In the fall of 1990, Lee moved to St. Louis and put his experience and expertise to work designing new
Ampeg amplifiers. The resulting VL Series amps are the embodiment of his incredible talents combined
with Ampeg's industryleading manufacturing capabilities. With more features and better performance
than ANY stock amplifier available, we decided to give you total control over who gets to play with it.
Our key-lock security system deters undesirables from playing with your VL.
When you power-up a VL Series amplifier, your good taste in music gear becomes readily visible to all:
a back-lit Ampeg logo, resurrected and updated from our 1960's concept,glows
proudly across the front
of the amp.
Two completely discrete channels with dedicated tubes and circuits result in uncompromised sound.
Unlike so many other brands of amplifiers available, the VL-502 and 1002 have a clean channel that
is pure sparkle, rather than a watered-down version of the overdrive side. The overdrive channel has
three stages of gain, driven by. two gain controls. In fact there's so much gain, we had to put in a
" red-line" area indicator to let you know when the preamp tubes are
heavily compressing the signal.
Three bands of wide-range EQ are supplemented by a 5 position midrange selector switch for total tone
control. The midrange selector can change the voice of a guitar, thicken the sounds of a single-coil
pickup, and clean up a muddysounding humbucking pickup.
Reverb is separately controllable for each channel, giving you complete control over the six spring,
long pan tube reverb. A footswitch option gives you remote control of the reverb effect.
A power attenuator section allows all of the compression and life of high-volume sound settings at
reduced volumes. New freedom for anyone who has ever had to sacrifice quality for quantity of sound.
Now you can overdrive the amp's tubes without overdriving your eardrums.
All VL Series amplifiers have a tube-driven effects loop to match signals with any and every effect on
the market. An on/off switch controls the effects loop, which doubles as an always-on signal out for
connections to external on-stage power amps or mixing boards.
Speaker cabinet impedance matching is easily accomplished by setting a rear-panel switch to either
4, 8 or 16 ohms, depending on your cabinets.
To change the VL Series amplifiers from "American" to a more "European" sound,
the output tubes can
be changed. Either 6550 (the American sound) or EL34 (6CA7) tubes are acceptable, and biasing is
accomplished with the flick of a rear-panel switch. No trips to the service center, no multimeters, and
no guesswork required.
Bias Select switch allows the unit to automatically accept EL34 or 6550 power tubes.