplifier. Of course, for many of the others, the VH4 is simply more amp than they need. And for some they require the specificity of a `65 Twin or really are solidly wed to the tone of their `71 SL-100 or something. But for the mass majority, this one amp would most likely do it all. Of course, it isn't inexpensive, so it cannot be rated a 10--Fantastic Value. But it's close.

Here's a follow-up to the last post: Peter has gone out of his way to ship a new VH-4 to me as a replacement for this head; thus allowing the sessions to continue full speed ahead. As noted, the sound/tone of the VH-4 is very good, and if there was some way to develop a smart chime-like reverb system, the features set would be about as good as it gets, as well.

The sound quality is as noted before: near the manifestation of a Platonic form in the material realm. I've never heard an amp that was a 10--I've had heads that had channels that qualified as 10's, but never an entire head. As such, a rating of 9 is as good as it comes from this player.

My original VH-4 seems to have a very odd and elusive issue. Odd insofar as it has been spot on perfect for years and then just went down.

After a rare problem with the head, and balls-deep in various session projects, Peter has sent me a new VH-4 as a substitute for my injured amp. Now, THAT'S CUSTOMER SUPPORT!

Me? I've been playing since Les Pauls were $500.00 new. The VH-4 is a good fit for my rig insofar as I use it together with an old Bruce Egnater MICA TOL-100 head, each split side to side with a 4x12 & 2x12 cab apiece. Because each head is MIDI, it's a no brainer. So, the VH4 is great because it makes utilizing a deep rack rig easy. It also allows for 4 channels which I find is really important. The clean may be a bit too chrisp for some tastes, but the gain is good and doesn't come off like the buzzy, preamp-driven crap that many builders seem to shoot for these days. Of course, the VH4 is not inexpensive, so the bang for the value ratio may be a subjective element. As far as other gear...I have enough to get the job done.

Amp has crapped out and nobody seems to respond to email; though they have my $4000.00 amp. We'll no longer recommend Diezel products to clients here.

Well, they talk a good game, but over three weeks and no report on the issue with this amp, and a week with no response to email concerning the problem that required the initial repair. At these prices, some word as to a preliminary bench analysis should be forthcoming within 10 days.

Well, anymore, apparently hype trumps reality. It's a George Bush world. But when I shell out serious dough for an instrument, it needs to function as designed. And if not, it needs to be rectified in a timely manner. This head is a large waste of time and money.

The features have been said 50+ times. I will focus on the interaction. It is layed out so good, I can easily dial in tones... I mean more than one! I have the independent controls over each of the four channels and then I adjust the DEEP knob to fill out the low end after I get it where I want it. Man, this is the only amp I will ever need. 4 Channels and.... (see next section)

THEY ALL FU<KING ROCK! I was turned on to this amp by one of the producer's of my album, Kris Singh, and I will never turn back. It has more balls than any Marshall and it always maintains a clarity that can't be messed with. We used it on our recording sessions and we tried hard to beat it. We put up vintage Plexis, Bogners XTC and Ubershall, Engl, Soldano SLO, New Marshalls, Modded JCM 800s, we tried pedals, we tried everything. At the end of the day, NOTHING could touch the Diezel for our sound. We do range from classic Rock, Blues Rock to Classic Punk and Modern Heavy Metal. My band is "Stereo Transmitted Disease." You can hear the Diezel all over our songs at our myspace site:

http://www.myspace.com/stdthebanddotcom

We did not use any pedals for added distortion. All Diezel. Various channels though.


The Bogner Ecstasy was the second best amp for us and we used that a little too.

I had to buy a Diezel after the sessions and I don't regret it. It is my #1 amp! I wish I could rate it higher than "10"!!!

Took it on the road. No problems. It is solid as hell.

Never needed their support, that is the best kind ;-)

Best heavy rock amp I have ever used (and we tried a lot of the top ones next to it in the studio). Great for classic rock, clean, AC/DC on up. It can ever get you that Joe Walsh sound. Amazing. I cannot believe that many sounds are all in one box. My producer called it the swiss army knife of guitar tones. and it is. I am their biggest fan. They brought the sound out of my head, through my fingertips and out the speakers. What more can you ask for???

I hate to give all 10's but this amp earns it.