Metropoulos Forum

Has anyone opened up the EVH 5150 III "Stealth" and documented what mods they did ?

Bump!

It's a major amount from what I was told,better off selling what you have and getting the stealth..I was ready to sell my 5153 amp ,just didn't care for it..then I played the stealth and was like wow it sounds a lot improved..

I missed seeing that there was such a thing. Not that I would buy one, but it looks like you can't anymore. They are a limited edition and apparently sold out.

bmf5150 wrote:It's a major amount from what I was told,better off selling what you have and getting the stealth..I was ready to sell my 5153 amp ,just didn't care for it..then I played the stealth and was like wow it sounds a lot improved..

The 50 watts has the same sort of mods that the stealth had. If you find the schematic somewhere probably it should give you a good idea.

I love my first year 5153. Only quibbles are maybe a cunt hair more hair on channel two. Preamp tubes could make all the difference here if your savvy and have the tubes to swap out. While I love the SL68, BE, and Bray stuff its really a different animal. The tubes just do not change character no matter how much circuit circus there is. So I kinda accept the amp as it is in its own right. But curious about the tonal differences. It said more gain on channel 3!!!
Uh...... that channel has plenty of gain already from the first version. But channel 2? If that had more hair then I could get by on 1+2 alone and forget 3 totally. I like 3 but its not as open as 2. I can make it sound great on 3 anyway but its still... to squished and you gotta work against that through p/u choice and tweakin.
I have found that noon is too much bass even though on mine-its gotta roll back and the highs need to turn up with hotter pickups.. Back the bass down on all channels to like 10:00 is better with hotter P/U's. Noon for PAF style p/u's. Its more vintage-lets the mids sound different-tighter-and the cabinet can turn up more with sounding like And Justice For All. Fwoom fwa fwa fwoom you know? For metal yes-brown sound? No.
The resonance knob thing I hated on the pv versions. Never could get the bottom sounding right. I seen that on the 50 and thought So I kinda have some knee jerk reaction to this business. Still haven't played a 50 yet so its all my own speculation. When I tried the evh5153 I was expectin the ear fatige of the pv ones-totally different. I was suprised.

Apparently the Stealth is just the 50w preamp in a 100w package. I don't know that for sure though.

I did study the 50w and 100w schematics side by side. They are 99% identical. The green and blue channels share their entire signal path on both amps. The difference is the 100w dumps a load of signal to ground early on where the 50w dumps a lot less. Except on the green channel where it dumps a lot more. So in other words the channels are identical except they're further apart gain-wise on the 50w. This effect is achieved via two different resistor values, the main one being at the voltage divider between the second and third gain stages. So on the green channel of both amps the third and fourth stages are doing almost nothing gain-wise but they are still in circuit.

The red channel is IDENTICAL to an SLO on both amps but with two extra shaping stages at the end. The 50w has one resistor different on one of these later stages, again giving more gain. The first four stages are component-for-component an SLO lead channel preamp. The red channel is entirely separate from the green and blue channels on both amps. It's clear EVH felt the red channel was a high priority.

I'm only just learning this stuff so please excuse any crap terminology.

I like your spin on this. Even Dave F commented it was like a pissed off SLO. Looks like there maybe some definite origin to this statement now that you mention it.