EVH 5150 III LBX

EVH 5150 III LBX £450
Sound like Eddie without breaking the bank – or your back
MOST
amp makers
offer a
metal-cased lunchbox amp these
days, but EVH has been slow to
join the party – until now. With one
of guitardom’s most enviable user
lists – including, of course, Mr Van
Halen himself – any new addition
to the EVH range is signifi cant, but
it’s particularly true at this price.
While the 5150 LBX is small,
there’s no compromise in the
construction or circuitry. It’s
built to a very high standard,
with a robust printed circuit
board holding most of the
components, and a tough steel
chassis supporting two oversized
transformers. Cosmetically, it looks
the business, with a powder-
coated EVH ‘stripe’ logo fi xed to
the front of the perforated steel
cover, and a smart white control
panel with ivory chicken-head
knobs. The 5150’s preamp section
is all-valve, with no less than fi ve
12AX7s generating a huge
onslaught of rock and metal
overdrive tones. The designers
have opted to do away with the
clean channel and keep the blue
(crunch) and red (lead) channels
everyone uses, so the smart front
panel is clear and easy to
understand, with controls for gain,
low, mid and high EQ, volume and
presence. There’s a single input
jack, a small push-button switch
to change channels, and a large
mains indicator light. The rear
panel has mains and standby
switches together with a quarter-
power option that knocks the
output down to around four watts.
It’s surprisingly fully featured for a
lunchbox amp, with a series effects
loop, jack for the single button
footswitch, resonance control to
tweak the 5150’s low-end
response, and a single speaker
outlet with an impedance switch.
Overall, it’s good-looking,
well-built and ready to rock.
We try out the 5150 LBX with its
matching 2x12 extension cab and
a variety of different guitars –
Strats, Les Pauls and a Floyd-
equipped Strat with PAF-style
humbucker. Even though the LBX
lacks a proper clean channel and
shares its controls, there’s more
than enough range on the blue
‘crunch’ mode to cover most needs,
going up to the kind of sustain that
most amp builders would give
you for a lead sound. Activate
the red ‘Full Burn’ mode, and
the overdrive and distortion is
borderline insanity, with so much
gain that even the weediest
single-coil pickups turn into
high-gain solo monsters.
Use the presence and rear-
mounted resonance controls to
dial in the LBX’s power amp, and
you can easily nail the almost over
the top ‘brown’ sound that’s an
integral part of Eddie’s style and
technique, making pinched
harmonics, extended trem
dive-bombs and legato tapping
almost too easy. But the LBX isn’t a
one-trick pony – back off the gain,
add a little midrange and you can
get 80s Brit-rock as well as cleaner,
70s classic rock tones, too, and a
pretty good ‘nearly clean’ sound by
rolling off the guitar’s volume in
blue mode. Plugged into its
matching 2x12 cabinet, there’s
It comprehensively blows
other lunchbox heads away
Photography: Adam Gasson
EVH 5150 III LBX GEAR
AUGUST 2016 73
TYPE: All-valve preamp
and power amp head
OUTPUT: 15W, switchable to 4W
VALVES: 5x 12AX7, 2x EL84
CONTROLS: Gain, low, mid, high,
volume, presence, resonance
SOCKETS: Input, footswitch,
effects loop send/return, output
WEIGHT: 7kg
DIMENSIONS: [HxWxD]
180 x 325 x 160mm
CONTACT: Fender GBI
01342 331700 www.evhgear.com
AT A GLANCE
LESS IS MORE
AMAZINGLY, this
deceptively simple
control layout is all you
need to dial in the 5150
LBX’s huge arsenal of
rock guitar tone
SWITCHED ON
R O U N D the back, heavy-
duty mains, standby and
quarter-power switches work
with a satisfying clunk that
feels like they’ll last forever.
The low-power option is great
for recording
BIG BOTTOM
T H E rear panel’s resonance control
varies the LBX’s low-end response,
crucial to matching the speaker cabinet.
This is one of the secrets to getting
Eddie’s ‘brown’ sound
TGR282.gear_lead.indd 73 6/16/16 11:58 AM