Peavey Bandit 65 mods, anyone have any good mods?

[Slobrain]

Waxing a garbage truck?

You don't mod PVs to sound much better.
You start with an amp worth modding.
And that would be a tube amp. Not transistor.

The most obvious thing is the speaker. The speakers in PVs don't sound any good.
But installing a $150 speaker in a $50 amp is beyond what most people would do.

No, I would not spend the money on capacitors, unless the caps are actually bad.

But what I would do, is fix it and sell it.
Then take that money and buy a tube amp.

I actually have a few really good tube amps, one being a Marshall 50 watt non master full stack... The point is, making a really sucky amp actually sound good. LOL...

I cleaned the amp up, then ran the gain channel clean and ran a boss ME-50 thru it, sounded pretty good for what it was. Also ran an old Ibanez distortion charger pedal on it and that sounded pretty darn good too.

Any amp can serve a purpose for any style music whether it its a good tube amp or a SS amp as well. I sort of have the old nostalgia for the old peavey amps being that's all I could afford back in the early 80s when I was playing clubs. Those old Peavey amps are built like tanks too. I was looking for a electronic mod like maybe changing the dual op-amps out to better newer style dual op-amps or something like that. Some people actually get a kick moding all kinds of stuff, the Tim Taylor tool man way...

[nashvillebill]

Well, certainly the Peavey Bandit isn't quite in the same class as an original Fender Deluxe 5E3. Nevertheless, it's a dependable workhorse which takes pedals fairly well, and some folks seem to have rediscovered its usefulness. I think it got a bad rap for several reasons: 1) it's SS which has an auto-reflex action for too many people (ugg! SS!!) and 2) its a Peavey which gear snobs love to hate and 3) its distortion was the typical 1980's "bees buzzing in a box" sound when the Saturation was cranked way up (which was where we ALL turned it to!) IMHO this bad rap is unjustified.

If all it needs is a couple of op-amps, and maybe a cap job, I say go for it. The schematic is in this thread: http://music-electronics-forum.com/t16210/
A few bucks, and a couple of hours, to replace all the electrolytics would get it back up to a dependable level.

As far as modifications, a better speaker may help, sometimes the Scorpions had a midrange honk to them. A good Eminence would be less than $100. One possible circuit component change may help: I've read the steel guitar guys say that in the first couple of gain stages in Peavey preamps, changing the 4558 opamp to a OPA2134 helps smooth it out a lot. Ordinarily I would not buy into the "opamp rolling" philosophy, but here there might be some logic, since the OPA2134 is a JFET and the 4558 was a BJT. I think U1 and U2 would be the two likely spots for improvements. (in my Peavey Classic VTX, it had a couple of bad opamps: I replaced them with NE5532 but while I was in there I did stick a couple of OPA2134's in its U1 and U2 locations, and it works fine) The Saturation is pretty smooth but I don't crank it all the way up these days, just getting a little dirt in there is usually all I seek. So for a couple of bucks, that would be a low-cost mod to try. Otherwise I'd just use NE5532's.

[olddawg]

Well.... As my dad used to say, "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear", lol. But... if you are on a budget, try some pedals. It won't be a boutique amp no matter what you do. But if you are just jamming or playing clubs, you can make it usable. Crowds are much more forgiving than musicians. Or as SGM says. Sell it and get something you like. For cheap SS amps, I've been impressed with the modern Fender Frontman series lately. Not my favorite amp by any means, but I picked up 212R for $35 the other day. It's usable. 100 watts. Two 12 inch speakers. Spring reverb. As the saying goes. It doesn't suck.

[soundguruman]

Waxing a garbage truck?

You don't mod PVs to sound much better.
You start with an amp worth modding.
And that would be a tube amp. Not transistor.

The most obvious thing is the speaker. The speakers in PVs don't sound any good.
But installing a $150 speaker in a $50 amp is beyond what most people would do.

No, I would not spend the money on capacitors, unless the caps are actually bad.

But what I would do, is fix it and sell it.
Then take that money and buy a tube amp.

[Slobrain]

I just picked up an old 1984 Bandit 65 at a pawn broken for $50.00 out the door, got it home and it had a bad 4558 in it. Once fixed I noticed why I always hated the Bandit 65 but I know there is always a way to improve these amps. cap replacement is one way but I wanted to see if anyone ever modded one of these to sound much better?

Slo