Laney LC15

Thats very simple all-tube amp. It has one channel, no footswitch, no FX loop, no reverb, no external cab output, speaker wired just with a cable, no speaker socket! Its some older unit. It has no grill to secure the speaker and valves. There are some pros though. It has Celestion Tube onboard and TAD tubes. The third tube in preamp is no-name. I suppose it was there since the amp left factory. The amp has line-out taken from output transformer.

I use it with Epi LP, humbuckers. It produces mostly dirty sound, there are is no crystal clean channel. Gain knob lets you make overdriven sound, very high gain. Unfortunetly it was something wrong with my output transformer. Those overdriven sounds were very sharp, they did hurt my ears. Thats why I give it only 5. RECENTLY I upgraded output transformer and now I have cool natural overdrive. If it was stock transformer, I'd give it 9 or 10... But the stock was really cheap. So I give only 5.

Output trafo is rubbish! After I replaced it, I think the amp is reliable. After trafo replacement, I could give it 7 points in this category. It has a big con. All the heat from tubes goes to chassis. Its dangerous because after few hours even the front panel is very warm :(

no experience

I love it since I've changed the trafo.

very simple valve amp... volume, treble, mid, bass and gain controls... and a bright switch (wahoo).
2 inputs hi and low... in all not particularly versatile

it can reach pretty high volumes (i've never pushed it right up) so not bad for small gigs, but mine hasn't often left my bedroom due to the lack of features (and my lack of effects pedals to sort it)

this thing seems to work best with humbucking pickups on a higher gain setting and is great for that fat classic rock tone, thanks to those valves in the back. the unit would however benefit form a reverb control, i play mainly a sort of rock/blues mixture (SRV/Hendrix style) so it would be nice, i've recently found out that the model up from this one has a reverb control, for an extra ??30!

seems to have a problem handling nice clean tones though
especially not good with fender style single coil pickups playing through it... which can sound sharp and occasionally brittle... as i've mentioned a good few effects pedals would help improve the amp a great deal.. but i don't have enough pocket money for that =[

i'm going to give this amp a 9 for reliability, i feel like i've been quite harsh so far... and this thing has never let me down performance wise, i've had it for over 2 years now and it seems to be built pretty well. the only problem could be the valves... i've always thought they look quite fragile and they wouldn't be easy to replace on the night of a gig (but hey valve amps are the way forwards)

i may have been a little harsh reviewing this amp, because i probably haven't experienced it's full potential without effects... but if you've got a fully loaded pedal board then it could work really nicely as a small gig/practice amp.

i personally found the tone on it's own to be a bit brittle when using a guitar with single coils but when you ramp up the gain a bit and plug in a les paul, you can get some really great beefy sounds... restricted... but great

Features for this amp are pretty nill
2 inputs, gain, bright switch (killer with germanium fuzz pedals!! Use this switch its like a presence booster!!), low, mid, treb, master volume..

..that being said I like simple amps becuase I like to use effects to get my tones, being a effect designer I have access to any sound I want in that department..

This amp can be unbeileiveable and I am going to tell you exactly what I did to make it killer...goto the "Sound quality" section for this info..

Ok to make this amp simpley OWN!!9 after mod 8 before..great for studio home use...great entry level tube amp and awesome unit if you ditch the enclosure!
Step 1)
Take the chasis out of the unit and put it in a enclosure that will handle at least a 12" speaker (this is a optional but its what I did)
I used a old standel 15" speaker combo enclosure that was from the 60's or 70's.. I stripped out the old chasis and put a new wood frame in it to except a 12" speaker.. I then ordered a HH invader speaker off ebay..I got 2 for 40$ !!!! These speakers people talk shit about but if you use them with low watt amps and break them in they are just as good as any 100-150$ speaker trust me..I have 1000's! in gear and speakers and build effects pedals for a living these speakers are not as bad as people say they just dont know how to use them whish is true with most gear that people flame...at any rate
Step 2)
Replace the power amp tubes with 7189's these are the EL84's that they used in the 60's so you have to find NOS ones or used ones..they are easy to find on ebay and are not to pricey. I recomend these old school EL84's in place of any EL84 for a warm beautiful clean tone..they also sound great overdriven but since this is a classA/B amp the preamp tubes make more of a difference in tone for these I used EH tubes but you can use whatever suits you
Step 3)Put protetive covering on the circuit board..Because you are putting this amp in a new enclosure if anything touches the board while it is on it will short and you will be spending 175 to fix it if you arent electricaly inclined I used buisness card stock and clear packing tape and it worked awesome as a anti-short shield.. I will post pictures of all mods soon.
The result was a amazing sounding amp with a loud clear clean side with tones of head room.. a blistering lead sound when the gain is cranked and this baby with do everything but the metal chunk thrash sound.. which it can easily get with pedals.. I also use the line out of this amp to go my 5watt modified class A Valve JUnior but thats another review..

