Review : Laney LA-Studio Amplifier
Hey folks!
After just over a year using a REVV D20 for DI work leveraging the built-in Two Notes Torpedo, I have finally made a change. As a recording amp, the D20 was quite decent, but when playing through a simple Fender Hot Rod Deluxe 1 x 12 cabinet, I did not care for it. Of course, none of the Torpedo cabinet captures are active when playing through a real cabinet so as a preamp/poweramp head, the sound did not inspire me.
I was down at Cosmo Music in Richmond Hill, Ontario early in the week and Paul who builds their demo sections and I were talking about a number of things. As I was leaving he asked me to wait as I needed to see something that had just come in. He pulled from a box the Laney LA-Studio.
Laney LA-Studio
The LA-Studio is a head unit built for studio recording. What I mean is that it does not have a ton of power, but it is an all tube head. In regular mode, it puts out 3 watts of all tube power and in Brake mode, drops to 0.1 watt. Before you start thinking, what good is that, I can tell you that in real world use, 3 watts of AB tube power is quite loud. I have already noted that I rarely run my 5 watt Tone King Gremlin past halfway without engaging the built in Ironman attenuator. In fact, in my recording space and for practicing at home, I can raise the gain on the amp in the 0.1 watt setting and it is still moving air through that 1 x 12 cabinet.
This alone would make it really useful to me. But there’s more.
The LA-Studio also has a full Torpedo Captor built right in so I can run the head direct into my UA Apollo using an XLR cable for silent in the room recording. Like every Torpedo I have encountered, there are six presets that can be stored as available via a switch, and more can be loaded and accessed by the excellent Torpedo Remote application.
Black Country Customs
When you get the amp, you notice immediately that the box says Black Country Customs. This is the company that makes the Laney products. They are based in the Black Country area of England, basically in the Birmingham area. The LA-Studio, like the other LA series amps are handcrafted in the UK.
The LA-Studio in Detail
The Laney LA-Studio is a standard design head built to sit on top of a cabinet. It is not as wide as the 100 watt Laney head, or either of my Marshall 100 watt heads, more the width of a vertical 2 x 12 cabinet. This means lighter and requiring of less space. Power is AC.
On the front is a very classy looking and readily readable face. There is the power switch (there is no standby), the brake switch which when ON engages the attenuator to drop the output to 0.1 watts, Presence, Bass, Mid, Treble and Gain. There are four inputs in two pairs. The pair labelled Bass have High and Low input options (think of these as the Rhythm inputs) and the pair labelled Treble also have high and low options. For those of us who grew up watching players jumper the inputs, that was a very early question that I answer in the Performance section of this article.
The rear panel is very clean. There is the AC power connection of course and two speaker cabinet connections, one for 8 ohm cabs and one for 16 ohm cabs. You can only use one at a time which makes sense. The Two Notes section has three areas, one for the MIDI in and out, one for USB which I will touch on further on and one for the DI out. The MIDI section is as expected and is used to use MIDI commands to control the built in Torpedo. The DI out section has a ground lift, and an XLR balanced line out to connect to your interface. There is a 3.5mm headphone jack that gives you the output AFTER the Two Notes cabinet simulation and is ideal for evaluating the different cabinet options. There is a selector for six presets that you can configure or use the defaults, and while the amp can store many more cabinet emulations, only six are available through the switch. Then there is a level control for the DI out and a Peak indicator LED. Turn the Level knob as far up as you can without clipping.
I understand why the control and the peak indicator are on the back of the amp from a cosmetic presentation perspective, but it would be more convenient in my opinion if they were up front.
Performance
Despite being only three watts, this critter gets loud! I am well aware that watts are watts, but the volume of a tube amp and a solid state amp with the same wattage rating is vastly different. The LA-Studio at 3 watts utterly destroys my THR-30II at 30 watts. This is no surprise to anyone who has played both types of amplifier. My superb Fender Tonemaster Deluxe Reverb in blonde uses a 100 watt Class D amplifier to achieve the same volume as the original 22 watt tube amp.
