Langner pre-amp

N

Nickelbagn

New member
Hand built by Todd Langner in the bay area. Does anybody remember these? My old bandmate used to have one and it absolutely crushed. How much would one of these go for nowadays? I haven't seen one listed in a long time but I'd be curious to pick one up.
 
Yeah, I owned two of them (DCP-1's) at one time and one of Todd's modded ADA MP1's. The first DCP had the cream green front and the second had the anodized front - that one was modded with an extra gain knob on the back. They were the last rack pre-amps I owned before moving to 5150's in the way back.

I paid 400 for both and less than that for the modded ADA whom I bought from the guy who hooked me up with Todd to get the pre-amps. Last I saw they are around 1500 plus if you can find them.
 
jabps said:
Yeah, I owned two of them (DCP-1's) at one time and one of Todd's modded ADA MP1's. The first DCP had the cream green front and the second had the anodized front - that one was modded with an extra gain knob on the back. They were the last rack pre-amps I owned before moving to 5150's in the way back.

I paid 400 for both and less than that for the modded ADA whom I bought from the guy who hooked me up with Todd to get the pre-amps. Last I saw they are around 1500 plus if you can find them.
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I had my ADA MP1 modded by Todd, as well. I was an idiot and gave it (for nothing) to Joey Z from Life of agony after I got back from touring with them
 
Always good to remember the old school master...wayy ahead of his time for sure. The Langner stuff is rare as hell these days. I'm always looking for any of the amps, preamps, parametric tube eq's...a friend just scored a monoblock poweramp that may have been a prototype. I miss my modded MP-1, it was killer. To answer your question, $1500-2k in this market. The first version preamp the Creator was more raw and if u can believe had more gain but was not built as well, not bad but that was the rumor. I wouldn't pass on one if it ever came up.
 
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Great preamp, agree with EM, Todd was way ahead of his time for sure. While everyone else was adding gain stages and tubes, Todd was the first to beef up the power supply to the tubes with a regulated DC power supply, so not only were the gain levels twice what everything else at the time was, they were very quiet at ridiculous gain levels.
Will still hold its own against anything currently in production, and still smokes most of the current stuff out there. The midrange control will saw your head off :D
They are compressed, but in a good way. The clean channel on the DCP1 is very usable, the gain channel is so much gain it dosent roll off and clean up like a lot of things. It does to an extent, but its better to just use the clean channel for cleans, it sounds much better than the gain channel rolled off. It gets thin and more brittle (for lack of a better term) sounding. The gain channel also gets thicker as the gain goes up, which I love. Not everything will do that and some do the opposite..
 
It's funny this post came up I just managed to re-secure my Langner JMP amp. Dave Hopkins from Pandora amps, sold it back to me and it arrived in the mail this week. I say its like thrash metal in a box. THe preamp section is something else on those things. It's not a sound for everyone but Todd Langners stuff does what it's intended to do really well.
 
Exo-metal said:
Always good to remember the old school master...wayy ahead of his time for sure. The Langner stuff is rare as hell these days. I'm always looking for any of the amps, preamps, parametric tube eq's...a friend just scored a monoblock poweramp that may have been a prototype. I miss my modded MP-1, it was killer. To answer your question, $1500-2k in this market. The first version preamp the Creator was more raw and if u can believe had more gain but was not built as well, not bad but that was the rumor. I wouldn't pass on one if it ever came up.
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I can confirm that the first version was not as well built. The back chassis was just thin metal, honestly it felt like tin. That said it sounded incredible. Lots of gain, lots of cut. When I ordered the newer version with the anodized green front plate from Todd I had him install an additional gain pot on the back (why, hell I don't know now lol), plus the chassis was alot more beefy. However that pre-amp didn't sound as good as the original. In fact Michael Nielsen's youtube video's is a great example of how that second one sounded. Still sounded good though, had more beef, not as much cut or sweetness. Unfortunately I had promised to sell my first one to another guitarist upon arrival of the new one. At that point I went back to the modded ADA which sounded fantastic as well. I had both those in my rack until I switched to the block 5150's when they first came out. What's funny is I honestly do not remember what I did with the second Langner preamp. I cannot remember who I sold that too. I sold the ADA back to the guy I had originally purchased it from. At that point I left the preamp/poweramp thing behind.

I had gone through alot of preamps during my flipping back in those days as I was full on rack at that point, and of all I went through Todd's stuff sounded the best to me.
 
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I have one and it's a beast, more gain than you'll ever use: pair it with delay and you have sustain for days: it has one of the best lead sounds out of my amps.
It's a two channel preamp with a boosted lead channel but there's a pot on the back that you can use to also have a crunch sound.