Has treated me very well has very nice Transformers on my model!!
New models come with a ceramic 8" speaker I think but ditch the speaker and enclosure and use a 12" speaker for this baby!!

newver dealt with them

Over all nice tones for the money...amazing entry level amp I highly recomend this to anyone starting off on there tube journies.. You cant go wrong with this..and if you are machanicly inclined can mod this into a professional peice of gear!

This is an update to a previous review after having contacted Laney

I called Laney up, which if you try and get their number from a website is nigh-on impossible, but if you contact the dealer your purchased your amp from they'll more than likely be happy to put you in touch.

The person I spoke to was very helpful and gave me all the information I needed. Had a good long chat about the finer points of output tubes, and he helped me solve the problems I had and recommended good output tubes.

It's a shame that they're so hard to get in touch with initially, but all you have to do is ask your dealer, or any for that matter, and they'll put you in touch.

I reached them on 01215-086-666, start with +44 if you're calling from outside the UK. Top guys to talk to.

this is a fairly new combo. not sure exactly as i bought it used. i play all kinds of music as a semi-pro player. single channel but with quick knob turnings can be nice and clean to nice and dirty. oh yeah it's tube. 3x12ax7 and 2xel84. no reverb or extension speaker or fx loop. the lc15r has those. it has all ineed for features. i lean towards single channel amps with simple functions. it does have a bright switch which i don't use. otherwise gain bass mid treble and volume knobs. it does have a line out which is useful. i use it for practice, recording and a live project where my sovtek mig 100h is too much.

i use ahumbucker equipped guitar and a p-90 guitar and get excellent results from both. i'm building a tele and i can't wait to hear it as i'm sure it'll be stirling. it sounds killer with all my styles although i do have a wasabi over drive to boost for more heaviness.i have little buzz going on at some frequencies especially on higher gain settings so i took it apart and tightened everything up but the buzz remained and now i'm sure it's one or both of the power tubes. i bought another pair to see if that helps. other wise no real noise even at high gain with the p-90's. on it's own with knob tweaking there is quite a range of tones and with my setup,guitar into wasabi od-snarling dogs blues bawl-small stone phase shifter-boss delay machine 100 into amp i have a really versatile sound setup. clean setting has quite abit of headroom and the bright switch can get quite bright. the distortion settings have quite a range from crunchy to quite saturated. not metal or numetal tho but i really don't go there. great for hard rock though and this little fellow can get really loud.

don't know about that. simple circuit. easy fix.

even though it was used laney answered my emails right away and sent me a manual. laney dealer where i live. no warranty of course but laney is really approachable.

i've been playing for years and years and years. i've owned alot of stuff including some digital modelling stuff. amps and fx. now i am simplified and i think my tone is the best ever. i love it's tones and portability and simplicity. i was leery of el84's as i had a peavey delta blues and a peavey classic 50 but was never happy with the tones.this amp is different tho. i guess i'd have to say it's more of a british tone than the peaveys which suits me better

This amp is so new that it wasn't finished when I ordered it (March 2005).

It's got gain, bass, middle, treble and master volume controls, high and low inputs, a line out, and a 10" version of the Celestion V30. It runs on two EL84s and 3 ECC83s. There's also a nifty lil bright switch on there, good package.

It's a single channel amp as you probably know and works well for anything that uses a sound anywhere between jazzy cleans to hard rock drive.

It has a point off for no standby, and a couple off for chasis design (more on this later).

I'm currently using an SG with PAF style humbuckers. I'm quite eclectic in what I play, but this amp works well for jazz, blues, rock, funk, reggae, surf(with reverb added externally), metal would need a pedal to drive it, but it snarls nicely on its own.

There's some background noise, but it's a valve amp and my bedroom is an EMI nightmare, what you gonna do? You can hear hiss at the start of "Voodoo Chile slight return" on Electric Ladyland, you can hear a phone ringing in "20th Century Boy" by T-Rex, so I think I can handle a tincy bit of background noise that's only audible in moments of silence.

