Laney IRT-Studio

The IRT series is one of the newest lines in the Laney range. These all-tube machines are designed primarily for fans of harder genres, but you can easily get a nice clean sound, as well as live rock distortion and feel at home with them in the waters of metal hi-gain.

This particular model has 15 watts of power, thanks to two EL84 tubes. In the preamp you will find three ECC83 tubes. It is possible to use the input, with which the output will be just 1 Watt, which is ideal for home practice, or use a "dummy load" for completely silent recording. Power can be delivered to 8 or 16 Ohm speaker loads.

On the front panel you will find the input for your instrument on the far right. The potentiometers are placed here in two rows, the upper one used to control the third, solo, channel, and the lower one to adjust the first, clean, and second, accompaniment, channels. The bottom row, then, contains Clean Volume, Rhythm Gain for adjusting the distortion of the second channel, a common 3-band EQ and Volume. On the top row, there's Pre-Boost, Lead Gain, a 3-band EQ and also Volume. The Pre-Boost can be switched by footswitch and the EQ potentiometer are push/pull to shift the function frequency or gain. In the master section, in addition to the Tone and Reverb controls, there are also special Dynamics potentiometers, which has a big effect on the bass behaviour.

As for the rear panel of the unit, all the necessary connectors are located here. First of all, there is a jack for connecting speakers, followed by inputs for connecting footswitches controlling boost, reverb and channels, an effects loop, DI outputs, mp3 input and a USB interface, thanks to which the IRT can be used as an audio interface and directly connected to a computer for recording.

For a relatively simple but very capable machine, the Laney IRT is very capable. You definitely won't get lost with this monster, no matter what kind of music you play.