Laney LA100BL 50th Anniversary Guitar Amplifier Head (100 Watts)

The Laney LA100BL & LA412 are a faithful, hand built, point-to-point wired, reissue of the original amp and cab Tony used at the beginning of his Black Sabbath career. Everything in the amp is as it was in the original. From the hand drilled turret board, the parts list, the authentic hand wiring process and the original box frame styled output transformer. It is as close to the real thing as buying an original LA100BL.

"The driving force behind the project wasn't simply just the company's 50th anniversary on the horizon, but also the fact that Tony Iommi was starting to think about gearing up for Back Sabbath's final world tour known as "The End".

The set list for the final tour was to pull material from the whole of Black Sabbath catalogue and Tony had the idea that it would be a fitting way to end his Black Sabbath touring career the same way he began it - playing a Laney LA100BL.

So we started talking about the possibility of building Tony a reissue of the 1969 amplifier that he used on the original Black Sabbath release. First thing we needed to do was to set about listening to these old amps.

Laney have a small collection of "historic" amps but they needed a few more for comparisons. So Laney set about scouring the relevant sources for original LA100BL's for us to work with.

Laney met some very dedicated and immensely interesting people along the way and managed to source a few examples of LA100BL's we were after and began to put them through their paces. It's not… read more often that you get the time to listen to "Old" amps in detail so the fact that we had to listen to old SUPERGROUP era amps was a real pleasure.

There is not doubt that these amps have a sound unique to them - a subtle undertone to the note played. A sound, which with hindsight, was a very unique sound and something intrinsic to the sound of the early Sabbath recordings. When you play an LA100BL you quickly hear why it is so special.

The key sonic feature of the amplifier is definitely a musical undertone introduced to the original signal by the output transformer. A great amount of time and care was taken in re-designing and engineering the output transformer, making sure it replicated the unique sound of the original Partridge transformer used in 1969. If you ever get the chance to listen to an original LA100BL from the late 60's you will hear just how faithful the reissue transformer is - the new LA100BL captures this sound with 100% authenticity.

WHO ARE BLACK COUNTRY CUSTOMS?

Black Country Customs are a group of highly skilled amp technicians who have 50 years of continuous tube manufacturing heritage behind them.

Born out of the desire to design and build products in a way they used to be "back in the day", with the attention to detail that comes from the physical process of taking the time to design and build something by hand.

The aim of the journey is not always to arrive. read less