Ever since selling my EVH 5150 III, I’ve been considering adding one back to the stable. My main concern was that hollowness to the mids of the EVH amps, despite adding some nice clarity to the notes and many reviews online citing the EVH as a clearly better amp than the old 6505/5150 I/II, I just had to find out for myself.
So I worked out a deal on this 6505. I’ve heard the standard 6505/5150 models are a bit more aggressive and have a little better drive tones than the 6505+/5150 II’s, so I went for this model instead. I’m not sure how true that is, the more I learn about it the more I think it’s just internet hearsay, but since I don’t own a 6505+ I don’t know for sure.
Any mids the EVH was missing, this amp has an excess of. This is one of the thickest, fullest sounding amps I’ve ever had and it really needs to have the mids scooped out a little to make it more clear sounding. Much like the EVH, it also has an extreme amount of gain and gets very saturated sounding.
The rhythm channel can be set clean or crunch mode, but crunch is essentially just another high gain channel. The gain maxed in crunch mode feels close to the gain around 5-6 on the lead channel, but really the lead channel isn’t really usable with the gain set higher than that anyway. This would be great if these channels had separate EQ’s, so you could dial in two different high gain sounds - but this is not the case. Even though the rhythm channel has a bright switch as well (which affects both the clean or crunch modes), it’s not a big enough difference to make it sound much different from the lead channel.
Ultimately the best way to set this amp up is to dial in the lead channel to taste, sacrificing everything for that perfect lead tone, then set the rhythm channel to clean and just deal with the way it sounds - with the tiny bit of flexibility of the bright switch on or off.
I’m sure the 6505+ would do the two high gain sound thing much better than this - but I wonder what I’d have to give up as far as the lead channel to do so. I suppose I’ll have to find out someday. For now, this is a killer amp and I find I like it a lot more than the EVH 5150 III on the lead channel, but I do miss the separate EQ’s that amp had for its channels.
