How to tell age of Peavey amp?

[Jack Latimer]

Is there a way of telling the age of a Peavey Nashville 400 by the serial number? (The serial number is 5a 02376717.) I believe this is an older model, so my next question is with all the talk of the modifications that can be made to the older models, do they compare to the newer Nashville 400 amps when the modifications are made? I'm looking for suggestions on buying used or biting the bullet and going for the new amp. Any help would be appreciated.

[Ron Whitworth]

Hello Jack;
Going by what Mike Brown from Peavey said in this post a few down the page here,
your amps should be a 1995..here is the post:
http://steelguitarforum.com/Forum11/HTML/007318.html

[Jack Stoner]

The difference between a "stock" (Unmodified) 95 Nashville 400 and a late 96 is the factory tone mod. Peavey and John Lemay had mods but it wasn't until about September 96 that Peavey made a production engineering change and incorporated the mod component changes into production.

There is a major difference in the low end and high end with the tone mod. More lows are added and the high end is not as "brittle".

However, the early Nashville 400's, with the 1502 speaker do not need the mod (but people install it anyway). The amp was originally designed for the 1502 speaker. Later (about 89 or 90) Peavey started using the 1501 speaker (what is currently used in the Nashville 1000) and that changed the overall response of the amp. The tone mod basically restored the amp to the response it had with the 1502 speaker. (This also relates to another thread that someone put a 12" speaker in a Nashville 400 and wanted to compare it to a Nashville 112, which you can't because of the overall system's tailored response).

[Jack Latimer]

Thanks for the dating Ron, and Jack I appreciate your explanation of the speaker issue.