At home for practice I typically use the Brake setting on. This sets the output to 0.1 watt and I assure you it gets loud enough for fun and to annoy family members. Of course by using headphones and unplugging your speaker cabinet, it can also be completely silent. Since there is a built in Two Notes attenuator, you can run this head without a cabinet attached.
The front controls are large and easy to see. The taper on them is excellent and delivers the variance that serious players demand. Of course you can dime all the controls if that’s your thing.
As with all tube amps of this type of design, there is a background noise floor. It is exacerbated when using single coils that are inherently noisy and in that case you might want to put a noise gate in front of the input.
I found the amplifier to be very pedal friendly. It’s a simple and classic design, so there is no effects loop. When I was recording, I went direct to the amp with only a tuner in the volume pedal tuner out. I am very cognizant of noise from pedals and while I try to pick pedals that don’t add a bunch of noise, it can just happen regardless. Any noise is mostly noticeable with vintage designed single coils with the amplifier gain ready for overdrive and the guitar volume turned down. Raise the volume control on the guitar and you enter into amplifier compression and the noise is less noticeable. I love the sound of this amplifier, but be clear, that there is not a ton of headroom here, particularly when in Brake On mode.
When I was ready to do my recording of the samples, I disconnected the speaker cabinet and used the Two Notes Torpedo Remote on the machine where the interface was.
For those wanting to know if you can jump the inputs, you can and I have and you’ll probably do the same.
The image above which is from the LA-Studio manual gives a good diagram of how the recording was set up. I use a UA Apollo instead of Scarlett and in this recording was using a Windows 11 machine running Presonus Studio One, but the idea is the same. XLR out from the LA-Studio to the XLR input on the UA Apollo and the computer connected via USB cable to the amplifier so Torpedo Remote could control the Two Notes section in the amp.
My unit was a repack I am pretty sure as there was only the amp and the power cord in the box. I downloaded the manual from Black Country Customs. I also had an existing USB2 to USB A cable from use with the REVV D20. I do not know if the amp ships with a USB A cable but if it doesn’t that’s a shame to inconvenience a buyer by not including a $5 cable. Maybe one does come with the amp but there was not one in the box.
Torpedo Remote
The LA-Studio comes from the factory with the six preset slots preloaded. Three slots use the Laney LA412 cabinet and three slots use the Laney LA212 cabinet. The settings use different “rooms”. The first two are set in a dry studio small room. The third is the 4 x 12 in a medium sized hall. The fourth is the 2 x 12 in a large concert hall. The fifth is a 4 x 12 with a giant plate reverb and the sixth is a 2 x 12 in a massive cathedral. I have used Two Notes cabinets for some time both for direct recording and with their Wall of Sound plugin that gives you access in post production to all of the cabinets that you have licensed.
To really get the leverage, you should install the free Torpedo Remote app available for Mac and for Windows. You can see what it looks like in the screen shot of the setup used for my sample recordings.
In this example, you see that I am recording in Studio A using a Laney LA412 cabinet. I have set Mic A to be a Shure SM57 slightly off axis and backed off the amplifier a bit. Mic B is a Royer 121 Ribbon in tight and on axis. It is my opinion that the Two Notes microphones are excellent representations of the real thing. You can also see that the Torpedo Remote includes a learning noise gate and a power amp simulator. I have the gate turned off, but have turned on the power amp emulator for push pull EL34 tubes in Pentode mode. Think LA100SM 100 watts. Torpedo Remote incorporates a tuner indicated by the tuning fork and three post FX options for EQ, Enhancer and Reverb. For my sample, I left them all off and did any work of this type in post processing. Torpedo Remote is very easy to use and by going to the Preset Manager option, you can select which presets are loaded to the amplifier and in what order, so if you want to change what preset is on each of the rotary switch positions on the back of the amp, this is where you do it.
The amplifier that you have is linked to your own Two Notes account. To register the LA-Studio, I connected it to the computer by USB and launched Torpedo Remote. The amplifier was found and with one click it was registered to my Two Notes account that I was already signed into. Once registration was completed, my account was updated with cabinet emulations that are included with the LA-Studio. While I already owned some of them from other projects, there was no pain or futzing around to make it happen.