I can get a variety of sounds, I got a pretty good woman tone out of it, somehow dragged Angus Young out of there, and I got this fantastic sound like Link Wray had on "Rumble", that was almost exact. Between the different controls and your pick attack you can get a lot of sounds.

The amp is more versatile than it's single channel nature would suggest, if you set it right you can go from sparkling clean to rock & roll grind just by digging in harder with the pick.

The sound is slightly boxy and stiff, but this is down to the speaker needing to be broken in, and the Celestion speaker is a fantastic improvement. I was willing to pay money for this with the HH Invader in it, but my one with a Celestion beats that hands down before I've even broken it in.

Well, I've not had it long, but as with all valve amps some things are bound to go wrong, prehaps moreso because the design of this amp though.

The EL84s have a pointy bit to dissipate heat, heat rises. So what do Laney do? They mount the EL84s upside down so not only is the pointy bit no longer doing anything but the heat rises up into the chasis and into the PCB which the valves are mounted on. Not very smart, but since it was cheap (like the budgie) I won't moan on and on about it.

I won't rate this section since it would be unfair to, but there is an inherant design flaw in how the heat is dissipated and this could lead to reliablity issues. Aside from that, it's quite sturdy.

No idea, never tried them. But their website's shit. There is absolutely no way for me to find out how to contact them through it, in fact, there is no direct link between Laney and the musician buying their product which I find a bit worrying.

Flying Pig Music on the other hand were very helpful in tracking down where the hell my amp had gotten to (apparently Laney were waiting for bloody handles!) and happily answered all my stupid questions. Top fellas. Since that good support was Flying Pig and not Laney however, I will keep the rating neutral.

I've been playing for 3 or 4 years now, my other gear consists of an SG, half a telecaster (work in progress), a Korg AX-1500G(cheap & cheerful multi-FX) and rather a lot of planet waves cable (it lives forever...apparently.)

I love that Laney created a cheap valve amp with an excellent tone. If this amp caught more publicity Marshall would never sell one of their "budget" amps again. I hate the silly design flaw in it though. Silly, silly flaw...

I tried several other amps before settling on this. The Peavey Classic 30 was a good amp, but more bits than I needed and was a bit loud to be useable at home. I tried a Line 6, good for what it is, but sounded artificial when trying to replicate valve tone (if you want valve tone, buy valve amps, it's not rocket science). And I tried the other version of this which is the Laney LC-15R. It was essentially the same amp, but with the addition of a speaker out, FX loop and reverb. Had the reverb been valve, not SS and the FX loop been absent I'd have gone for it, but I don't want a valve amp with non-valve parts in the circuit and an FX loop I'd never use.

I think if Laney redesigned the cab, they'd solve all it's short comings in one go. If they mounted the chasis to the "back wall" of the cab like on a Vox AC-30 the valves being horizontal would have a far greater top surfce area and no chasis above them which would vastly improve ventilation.The front would have no panel on, and the controls would be more accessable from when you're standing over it. When I thought this was going to come with an HH speaker I planned on making a cab like this and upgrading to a 12" speaker. The change in spec has made me reconsider this though, but it'd be a cool project anyhow.

In conclusion: Laney have made good valve tone accessible to the gigging musician on a budget. Good tone does not cost the Earth when you no where to look and don't need it to say "Vox" or "Marshall" on the front. If Laney had designed this thing how I said, it'd be an 11.

For a small combo, I give it a higher rating because of the addition of the master volume knob. 3 band eq is nice, but I don't think the eq is as versatile as I'd like it to be. Cuts and boosts are not as dramatic as in other small tube amps I've owned (including a few Fenders and an Orange). The presence boost button is good if you're playing at low volumes.

I'm playing a Fender Nashville Tele modded with a Seymour Duncan 59 mini-humbucker in the middle position. No pedals.

