It’s 25 years since Ashdown Engineering shook up the world of bass with its iconic ABM (Ashdown Bass Magnifier) bass amp. The warm glow of the ABM’s retro illuminated VU meter became a regular sight on stages with players like Mark King, JJ Burnel, Adam Clayton and the late John Entwistle, and the ABM has remained the amplifier of choice for top bassists pretty much ever since.
To mark Ashdown’s 25th anniversary, the UK-based company are producing limited edition ABM-400 heads, hand numbered and signed by Ashdown founder Mark Gooday and each supplied in a custom flight case, along with a personal note of thanks.
A fitting tribute to a milestone in bass technology, the ABM-400 Ltd Edition is, first and foremost, a terrific bass amp. Central on the front panel is the 7 band EQ section that helped make the ABM an instant classic, combining simple rotary controls for Bass, Middle and Treble with pairs of sliders between the knobs to deliver more sophisticated control for players looking to tailor their own signature sound.
An on-board sub-harmonic generator and a 400-Watt, high-headroom power stage gift the amplifier with effortless ABM clout, and the variable Valve Drive control delivers a range of core tones from clean and punchy to warm and grinding.
There’s a balanced DI output on the front panel, and FX send and return on the back, along with a pair of Speakon speaker outputs, a line input and a jack for the included 4-way footswitch controlling EQ, sub harmonics, valve drive and a fixed level of soft compression. The rear panel is also home to ABM’s low-noise, twin fan intelligent cooling system.
- Category : Bass amp head
- EQ : [ampli_eq_7bandes]
- Effects loop : Yes
- Footswitch input : Yes
- Headphone output : No
- Input : jack, aux jack, [G_entree_boucle_effet_jack], footswitch
- MIDI : No
- Number of effects : 3
- Output : XLR DI, Tuner jack, Cabinet 2 x Speakon, Line out jack
- Pedalboard included : No
- Power : 400 W
- Pre-amp tubes : 12AX7