The cabinets that you receive as part of the Two Notes function are ;
• Laney LA412
• Laney LA212
• Brit 65C (Marshall 4x12)
• GreenArtO (Marshall 4x12)
• Free Rock (VHT 4x12)
• Eggbeater (Egnater 2x12)
• Radcat 25W (Badcat 4x12)
• Voice Modrn (Vox AC30)
• Watt FanO (Hiwatt 2x12)
• Tanger 30C (Orange 2x12)
When you register you get these two additional cabinets
• SilverJen (Fender Twin with Jensen Speakers)
• Calif StdC (Mesa 4x12 recto)
Thus you have effectively bought a single head that can be “played” through ten different cabinets.
Example Recording
In this three part sample, I wanted to try both a cleanish and crunch session.
I did not change any of the settings on the front of the amplifer which were Brake On, Presence 7, Bass 3, Middle 4, Gain 4 1/2 and plugged into Treble input 1. I also made no changes to the settings as shown above in Torpedo remote
In the first segment, I used the neck pickup of a PRS CE 24 in coil tapped mode with the volume at 5 and the tone at 5. As you can hear, it’s very nicely bright and clean and has a good amount of headroom. In post processing I applied a Waves X-Noise noise reduction plugin on the input directly. In a bus for this section, I placed a UAD NEVE 1073 Legacy Preamp, with a small volume reduction and all the eq set flat. I actually used the same NEVE 1073 plugin for all three segments. I like the sound of this plugin a great deal. I find it superb for electric guitar as it warms things up very subtly without changing the overall tonality to any great extent. In this segment I also added a UA Pure Plate Reverb at about 60% wet and short reverb delay, a low cut at 90 Hz and no predelay.
In the second segment, I switched to the bridge pickup in humbucker mode with the guitar volume turned up to eight. I have found that when nailed at ten, humbuckers get a bit wooly, so I always roll them off a bit. I used the same NEVE preamp, but removed the Plate Reverb and replaced it with the UA Galaxy Tape Echo. The Galaxy Tape Echo used to be called the Space Echo but had a name change a while ago. If you’ve ever used an original Roland Space Echo, you know exactly how to use this. The settings were head two at 284ms delay with Echo volume (mix) at halfway, echo treble rolled off a bit and everything else flat. Reverb in the Galaxy was not engaged. I chose a “new” tape loop for this segment.
The third segment is the same guitar settings as in segment two, with the same NEVE preamp. Here I used the UA Capitol Chambers reverb starting with a John Paterno Jazz preset and then set the mics to be SM80s in room layout 2 with 50ms predelay and medium decay. I set the Mix at 15%.
Finally all tracks and busses went to a final bus with a Teletronix LA-2A Silver Compressor with Peak Reduction at 42 and Gain at 40. The Teletronix LA-2A is my favourite general use compressor. The original is an optical compressor and I find them to be very smooth and very transparent. All of my compressor pedals are optical compressors except one which actually uses a tube.
I understand that the prelude to the audio file is quite long, longer than the samples in fact, but I believe in being clear about what has been done in pre and post processing.
In Summary
I’m really very taken with the Laney LA-Studio. It sounds as I expected a classic British tube amp to sound. It’s more suited to being overdriven than clean, but I think it does a fine job clean too. When cranked, there is not a ton of headroom, similar to a Marshall or an Orange, but with mid volume at the amp and the guitar, it’s really crisp without ever being ice pick in the earhole. When it comes to playing with a cabinet, I much prefer it to the REVV D20 that I traded in for the Laney.
When we come to recording, as both amps used a built in Two Notes Torpedo they are not dissimilar in that regard, however I prefer the preamp section of the Laney to the preamp section of the D20. That’s my personal opinion, you may have a different perspective on that. I find the Laney to be a solid pedal platform and while it can be a bit noisy with vintage wind single coils (ie not noiseless versions) any noise is easily dealt with using a gate, and the Laney is no different than any other Class AB tube amplifier.
This is highly recommended and at $1299 CAD MAP, I think it’s a great value. Thanks kindly for reading and until next time, peace!