It's a very angry and unique sound, kind of '80s thrash metal tone, plenty of mids but not so low on the bottom end. On the other hand it's not so flexible for other than heavy rock or metal IMO. At extreme settings it reminds me of Testament first albums sounds or so.
Clean sound is OK. I remember that someone told me that he was literally tearing up the Bogner Fish but I don't remember in what context.

Very well made. I love the big white letters on seafoam faceplate.

 
Its the exact tone of the Viscous Rumors albums, especially the first one. The above vid would have sounded better if he just ran it into a power amp and miked it up. It seems to sound a little congested at wicked gain levels. Might be the way he recorded it. Maybe that one sounds that way, I had to go through several V1 tubes to find one that held up to being pushed that hard, a bunch of them I tried would go full microphonic and motorboat with the gain past around 2:00-2:30. I rarely ever run it past 1:30, its sooooo much gain :inlove::inlove:
Great stuff
 
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JTyson said:
Its the exact tone of the Viscous Rumors albums, especially the first one. The above vid would have sounded better if he just ran it into a power amp and miked it up. It seems to sound a little congested at wicked gain levels. Might be the way he recorded it. Maybe that one sounds that way, I had to go through several V1 tubes to find one that held up to being pushed that hard, a bunch of them I tried would go full microphonic and motorboat with the gain past around 2:00-2:30. I rarely ever run it past 1:30, its sooooo much gain :inlove::inlove:
Great stuff
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Agreed, it would have sounded better running it properly. Still fairly close approximation. With my first Langner pre, my main power amp at the time was the Peavey Stereo Classic, what a beast of a power amp. 8 Sylvania 6L6's with the depth and Resonance per channel. Was freaking monstrous sounding running stereo through two 4x12's. I should have kept that first pre-amp and the modded ADA.
 
jabps said:
Agreed, it would have sounded better running it properly. Still fairly close approximation. With my first Langner pre, my main power amp at the time was the Peavey Stereo Classic, what a beast of a power amp. 8 Sylvania 6L6's with the depth and Resonance per channel. Was freaking monstrous sounding running stereo through two 4x12's. I should have kept that first pre-amp and the modded ADA.
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Mine must be early, it has the tin chassis although Ive never had a problem with it. It never leaves our studio or travels anywhere. I run it through a Marshall 100/100 power amp with 8 matched SED Winged C's that have been in it since I got it from Psychodave here on the forum years ago.
Yeah, that thing through 2 or 4 412's cranked is a thing to behold :shocked:
Ive never heard it with 6L6's, I bet it sounds great with those too. I have heard it through a slightly modded Soldano power amp that had been changed to KT88's a buddy has and it sounded great but had a lot of hum, we found one of the power tubes was no longer matched up and was mismatched enough to induce the hum, but I never heard it through the same power section later after he had resolved the issue. He sold it before we could race test that again....
I should have bought it from him, but the Marshall 100/100 with the voicing set to aggressive really delivers the goods..
 
So for me one of the biggest misfortunes in this little guitar, and gear world we're all in is that Todd Langner never really got the chance to put out that much product. I think if more people could hear his work in person he would've been a bigger name in the gear industry. Maybe even heard some langner stuff on more modern recordings, because those amps could scream. I know not even a lot of us here have played an actual preamp by him. I've been looking for like 3 years for one to no avail. I'm glad there are sites like rig-talk, and communities around to keep his name going, and his gear on peoples minds.

I heard he made a 4x12 cabs made were something amazing as well. i'll probably never find one, but dude seemed way ahead of his time.
 
I noticed in that vid where he's going through the tone controls on the gain channel, when he jacks the midrange control, its about what you would expect on just about anything. The mid control on this one seems to have 3 times the boost of the unit in the vid. Anyone else experience that? This one literally turns into a chainsaw. Im not aware of changes to the tone circuits through the different revisions, Ive never heard anyone speak of it, but there has to be some. The contour controls seem to do very little on mine, I can barely tell a small difference. The bass and treble are very effective, but the frikking midrange on this one will pummel you. Its so much that it sounds like you killed the bass and treble, but its still there, its just buried by midrange..
I only know the one I have (as do most of us) but at this point I think there were more changes to the revisions than we thought. We know some got the Hyper mod later, but now Im thinking the changes were more sweeping than just gain changes
Just an observation
 
frontline205 said:
So for me one of the biggest misfortunes in this little guitar, and gear world we're all in is that Todd Langner never really got the chance to put out that much product. I think if more people could hear his work in person he would've been a bigger name in the gear industry. Maybe even heard some langner stuff on more modern recordings, because those amps could scream. I know not even a lot of us here have played an actual preamp by him. I've been looking for like 3 years for one to no avail. I'm glad there are sites like rig-talk, and communities around to keep his name going, and his gear on peoples minds.

