Head to head
Which lunchbox is packing the best features?
All four lunchboxes are very wellbehaved electrically, with low hiss and hum levels making them just as much fun for low-volume use at home as they are when plugged in and ripping with a band. For out-and-out rock, the thick, multilayered drive of the EVH 5150 is really hard to beat – it gets the legendary brown sound and retains definition up to around three-quarters on the masters, with a clean channel that can be wound into a decent crunch. The Blue channel’s harmonic-laden gain is simply nuts and great fun.
The Orange’s extra power and clever channel EQs make it superb for proper stages where extra headroom and definition is important, while the quad-EL84 power stage really gets your point over, and the two channels provide the best pick of classic and modern Brit-rock sounds. It’s a deceptively simple and lightningfast amp to dial in; for live work where you need
For out-and-out rock, the EVH 5150’s thick, multilayered drive is hard to beat
a great sound in seconds with minimal fiddling around, it’s sonically in a different league.
Peavey’s 6505 MH impressed us with its feature list, and in use, those features all work really well. Being able to footswitch the effects loop adds significant versatility for live use, as does the addition of a third crunch mode between clean and lead channels. If you like reverb, the 6505 stands out because it’s the only one of this quartet to include it. Hughes & Kettner’s Deluxe 20 sits at the other extreme to their jaw-dropping GrandMeister 36, but in many ways it’s just as usable, with a great recording output and four sound options that comfortably cover most genres, although for serious metal it’s not quite as extreme as Peavey’s 6505. Sonically, the Deluxe 20 punches above its weight, with tones that compete well with amps costing almost twice as much; not a bad thing, because compared with the other three, the H&K is the most expensive by far.