Laney has expanded its Lionheart Foundry series of solid-state guitar amps with the high-wattage Supertop head, an amp with an old-school name, old-school aesthetic, but with a bunch of modern appointments under the hood.
The Supertop is a 120-watt, twin channel amp head that comes equipped with Laney’s proprietary LAIR IR tech, onboard effects, and ships with matching 2x12 and 4x12 guitar speaker cabinets, both loaded with 12” drivers designed by HH Acoustics.
As with its siblings in the Lionheart lineage, the Supertop is bedecked in blue vinyl with a wheat-coloured grille clothe. It looks tidy.
“The Foundry Series takes the power, dynamism and response of our acclaimed tube amp ranges and forges them into creative, affordable, high-quality solid-state amplifiers that are practical, feature-laden, portable and a lot of fun,” says James Laney. “This powerful head is perfect for home practice, studio sessions, rehearsals and live performance and to top it all off – just like its tube-driven cousins – it looks classy too.”
The Supertop has a lot of the same features as the 60-watt combos that were released around this time last year.
The footswitchable boost feature, adjustable via its red-for-danger chickenhead dial, was a very cool touch – not least because it effectively makes this a three channel amplifier, with one channel for your cleans, the other for overdrive, activate the boost for a de facto lead channel.
The tone stack is interesting because not only do we have a 3-band EQ serving both channels, there is a global Tone control for shaping your electric guitar sound post-EQ, and a Bright/Dark switch that could come in handy when switching between humbucker-equipped guitars and single-coils.
There is power scaling to take it from full-power to under a single watt for bedroom playing.
The LAIR (Laney Advanced Impulse Response) technology deploys and if As for your onboard IRs, you have a sliding switch on the back of the amp to choose between the Laney GS112 1x12 and GS412 4x12, both captured in-house by Laney’s technicians. Helpfully, there is an XRL output for sending your signal direct to mixing desk or DAW, and there’s a mini-jack headphones output for silent practice.
You also get an effects loop, an aux-in, and there is another input for a footswitch to toggle the reverb on and off.
Now, the effects. There is a vintage-voiced tremolo, a Spiral Chorus and Modulation inspired by the circuit of Laney’s Black Country Customs Spiral Array chorus pedal – as used by Andy Timmons. This does chorusing as standard but also “down a drain pipe” flanging. The reverb is a another BCC deep cut, with the algorithm taken from the BCC Secret Path Spring Reverb pedal.
The Lionheart Foundry Supertop is out now, price TBC. See Laney Amplification for more details.
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