Laney AOR 50 Head

You've heard of the 11 setting, this has a 12,
sustain for 3 weeks, really only has a few sounds though, like a very very souped up marshall.

15 years ago I used all Kramers using Duncan Distortion pickups, and going into a prehistoric 4-12 peavey cab, at all gains cranked this thing is really noisy on the gain-of-hell channel, but on the clean its super quient at full blast. The distortion, amazing is about the only word i have, smooth as a violin at full blast.

15 years and still blasting, travels very well, ( i saw it drop off a conveyor belt on flight to play in greece once, and it survived)same consistent sound every single time

I heard that laney is out of business, or they were bought or something..so I have no idea.

Been playing for 22 years (since i was 13), if lost or stolen I would try to find another one, I love the sound and 3 week long sustain and smoothness, i hate the hissing when my guitars vol is off, I originally wanted to get a souped-up marshall until i actually heard this in a store. Back then the Laneys were essentially what 80's metal players were looking for, an already souped-up marshall.

two channels, one clean to dirty, the other is pure shred. t,m,b,p controls, gain and master for each channel, pull deep switch , pull brights on each channel, pull mid boost, effects loop, line out, footswitch jack and speaker outs. 50Watts w/2 el34's. that about covers it. i wish it had onboard reverb, but oh well. I use this amp as a lead guitarist in an 80's and 90's cover band. i could not ask for more tasty tones. at 50Watts I can get the power end crunching without blowing out the room like my marshall jcm800 2203 100watt does. plenty lolud and fat!!! I give it an 8 for having everything you need for two great channels and an fx loop. separate eq's would have been ok, but this works fine w/the shared eq.

i play a les paul and a strat into this amp, the strat yeilds awesome shreiks, dive bombs, and squeals, the paul snorts and chugs like a pig in heat!. this amp has tones like that of a tasty marshall jcm800, but it has a cascaded gain structure reminding me of a boogie, picture -playing a nice liquid boogie with a feel that lets you clearly articulate every note, but it sounds like a marshall. yeah thats it! feels like a boogie, sounds like a marshall!! clean is not super clean, distortion yeilds brown, thrash, rock, and grind tones. what i like is that this is a high gain head that still has a rough edge to the distortion, not a smoothed out grind like a rectifier or triple super lead(all fine amps in their own right). the best part of this amp is the tone you get for the price on the used market. great overtones, thick sound, just enough compression in the gain, i could go on and on. the low gain input would allow some jazz and blues tones, but this head thrives in the rock and roll arena. I give it an 8.5. pure clean would be nice, but tubes sound friggin great when they are pushed.

laneys have good reps as long as you dont yank the tubes out during a retube job, they are mounted to the board from what i hear, once they are in, fa get about it.

my amp tech lives up the street. i dont think any amp co offers customer service on a head built in the 80's. a 10 for my tech. for laney, no opinion

great value for high gain that sounds thick, i love it!! the band loves it!! I can sound cranked without drowning everyone else out.
this is good stuff.
i give it a9. for what it is, it does it very well.

This is a mid 80's all tube head and it came with a Laney 4 x 10" cabinet, both in mint condition. Please read the technical data from the earler reviews below. Very basic controls, but that's how I wanted it. One thing I noticed: If I use the low input, I can turn both preamp volumes all the way up, and still stay clean. This means, that by activating/deactivating the preamp 1, I basicly get two footswitchable clean channels with individual volume controls. Now I can get a real volume boost for solos. And because I use external distortion, this works for dirty tones too. This is a really nice feature.

I play a MIM Strat and a Yamaha Pacifica 402s tele copy, and I can get some very nice clean tones out of this amp. I don't care about the distortion, too buzzy for my tastes. I use a Hughes & Kettner Tube Factor, and it sounds great. One thing though, it takes some time the amp to warm up, about an hour or so. Before that the tone is a little biting in the midrange. But, when the amp has warmed up, the tone becomes smoother. This is specially notceable with the Tube Factor (or maybe it's the TF that must warm up? I dunno..). I play in an alternative guitar rock band, and now I have a tone that fits the abnd very well (Dirty tone: think 'Zombie' by the Cranberries).

I've had this amp for four days now, so I can't really tell. It's over ten years old, and there's hardly any signs of usage. Seems to be built well.

I haven't dealt with Laney. Well, they should fix their web pages =).

This is my first head & cabinet after a long series of combos. I needed an affordable system for my new band. I was mostly looking at Marshalls (JCM 800, Jubilee), but this one came up, and it was so cheap and in mint condition, so I bought it instead. OK, I don't care about the distortion too much, but I wasn't gonna use the amp's distortion anyway. The footswitchable volume boost is a really useful feature. This one's a great amp for the price.

This amp was made around 1985, and like the last review, sounds like a 90's Marshall high gain head. It has pull-push frequency boosts on the Bass, Mid, and Treble, and a cascading preamp, which means you can really distort the heck out of this head. One master volume and presence control. Can go out to 4, 8, or 16 ohms. Also has a voltage selector on the back in case you're playing overseas or on a wierd power line. VERY loud 50 watts (theres only a 6 Db difference between 50 and 100 watts). Absolutely no effects or loop, which is fine with me. If this amp had a footswitchable clean-distortion channel, Id give it a 10 (it has a low and high input, and the channel switching is based off of that, so you can only go from clean-crunch or crunch-distortion but not from one end to the other).

