Engl E530

Great "bang for the buck" preamp for both live and studio use.

I ordered this pre-amp several years ago from this site and was blown away by the sound! I primarily use the unit for direct recording into some decent cabinet impulse responses, however I have used it live on several occasions with a power amp or slave head.

Cleans: Fantastic clean tone, sparkly, lots of high end, great character. Tone controls are incredibly effective here. Sounds great with a neck pickup for a bit of warmth.

Crunch: Classic crunch tones! Using the clean channel with the Hi Gain setting gets you some lovely breakup, especially when paired with some hot pickups!

Lead: TONNES of gain on tap here, though it does get a tad noisy when pushed to it's limits. It has a very distinctive high gain sound, not like a Marshall, not like a Mesa. Again, as with the clean channel, the tone controls are incredibly responsive and musical. It's worth noting that the high mid acts more like a treble control, and the treble more like a presence control. The contour button works brilliantly too, at enhancing the mid-range for a more cutting tone.

It connects effortlessly to other gear with line outputs with gain control on the back, and I've used it with a wide variety of equipment with no issues.

The ENGL E530 is perhaps the ONLY tube driven 1U preamp you can still purchase new. there are small boutique manufactures doing other things, there is lots of activity in the digital world and LOTS to consider in the 2nd hand market, but if you want big name, new, tube drive, affordable rack preamp... this is the one.

The quality is EXCELLENT and the features are good (perhaps the inclusion of MIDI would help but regardless you can remote midi switch via TRS from another device). the inclusion of a small 1W power amp and basic speaker simulation output is very good.

The sound is ENGL. This is great if you want ENGL but for me perhaps lacked the saturation of other (no longer available preamps). its a great sound but just not 100% my sound.

Stating that - if you want a great featured, new, very well built 1U tube preamp, you should consider the E530

I wanted to achieve specifically Necrophagist's guitar tone on the album Epitaph . After trying every plugin vst that claimed to be an Engl E530 I ended up very disappointed because nothing was even close to that type of tone.
I decided then to buy the real deal and man , nothing compares to the real preamp. The response, the gain , the mid frequencies that instead of bringing in muddiness , make the guitar shine , that aggressive but smooth like butter tone.
Thanks to the separated low mids and high mids knobs and the contour button it's possible to achieve that angry lead but still smooth-like violin tone that I couldn't achieve with any other preamp , amp ,pedal or plugin.But it's not limited to death metal , the mids are the most important frequencies for guitars and there's where the 530 shines ; thanks to that, getting the 80's hair metal/ glam , heavy metal ,thrash metal or even Steve Vai's type of tone is a piece of cake.
By deactivating the contour button we get a kind of scooped tone that nails every metal / rock rhythm style we want to play and it feels like having a completely different preamp (in a good way) .
Then we got a low / high gain button that , when deactivated turns the preamp into a mid gain /overdrive machine giving us some kind of british vibes with Engl's soul and voice, very unique.
Last but not least the clean channel is so good and versatile, also possible to activate the high gain mode on the clean channel ,going from a pristine clean ,to an edge of breakup and overdriven sound just by pressing the high gain button on the clean channel.
Also the clean channel takes pedals very well, giving us even more options and with some delay or reverb through the fx loop the possibilities are infinite.
So, we got 2 channels that can be activated with a footswitch (not included) ,lead and a clean one. Each channel can run on high and low gain mode , that's like having 4 different channels and then with the contour button (that works for high and low gain) on the lead channel we have 2 more voices. In the end, from 2 channels , the versatility of this device, allows us to access to 6 diferent "subchannels".
But, it's not over yet, the e530 has a built in power amp in the front of the preamp. It's important to know and remember that in order to connect to a guitar speaker cabinet, we must set the switch to speaker cab on the back of the preamp and plug in to the headphones out a stereo cable to avoid damaging the power amp.
I'd buy it again and again a million times if I had to. The versatility and uniqueness of its tone is something that's hard to find on another piece of gear and for less than 600 euros / dollars it's undoubtedly a must have for any guitarist.
It's obvious why Alexi Laiho (Children of Bodom) or Muhammed Suicmez (Necrophagist) have chosen this preamp as their main rig.

When it comes to a question about tube sound there can be doubts about buying an expensive tube amps or digital ones - here comes the solution as preamps.

I think its a perfect way to construct your own beloved sound when you can collect everything you need at one unit.

The main thing which i like the most about 530 - its suits in many ways of combining digital and analog types of sound usage.

Im using it mainly for studio - getting a signal from the line output and mixing it with a rosen cab impulses for mesa and it still sounds perfect as if it would sound with a real cab.

The 1.5 watt built in amp is very useful.
You either can connect it to a guitar cab or even use this preamp as a pedal for your combo at home!

Another fantastic thing about this preamp versatility is that you can even record a bass guitar through a clean settings and achieve a massive tone.

Also the gain amounts and settings can suit any kind of guitarist needs - you can rock it, you can djent it, or do anything you want - it would still sound awesome!
It holds perfect the lowest notes of the 5 string bass or 8 string guitr - still sounds crisp and tight.

Looking for buy an engl power amp for it - im sure that it would be a nice combination!

This Amp is a murder weapon! Loaded with so much Gain..you can handle it! I love Engl Amps! At first I will say that you can not imagine how defined the Sound is although how much gain you choose! This is typical Engl. When you Pick an open Riff you hear this clear tone,awesome! I use it with my Marshall Power Amp from my JVM410h. Soon I´ll buy a power Amp with 6l6 tubes in it to combine both Power Amps.
The Clean Sound is awesome too!
Try this Amp it´s defentily an awesome Preamp for High Gain or some kind of Rock stuff. Also you have a build in Power Amp with 3 Watts Stereo..for playing in your flat for you alone. I´ll never give this Amp away I´m happy with it!