I heard he made a 4x12 cabs made were something amazing as well. i'll probably never find one, but dude seemed way ahead of his time.
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Agreed
Ive looked at those cabs a lot and thought about trying to build a clone, but it turns out that Im lazy:aww:
The whole point according to the sales literature Todd put out was there was no phase cancellation spots for miking it up, the sweet spot was huge. I don't know how that played out in practice, Ive never seen/heard one in person, but history would likely have shown that somebody else would have done it if it was that effective. The patent he held on it has long since expired. I have a copy of the sales brochures somewhere on the different items he made.
Nowdays there are quite a few high gainers that will get you to similar tones, but at the time, Todds stuff was killing most of the offerings out there. A lot of the methods he used to get that kind/quality of gain have been taken up by a lot of builders and put into their designs, wether they would admit it is a whole different conversation....
I got one of the first JCM900's shipped to the states, I was very excited about it but it turns out that the 4500 High Gain Dual Reverbs sucked ass and I was hugely disappointed. I called my guy in Tampa and he gave me Todds number. I called him and spoke with him at length about what he would do, but he told me right up front he had not seen the new 900 circuits. He said it should take less than a week and would cost 275.00 to do the mod. He called me after he got it and told me it was gonna take a lot more time to go in and work through due to the solid state boost stages in the amp, but he would do it for the same price since neither of us new what he was getting into. So 2 months later he called me and said he had it where he wanted it and was shipping it back, and when I first cranked it up I was astonished at how good it was. This was well before he made any of his own stuff, he was strictly modding amps for people at this time. I still have that amp, its THE baddest fucking 900 on the face of the earth. It may well be the only 900 he ever modded, he said it was way too much work to get there compared to all the other Marshalls :LOL:
 
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Always wanted to try one but never had a chance.
A friend of mine owned one for a few days a couple years ago, he loved everything about it except the low-end was loose, according to him…
He owns a Wiz MTL so he’s a bit spoiled.
 
JTyson said:
Mine must be early, it has the tin chassis although Ive never had a problem with it. It never leaves our studio or travels anywhere. I run it through a Marshall 100/100 power amp with 8 matched SED Winged C's that have been in it since I got it from Psychodave here on the forum years ago.
Yeah, that thing through 2 or 4 412's cranked is a thing to behold :shocked:
Ive never heard it with 6L6's, I bet it sounds great with those too. I have heard it through a slightly modded Soldano power amp that had been changed to KT88's a buddy has and it sounded great but had a lot of hum, we found one of the power tubes was no longer matched up and was mismatched enough to induce the hum, but I never heard it through the same power section later after he had resolved the issue. He sold it before we could race test that again....
I should have bought it from him, but the Marshall 100/100 with the voicing set to aggressive really delivers the goods..
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Sweet man, glad you still have that pre-amp. Yeah the chassis is kinda flimsy and I never had issue with mine either but damn that thing sounded great. As I said above I only sold that one because I made the deal before getting the other one, had to keep my word even after I A/B'd them. Overall that pre cut a little better, and had a sweeter response. No idea why, maybe Todd had changed a few components or something. I had him add an additional gain control on the back of the pre to dial in even more gain lol.

Back then I was all about 6L6's and for the last nearly 15 years much prefer 34's. Would have loved to heard that pre through 34's.
 
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JTyson said:
I got one of the first JCM900's shipped to the states, I was very excited about it but it turns out that the 4500 High Gain Dual Reverbs sucked ass and I was hugely disappointed. I called my guy in Tampa and he gave me Todds number. I called him and spoke with him at length about what he would do, but he told me right up front he had not seen the new 900 circuits. He said it should take less than a week and would cost 275.00 to do the mod. He called me after he got it and told me it was gonna take a lot more time to go in and work through due to the solid state boost stages in the amp, but he would do it for the same price since neither of us new what he was getting into. So 2 months later he called me and said he had it where he wanted it and was shipping it back, and when I first cranked it up I was astonished at how good it was. This was well before he made any of his own stuff, he was strictly modding amps for people at this time. I still have that amp, its THE baddest fucking 900 on the face of the earth. It may well be the only 900 he ever modded, he said it was way too much work to get there compared to all the other Marshalls :LOL:
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Cool story man.

Modding is actually how I got in contact with Todd. Couple of friends of mine where into modding amps back in the day and they got connected to Todd through the modded ADA. They were always modding the typical Marshalls and stuff. In fact they would mod those Yamaha T100's back in the day and they were amazing. They hooked me up with Todd to get both my pre-amps. I think I still have his brochure as well somewhere around.
 
I've had the chance to study much of Todd L's work. He was a genius when it comes to tube circuits.
Here are the old brochures
The Big Hairy Guitar video is of an older version of the preamp before he designed the PCB. It has the tubes on separate board laying sideways rather than vertical

Todd
 

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