I play through a Squier strat with a SD Screamin Deamon humbucker in the bridge. I run that through a BBE 422A sonic maximizer and a Marshall 9001 preamp for the distortion, plus sometimes use a MXR+.
The clean channel IS pretty nice, I like it, but pull out the boosts on the bass and treble and it'll sound much better (put the mid around 7 but dont pull it out). Works great for my setup, through the MXR and Marshall.
Crunch is crunch, not bad, not great.
The distortion channel is messed up on this amp, so I can't give a good review on this. So I'm just going by the clean (which is why I bought this amp in the first place).
Running through a Roc Pro 4x12 cab, and it sounds great (need new Celestions one day, Eminence speakers aren't that great).

OLD amp, but I got it in perfect condition. I'll retube it soon. HEAVY HEAVY HEAVY....could probably drop this off a plane and it would laugh and get right back up.

Never had to go there...yet.

This is a great amp for a distortion pedal and a preamp, but I can't comment on the distortion channel, but I hear its awesome. I love this amp!

This amp was made around 1985, and it plays like a 90's amp. It has a high sensitivity in and a low sensitivity in, basically the "clean" or distorted channels. It has a gain boost switch, which makes it sort of switchable, but it does nothing on the clean channel. Makes good for switching from good overdrive to distortion, though. It has an effects loop, and it has push/pull tone knobs, which act like boosts for their frequencies. It has no effects built in, but that is fine with me. For 50 watts, its quite loud (stands up to bandmates 130 wt. musicman stack). I only wish it had a footswitchable low gain/high gain, it would have made it perfect.

I play with guitars equipped with humbuckers, which sound great through this amp. I play hard rock/metal, and it does this well. It is the best gain I have ever heard from an amp. It is a little noisy, but what hi-gain amp isn't? The clean channel stays clean, but sounds sort of flat. It is definetely a gain amp, and it does that well.

I have only had it a few months, so i can not really say. I have yet to gig with it, but I have had no problems with it while crankin it at my bands practices (which can get rowdy).

Have not had to deal with them.

Overall, I think this is a fine amp that dukes it out well with the high gain marshalls peaveys and crates. It is an excellent head if you are looking for distortion, and with good effects, the clean sounds ok too. For 175$, it is a steal.

This is a single channel "Marshall" type head with two cascaded preamps. This means you can distort the bejesus out of it. Each tone control has a pull-boost pot. One of the gain stages is footswitchable, making it sorta like a two channel amp. It uses four EL-84 power tubes. I ran this thru a Randall 4x12 loaded w/ 30 watt Celestions. it can go from relatively clean to a medium crunch, or medium crunch to nuclear detonation levels, but not from one extreme to the other.

I used this amp mostly w/ a Heartfield RR for a fairly psychedelicized, loud band. The guitar itself had a decent distortion box onboard, thus I had plenty of distortion levels from which to choose. The amp sounded pretty lifeless w/out the treble and bass pull boosts engaged. Engaging the mid-boost made it sound dumb. The bass boost produced a gut-churning low end that cannot be described in mere words (at least in English). Throwing box distortion on top of the amp distortion gave me a fairly exact Metallica-type sound (way cool that it could do that-but only used it for making fun of metal-wankers, who would probably love this amp). The overall sound of this amp was crisp, clear, and fairly "in yer face".

Bought it used, played/hauled it on the road for three years, and sold it when I quit that band. During that time I never even had to replace a tube!-and I often ran it pretty hard for a couple hours at a time.

n/a

I unloaded this thing on some Malaysian guy who was moving back home to start a Metallica cover band (the amp has a voltage switch-so yeah, he coulda done it), so it's long gone. As I didn't need a furniture-sized amp any longer, it was unnecessary to keep. It was a cool thing to gig with while playing loud music, but it couldn't handle subtle sounds at all-way too "brittle" sounding (or "crisp" if ya like that kinda thing). If I were in a metal or punk band I would definitely seek one of these out again-it did the "Marshall" thing real well and was pretty cheap. The head and cabinet cost me $500 bucks, which is what I sold it for when I was done w/it.

Hey, this amp has EL-34's in the power amp stage like my Marshalls. It sounds like a new Marshall hi gain head. EFX loop and all the modern features. Decent clean channel.

Loads of preamp gain. Nice power amp gain when turned up. Clean channel is kinda vintage sounding but representing nothing particular.

My amp looks good, but has been used ALOT. Just typical Tube changes once a year.

Never a prob. I paid $300 with a 2 by 12 celestion matching cab. Cool!

For the money, these amps are an excellent value. No they cant compete with my Marshall 100 watt superleads tonewise, but the are the equal of all the preamp overdriven buzzboxes on the market. Think of these amps as the poormans Marshall JCM's or 5150 head