Powerful and portable, the Peavey 6505 Piranha follows in the footsteps of the popular 6505 MH mini head by packing high-gain tones into an even smaller, 20W tube hybrid power amp head. Small enough to use in a bedroom, but powerful enough for the studio, the 6505 Piranha harnesses the full gain and legendary tone of the 6505 Series.
The 6505 Piranha adds a few tricks of its own, including a bright switch along with a unique "scoop" control to achieve a wide array of tones with few controls. Additional features include the 20-watt (RMS) solid state power amp, one 4-ohm speaker output, a buffered FX loop, aux. input, headphone out, 12AX7 preamp tube and tooled metal cabinet.
This potent practice- and studio-tooled head offers staggeringly simple controls that feature just a gain knob, single EQ control, volume and a crunch/lead button for thicker/smoother gain. The tone control is a 3-band EQ compressed into one knob, so full left is a "10-0-7" scooped tone to "7-7-7" at the 12 o'clock setting to "10-10-10" when rolled full right.
Power: 20W (hybrid)
Tube: one 12AX7 (preamp)
Single channel
Single input
Impedance: 4 ohms minimum
Controls: gain, EQ, volume, crunch/lead switch
Buffered FX loop
Aux. input
Headphone output
Heavy-duty metal construction
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Gold Coverage goes above and beyond the manufacturer's warranty to protect your gear from unexpected breakdowns, accidental damage from handling
and failures. This plan covers your product for one, two, three or up to five years from your date of purchase, costs just pennies per day and gives you a
complete "no-worry" solution for protecting your investment.
Gold Coverage Includes:
Unexpected and unintentional spills, drops and cracks
Normal wear and tear
Power surges
Dust, internal heat and humidity
Other plan features include:
For products over $200, No Lemon Policy applies. If it fails for the same defect 3 times, it is replaced on the 4th breakdown. (Does not apply to failures due to drops, spills, and cracks)
For products under $200 experiencing the above failures, a Custom Guitar's Friend gift card will be issued for the full price of the product + tax.
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I recently acquired a vintage Peavey 4x12 cabinet which is rate for 4Ohms impedance, and would cause most other heads rated at 8 or 16Ohms to draw too much current. I saw several promo videos for this head online and decided to give it a go around instead of rewiring the cabinet. As a guitarist that plays a little bit of everything, I was really impressed with how much of a range of tones this little head can deliver. It can deliver good clean tones, as well as a lot of good rock and metal tones. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of low gain and clean sounds I was able to achieve, since this head was designed to replicate the high gain sound of the 6505 series heads. The nice thing is being 20W, it puts out good distorted sounds at reasonable volume levels for practicing compared to 100W counterparts. It only has a single EQ pot, so you don't get the same tonal range you would with a 3 band EQ. You can still dial in lots of good sounding tones, its simply a matter of playing with the EQ. Having the two channels for crunch and lead really allow you to dial in a wider variety of tones, with the lead channel offering a bit more gain and sustain than the crunch channel. This does not give you quite the same high gain you would expect from its bigger brother 6505 heads, but it can achieve those super high gain tones with an overdrive pedal to give it that push over the hill.
Overall this head was a good buy for the price, and has been a lot of fun to play with.
Peavey 6505 Piranha 20W Tube Hybrid Guitar Amp Head Black
.I really love the 6505 sound, so I put this on my wish list as something I could play at low volumes or even record with. The first thing I noticed right away was that it lacked gain when dimed. This is a 6505 right? Gain is nowhere near the levels of it's big brothers. Another thing is that this head is really really noisy. If you want to get into modern high gain metal, you won't be able to without an OD in front. The gain is just too week. Get a noise suppressor too. Headphone jack has no speaker emulation which sort of makes it useless unless you like the sound of bees. Changing out the stock JJ tube improves the noise, gain, and fidelity. Yes, I know it's a micro head under two franklins, but I expect a little better from Peavey. If you are going to put the 6505 label on it, it's needs to have the main allure of the 6505 name- and that is tons of gain and good quality for the money.
Peavey 6505 Piranha 20W Tube Hybrid Guitar Amp Head Black
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