The digital amp modeler has transformed our relationship with the electric guitar , presenting players with hundreds, if not thousands, of sounds to work with, but the fundamental truth remains that part of the appeal of the instrument is experiential – hitting the strings and pushing air out of the speaker. Volume was front and center of Laney’s thinking when desinging the LFR Active guitar cabinet series, a groundbreaking range headlined by LFR-412, the world’s first 4x12 FRFR guitar cabinet, which, at 2,600-watts, is also the most powerful of its kind in the world. Laney had fun with the launch, noting that LFR-412 is almost as loud as a jetplane at takeoff.
Lee Wrathe, head of marketing, at Laney, admits this feat of audio engineering presented its own problems when introducing it to the world. “It is capable of being terrifyingly loud,” he says. “When we launched the product at NAMM 2024 we couldn’t turn it up beyond 2 on the volume dial for fear of being shut down by the noise police.
On the last day, we asked our good friend Mr Shred of Masters of Shred fame to turn it up to 6 and we had to go downwind and warn all of the other booths.” Analog die-hards are taking notice. This is part of Laney’s thinking.
Whether you used a floor-based modeller or plugins, the LFR series is designed to give your digital rig lungs, to take that “in-the-box” sound and make something physical of it, to make it behave like a quote/unquote real amp and cabinet. “Let�.