Let me say from the start that I love this amp. I found the stock sovtek tubes a little bland, so I replaced the 12ax7's with JJ Tesla tubes and heard a huge improvement. Cranked gain is now more dynamic and harmonically rich. Even at lower volumes, there is still a nice warmth and some tube compression. I rarely play without some tube overdrive, but clean, this amp does fine - maybe it's not as woody as an AC15, but it reminds me of that. Having the gain around 5 or 6 is what I like best. Later today I am going to replace the Sovtek el34's with a pair of Svetlana tubes. I actually like the stock HH speaker, though it can be a bit too mid-rangey. The bass is somewhat spongey, but it's not a bad speaker. I've tried a Jensen MOD speaker in it, and while that speaker is nice for clean stuff, it sounds absolutely horrible when overdriven.
My rating is based simply on sound - not on price-performance.

Never had a problem with any modern Laney amp I've owned, though an old AOR 30 watt combo eventually died on me.

I've thought about selling this amp and getting something more boutique, but every time I do, I go home and play it and realize that I love the LC15. I've owned other amps - some boutique - and this one is right up there with the rest. As a studio amp, you can't go wrong, especially considering the price.

I bought this new in around '97.
I bought it for home/practice. It sounds better if you turn up the volume and get the el84's working a bit. Its really a bit too loud for home use at higher volume settings. It came with chinese 12AX7's and russian EL84's. I liked the chinese tubes in this amp.

I used it mainly with a strat.
The amp has nice cleans and good overdriven sounds. Has that tube warmth too.
It has lots of gain, enough for whatever style you like, I think.

I gave this a 10 because I have never had a problem with it.
I don't use this for gigs, but if I were to, I would take along a backup. This amp seems to be cheaply made, with the tube sockets mounted directly on the PCB.
I have never really looked after this amp, because it was very cheap. (easy come, easy go) It has had a rough life and plenty of use, and its always worked fine. 10/10 for that.

N/A~never had to contact customer support.

This gets a 9/10 for being a cheap tube amp with 'proper' tube tone.
The best value for money amp I ever bought.

I bought this little amp used early 2004 from a college kid in TN without seeing and listening to it first. I believe it is an early model, according to Laney's tech support, probably made in mid/late 90s. This amp has a single channel, 15W tube power, regular EQ (bass/mid/high), two inputs (hi/low), bright switch, line out and a 10" internal HH invader speaker.

This is absolutely my main amp, I am using it regularly at club gigs, our band plays blues and west coast swing. The features of the amp suit me 100%, it is well powerful enough even for larger venues too.

Nothing is perfect -- the internal 10" speaker in an open back cab does not project those low frequencies from 11 or 12 gauge strings I use so I needed to built into the box two external speaker connetors: One that activates just an external speaker cab and another one that uses both the internal and external ones in series. At gigs I mainly use the amp with just an external closed back cab with 12" Celestion 70/80, cab made by Traynor in Canada. And, by the way, having two 8 ohm speakers in series DOES NOT DROP VOLUME INTO HALF!

Two ideas for Laney to lower manufacturing costs: Remove the Bright switch and the Low input Jack.

I use this amp mainly with semihollow and hollow body blues/jazz boxes with humbuckers (neck pu only) strung with 11s or 12s, typically with wound 3rd. The amp is not noisy at all, the sound is great (through external cab), tubes respond exactly the the way they should -- play harder and you'll get more sweet bluesy distortion. Keep front end gain low and power tubes hot, you'll get absolutely a great sound for blues & jazz that your audience will thank you for after the set!!

Have had the amp just over 6 months, bought used. I play it upside down, thanks to the info on this site. So far everything is OK with original (5 yr or older) tubes. However, the previous owner had played the amp in "correct position" and tubes are now really GLUED to the clips and sockets with hot glue from the main circuit board holding the caps etc. According to Laney, I can use a sharp knife to remove the glue for being able to remove and replace tubes.

Chassis, speaker, connectors, cables etc. perfect!

So far so good.

No longer under warranty -- I emailed to Laney support in the UK once for some technical advice -- received reply immediately. Great service. However, I do not know if they have a distributor with service in the US. However, due to fast response, my rating reflects to it.

Played for a long time (decades) -- and, as said this is my main amp now. I love it and it has more power and features than any true guitarist playing blues or swing ever needs. If you happen to use effect pedals you may want to look for something else -- this is a pure blues machine.

This is an update to my review just below.

I added the Jensen C10Q speaker and it is a HUGE improvement. much more clarity and control. also, a good way to run the amp is with the volume up pretty high (past half-way), then start with the gain all the way off and slowly bring it up to the desired level. roll back your volume knob a little too.

still going strong except for the input jacks. they are working but not very well. need to get them replaced.fixed soon.